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The transformations Buddhism has been undergoing in the modern age
have inspired much research over the last decade. The main focus of
attention has been the phenomenon known as Buddhist modernism,
which is defined as a conscious attempt to adjust Buddhist
teachings and practices in conformity with the modern norms of
rationality, science, or gender equality. This book advances
research on Buddhist modernism by attempting to clarify the highly
diverse ways in which Buddhist faith, thought, and practice have
developed in the modern age, both in Buddhist heartlands in Asia
and in the West. It presents a collection of case studies that,
taken together, demonstrate how Buddhist traditions interact with
modern phenomena such as colonialism and militarism, the market
economy, global interconnectedness, the institutionalization of
gender equality, and recent historical events such as
de-industrialization and the socio-cultural crisis in post-Soviet
Buddhist areas. This volume shows how the (re)invention of
traditions constitutes an important pathway in the development of
Buddhist modernities and emphasizes the pluralistic diversity of
these forms in different settings.
This book explores the interaction of rituals and ritualised
practices utilising a cross-cultural approach. It discusses whether
and why rituals are important today, and why they are possibly even
more relevant than before.
The transformations Buddhism has been undergoing in the modern age
have inspired much research over the last decade. The main focus of
attention has been the phenomenon known as Buddhist modernism,
which is defined as a conscious attempt to adjust Buddhist
teachings and practices in conformity with the modern norms of
rationality, science, or gender equality. This book advances
research on Buddhist modernism by attempting to clarify the highly
diverse ways in which Buddhist faith, thought, and practice have
developed in the modern age, both in Buddhist heartlands in Asia
and in the West. It presents a collection of case studies that,
taken together, demonstrate how Buddhist traditions interact with
modern phenomena such as colonialism and militarism, the market
economy, global interconnectedness, the institutionalization of
gender equality, and recent historical events such as
de-industrialization and the socio-cultural crisis in post-Soviet
Buddhist areas. This volume shows how the (re)invention of
traditions constitutes an important pathway in the development of
Buddhist modernities and emphasizes the pluralistic diversity of
these forms in different settings.
This book explores the interaction of rituals and ritualised
practices utilising a cross-cultural approach. It discusses whether
and why rituals are important today, and why they are possibly even
more relevant than before.
In common understanding, but also in scholarly discourse, ritual
has been long viewed as an undisputed and indisputable part of
(especially religious) tradition, performed over and over in the
same ways: stable in form, meaningless, preconcieved, and with the
aim of creating harmony and enabling a tradition's survival. The
authors represented in this collection argue, however, that these
assumptions can be seriously challenged.
Not only are rituals frequently disputed, they also constitute a
field in which vital and sometimes even violent negotiations take
place. Negotiations - here understood as processes of interaction
during which differing positions are debated and/or acted out - are
ubiquitous in ritual contexts, either in relation to the ritual
itself, or in relation to the realm beyond any given ritual
performance. The authors contend that a central feature of ritual
is its embeddedness in negotiation processes and that life beyond
the ritual frame often is negotiated in the field of rituals. This
point of view opens up fruitful new perspectives on ritual
procedures, on the interactions that constitute these procedures,
and on the contexts in which they are embedded. By explicitly
addressing and theorizing the relevance of negotiation in the world
of ritual, the essays in this volume seek to persuade scholars and
students alike to think differently and to find new starting points
for more nuanced discussions.
Although conflict is a normal aspect of human life, mass media
technologies are changing the dynamics of conflict and shaping
strategies for deploying rituals. Rituals can provoke or escalate
conflict; they can also mediate it. Media representations have long
been instrumental in establishing, maintaining, and challenging
political and economic power, as well as in determining the nature
of religious practice. This collection of essays emerged from a
two-year project based on collaboration between the Faculty of
Religious Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands
and the Ritual Dynamics Collaborative Research Center at the
University of Heidelberg in Germany. Here, an interdisciplinary
team of twenty-four scholars locates, describes, and explores cases
in which media-driven rituals or ritually saturated media
instigate, disseminate, or escalate conflict. Each chapter, built
around global and local examples of ritualized, mediatized
conflict, is multi-authored. The book's central question is: "When
ritual and media interact (either by the mediatizing of ritual or
by the ritualizing of media), how do the patterns of conflict
change?"
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