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Face To Face With The Absent Buddha
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Book Synopsis Face to Face with the Absent Buddha by : Klemens Karlsson
Download or read book Face to Face with the Absent Buddha written by Klemens Karlsson and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis Image Problems by : Robert Daniel DeCaroli
Download or read book Image Problems written by Robert Daniel DeCaroli and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2015-04-30 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This deft and lively study by Robert DeCaroli explores the questions of how and why the earliest verifiable images of the historical Buddha were created. In so doing, DeCaroli steps away from old questions of where and when to present the history of Buddhism�s relationship with figural art as an ongoing set of negotiations within the Buddhist community and in society at large. By comparing innovations in Brahmanical, Jain, and royal artistic practice, DeCaroli examines why no image of the Buddha was made until approximately five hundred years after his death and what changed in the centuries surrounding the start of the Common Era to suddenly make those images desirable and acceptable. The textual and archaeological sources reveal that figural likenesses held special importance in South Asia and were seen as having a significant amount of agency and power. Anxiety over image use extended well beyond the Buddhists, helping to explain why images of Vedic gods, Jain teachers, and political elites also are absent from the material record of the centuries BCE. DeCaroli shows how the emergence of powerful dynasties and rulers, who benefited from novel modes of visual authority, was at the root of the changes in attitude toward figural images. However, as DeCaroli demonstrates, a strain of unease with figural art persisted, even after a tradition of images of the Buddha had become established.
Download or read book Sacred Traces written by Janice Leoshko and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his novel Kim, in which a Tibetan pilgrim seeks to visit important Buddhist sites in India, Rudyard Kipling reveals the nineteenth-century fascination with the discovery of the importance of Buddhism in India's past. Janice Leoshko, a scholar of South Asian Buddhist art uses Kipling's account and those of other western writers to offer new insight into the priorities underlying nineteenth-century studies of Buddhist art in India. In the absence of written records, the first explorations of Buddhist sites were often guided by accounts of Chinese pilgrims. They had journeyed to India more than a thousand years earlier in search of sacred traces of the Buddha, the places where he lived, obtained enlightenment, taught and finally passed into nirvana. The British explorers, however, had other interests besides the religion itself. They were motivated by concerns tied to the growing British control of the subcontinent. Building on earlier interventions, Janice Leoshko examines this history of nineteenth-century exploration in order to illuminate how early concerns shaped the way Buddhist art has been studied in the West and presented in its museums.
Download or read book People Trees written by David L. Haberman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-25 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a book about religious conceptions of trees within the cultural world of tree worship at the tree shrines of northern India. Sacred trees have been worshipped for millennia in India and today tree worship continues there among all segments of society. In the past, tree worship was regarded by many Western anthropologists and scholars of religion as a prime example of childish animism or decadent ''popular religion.'' More recently this aspect of world religious cultures is almost completely ignored in the theoretical concerns of the day. David Haberman hopes to demonstrate that by seriously investigating the world of Indian tree worship, we can learn much about not only this prominent feature of the landscape of South Asian religion, but also something about the cultural construction of nature as well as religion overall. The title People Trees relates to the content of this book in at least six ways. First, although other sacred trees are examined, the pipal-arguably the most sacred tree in India-receives the greatest attention in this study. The Hindi word ''pipal'' is pronounced similarly to the English word ''people.''Second, the ''personhood'' of trees is a commonly accepted notion in India. Haberman was often told: ''This tree is a person just like you and me.'' Third, this is not a study of isolated trees in some remote wilderness area, but rather a study of trees in densely populated urban environments. This is a study of trees who live with people and people who live with trees. Fourth, the trees examined in this book have been planted and nurtured by people for many centuries. They seem to have benefited from human cultivation and flourished in environments managed by humans. Fifth, the book involves an examination of the human experience of trees, of the relationship between people and trees. Haberman is interested in people's sense of trees. And finally, the trees located in the neighborhood tree shrines of northern India are not controlled by a professional or elite class of priests. Common people have direct access to them and are free to worship them in their own way. They are part of the people's religion. Haberman hopes that this book will help readers expand their sense of the possible relationships that exist between humans and trees. By broadening our understanding of this relationship, he says, we may begin to think differently of the value of trees and the impact of deforestation and other human threats to trees.
Book Synopsis Early Buddhist Transmission and Trade Networks by : Jason Neelis
Download or read book Early Buddhist Transmission and Trade Networks written by Jason Neelis and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2010-11-19 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This exploration of early paths for Buddhist transmission within and beyond South Asia retraces the footsteps of monks, merchants, and other agents of cross-cultural exchange. A reassessment of literary, epigraphic, and archaeological sources reveals hisorical contexts for the growth of the Buddhist saṅgha from approximately the 5th century BCE to the end of the first millennium CE. Patterns of dynamic Buddhist mobility were closely linked to transregional trade networks extending to the northwestern borderlands and joined to Central Asian silk routes by capillary routes through transit zones in the upper Indus and Tarim Basin. By examining material conditions for Buddhist establishments at nodes along these routes, this book challenges models of gradual diffusion and develops alternative explanations for successful Buddhist movement.
Book Synopsis Becoming the Buddha by : Donald K. Swearer
Download or read book Becoming the Buddha written by Donald K. Swearer and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-21 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Becoming the Buddha is the first book-length study of a key ritual of Buddhist practice in Asia: the consecration of a Buddha image or "new Buddha," a ceremony by which the Buddha becomes present or alive. Through a richly detailed, accessible exploration of this ritual in northern Thailand, an exploration that stands apart from standard text-based or anthropological approaches, Donald Swearer makes a major contribution to our understanding of the Buddha image, its role in Buddhist devotional life, and its relationship to the veneration of Buddha relics. Blending ethnography, analysis, and Buddhist texts related to this mimetic reenactment of the night of the Buddha's enlightenment, he demonstrates that the image becomes the Buddha's surrogate by being invested with the Buddha's story and charged with the extraordinary power of Buddhahood. The process by which this transformation occurs through chant, sermon, meditation, and the presence of charismatic monks is at the heart of this book. Known as "opening the eyes of the Buddha," image consecration traditions throughout Buddhist Asia share much in common. Within the cultural context of northern Thailand, Becoming the Buddha illuminates scriptural accounts of the making of the first Buddha image; looks at debates over the ritual's historical origin, at Buddhological insights achieved, and at the hermeneutics of absence and presence; and provides a thematic comparison of several Buddhist traditions.
Book Synopsis The Oxford Handbook of Buddhist Practice by : Kevin Trainor
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Buddhist Practice written by Kevin Trainor and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 689 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This Handbook provides a state-of-the-art exploration of several key dynamics in current studies of the Buddhist tradition with a focus on practice. Embodiment, materiality, emotion, and gender shape the way most Buddhists engage with their traditions, in contrast to popular representations of Buddhism as spiritual, disembodied, and largely devoid of ritual. This volume highlights how practice often represents a fluid, dynamic, and strategic means of defining identity and negotiating the challenges of everyday life. Essays explore the transformational aims of practices that require practitioners to move, gesture, and emote in prescribed ways, including the ways that scholars' own embodied practices are integral to their research methodology. The chapters are written by acknowledged experts in their respective subject areas and taken together offer an overview of current thinking in the field. The volume is of particular value to scholars who seek an orientation to current perspectives on important conceptual, theoretical, and methodological concerns that are shaping the field in areas outside their primary expertise. The inclusion of substantial, up-to-date bibliographies also makes the volume an important guide to current scholarship"--
Book Synopsis Archaeology and Buddhism in South Asia by : Himanshu Prabha Ray
Download or read book Archaeology and Buddhism in South Asia written by Himanshu Prabha Ray and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-08-31 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the archaeological trajectory of the expansion of Buddhism and its regional variations in South Asia. Focusing on the multireligious context of the subcontinent in the first millennium BCE, the volume breaks from conventional studies that pose Buddhism as a counter to the Vedic tradition to understanding the religion more integrally in terms of dhamma (teachings of the Buddha), dāna (practice of cultivating generosity) and the engagement with the written word. The work underlines that relic and image worship were important features in the spread of Buddhism in the region and were instrumental in bringing the monastics and the laity together. Further, the author examines the significance of the histories of monastic complexes (viharas, stupas, caityas) and also religious travel and pilgrimage that provided connections across the subcontinent and the seas. An interdisciplinary study, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars in South Asian studies, religion, especially Buddhist studies, history and archaeology.
Book Synopsis The Authenticity of the Early Buddhist Texts by : Bhikkhu Sujato
Download or read book The Authenticity of the Early Buddhist Texts written by Bhikkhu Sujato and published by Buddhist Publication Society. This book was released on 2014-12-01 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are there any authentic Buddhist texts? If so, what are they? These are questions of tremendous spiritual and historical interest, about which there is a range of opinions that often appear to be irreconcilable. Traditionalists insist that the texts were “spoken by the Buddha” in the most literal of senses, while sceptics assert that we cannot know anything about the Buddha for certain, and further, that the notion of authenticity is irrelevant or pernicious. Most academic scholars of early Buddhism cautiously affirm that it is possible that the early Buddhist texts as contained in the Sutta and Vinaya Pitaka contain some authentic sayings of the Buddha. A sympathetic assessment of relevant evidence by the authors of this book shows that this is a drastic understatement and that it is very likely that the bulk of the sayings in the texts that are attributed to the Buddha were actually spoken by him. Rarely has the question of authenticity of the Buddhist texts been systematically investigated. Seeing the lack of an easily accessible summary of the evidence, the authors assembled this survey.
Book Synopsis Religious Individualisation by : Martin Fuchs
Download or read book Religious Individualisation written by Martin Fuchs and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-12-16 with total page 1058 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together key findings of the long-term research project ‘Religious Individualisation in Historical Perspective’ (Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies, Erfurt University). Combining a wide range of disciplinary approaches, methods and theories, the volume assembles over 50 contributions that explore and compare processes of religious individualisation in different religious environments and historical periods, in particular in Asia, the Mediterranean, and Europe from antiquity to the recent past. Contrary to standard theories of modernisation, which tend to regard religious individualisation as a specifically modern or early modern as well as an essentially Western or Christian phenomenon, the chapters reveal processes of religious individualisation in a large variety of non-Western and pre-modern scenarios. Furthermore, the volume challenges prevalent views that regard religions primarily as collective phenomena and provides nuanced perspectives on the appropriation of religious agency, the pluralisation of religious options, dynamics of de-traditionalisation and privatisation, the development of elaborated notions of the self, the facilitation of religious deviance, and on the notion of dividuality.
Download or read book Amaravati written by Jas Elsner and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2024-07-06 with total page 718 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A visual exploration of the Buddhist stupa or reliquary mounds at one of ancient India’s most remarkable monuments at Amarāvatī. In this book, Jaś Elsner presents a fresh perspective on the rich visual culture of ancient South Asia, connecting the stupa’s artistic innovations with advancements in Buddhist philosophy and practice. He offers new insights into early Buddhist art in South India, as well as a new understanding of the relationship between early Buddhism and its material culture. The photographs collected here, particularly those featuring objects from the British Museum in London, reveal in detail how the stupa communicated Buddhist teachings and practices to its followers, making this book an invaluable resource for students and scholars alike.
Book Synopsis Animating the Spirited by : Tze-yue G. Hu
Download or read book Animating the Spirited written by Tze-yue G. Hu and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2020-01-27 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contributions by Graham Barton, Raz Greenberg, Gyongyi Horvath, Birgitta Hosea, Tze-yue G. Hu, Yin Ker, M. Javad Khajavi, Richard J. Leskosky, Yuk Lan Ng, Giryung Park, Eileen Anastasia Reynolds, Akiko Sugawa-Shimada, Koji Yamamura, Masao Yokota, and Millie Young Getting in touch with a spiritual side is a craving many are unable to express or voice, but readers and viewers seek out this desired connection to something greater through animation, cinema, anime, and art. Animating the Spirited: Journeys and Transformations includes a range of explorations of the meanings of the spirited and spiritual in the diverse, dynamic, and polarized creative environment of the twenty-first century. While animation is at the heart of the book, such related subjects as fine art, comics, children's literature, folklore, religion, and philosophy enrich the discoveries. These interdisciplinary discussions range from theory to practice, within the framework of an ever-changing media landscape. Working on different continents and coming from varying cultural backgrounds, these diverse scholars, artists, curators, and educators demonstrate the insights of the spirited. Authors also size up new dimensions of mental health and related expressions of human living and interactions. While the book recognizes and acknowledges the particularities of the spirited across cultures, it also highlights its universality, demonstrating how it is being studied, researched, comprehended, expressed, and consumed in various parts of the world.
Book Synopsis Shifting Stones, Shaping the Past by : Catherine Becker
Download or read book Shifting Stones, Shaping the Past written by Catherine Becker and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a wide-ranging exploration of the creation and use of Buddhist art in Andhra Pradesh, India, from the second and third centuries of the Common Era to the present, Catherine Becker shows how material remains and visual experiences shape and reveal essential human concerns.
Book Synopsis Building a Sacred Mountain by : Wei-Cheng Lin
Download or read book Building a Sacred Mountain written by Wei-Cheng Lin and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2014-06-01 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the tenth century CE, Mount Wutai had become a major pilgrimage site within the emerging culture of a distinctively Chinese Buddhism. Famous as the abode of the bodhisattva Ma�ju r (known for his habit of riding around the mountain on a lion), the site in northeastern China�s Shanxi Province was transformed from a wild area, long believed by Daoists to be sacred, into an elaborate complex of Buddhist monasteries. In Building a Sacred Mountain, Wei-Cheng Lin traces the confluence of factors that produced this transformation and argues that monastic architecture, more than texts, icons, relics, or pilgrimages, was the key to Mount Wutai�s emergence as a sacred site. Departing from traditional architectural scholarship, Lin�s interdisciplinary approach goes beyond the analysis of forms and structures to show how the built environment can work in tandem with practices and discourses to provide a space for encountering the divine. For more information: http://arthistorypi.org/books/building-a-sacred-mountain
Book Synopsis Corporate Designing Religion by : Graham Wiseman
Download or read book Corporate Designing Religion written by Graham Wiseman and published by LIT Verlag Münster. This book was released on 2023 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Design professionalism interwoven with strategic marketing skills and advances in the technologies of digital communication are changing the interface and conceivably the future image of religious institutions. How and to what extent does corporate design influence the identity of religious institutions in the digital era? Six denominational case studies, including multifaith, in Europe were investigated. The concluding hypotheses outline principal response indicators, supplemented by a Religious Branding Compass, to assist in identifying the religious institutions' visual identity projections.
Download or read book Buddhisms written by John S. Strong and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2015-07-02 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Buddhism or Buddhisms? By the time they move on to Buddhism in Japan, many students who have studied its origins in India ask whether this is in fact the same religion, so different can they appear. In Buddhisms: An Introduction, Professor John S. Strong provides an overview of the Buddhist tradition in all its different forms around the world. Beginning at the modern day temples of Lumbini, where the Buddha was born, Strong takes us through the life of the Buddha and a study of Buddhist Doctrine, revealing how Buddhism has changed just as it has stayed the same. Finally, Strong examines the nature of Buddhist community life and its development today in the very different environments of Thailand, Japan, and Tibet. Enriched by the author’s own insights gathered over forty years, Buddhisms never loses sight of the personal experience amidst the wide-scope of its subject. Clear in its explanations, replete with tables and suggestions for further reading, this is an essential new work that makes original contributions to the study of this 2,500 year-old religion.
Book Synopsis Embodying the Dharma by : David Germano
Download or read book Embodying the Dharma written by David Germano and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Embodying the Dharma explores the centrality of relic veneration in Asian Buddhist cultures. Long disregarded by Western scholars as a superstitious practice reflecting the popularization of "original" Buddhism, relic veneration has emerged as a topic of vital interest in the last two decades with the increased attention to Buddhist ritual practice and material culture. This volume includes studies of relic traditions in India, Japan, Tibet, Sri Lanka, and Thailand, as well as broader comparative analyses, including comparisons of Buddhist and Christian relic veneration.