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Seeking Sakyamuni
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Book Synopsis Seeking Sakyamuni by : Richard M. Jaffe
Download or read book Seeking Sakyamuni written by Richard M. Jaffe and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-05-20 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though fascinated with the land of their tradition’s birth, virtually no Japanese Buddhists visited the Indian subcontinent before the nineteenth century. In the richly illustrated Seeking Śākyamuni, Richard M. Jaffe reveals the experiences of the first Japanese Buddhists who traveled to South Asia in search of Buddhist knowledge beginning in 1873. Analyzing the impact of these voyages on Japanese conceptions of Buddhism, he argues that South Asia developed into a pivotal nexus for the development of twentieth-century Japanese Buddhism. Jaffe shows that Japan’s growing economic ties to the subcontinent following World War I fostered even more Japanese pilgrimage and study at Buddhism’s foundational sites. Tracking the Japanese travelers who returned home, as well as South Asians who visited Japan, Jaffe describes how the resulting flows of knowledge, personal connections, linguistic expertise, and material artifacts of South and Southeast Asian Buddhism instantiated the growing popular consciousness of Buddhism as a pan-Asian tradition—in the heart of Japan.
Book Synopsis Defining Buddhism(s) by : Karen Derris
Download or read book Defining Buddhism(s) written by Karen Derris and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-08 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Defining Buddhism(s)' explores the multiple ways in which Buddhism has been defined and constructed by both Buddhists and scholars. In recent decades, scholars have become increasingly aware of their own role in the construction of how Buddhism is represented - a process in which multiple representations of Buddhism compete with and complement one another. The reader brings together key essays by leading scholars to examine the central methods and concerns of Buddhism. The essays aim to illuminate the challenges involved in defining historical, social, and political contexts and reveal how definitions of Buddhism have always been contested.
Book Synopsis Monastic Education in Korea by : Uri Kaplan
Download or read book Monastic Education in Korea written by Uri Kaplan and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2020-06-30 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What do Buddhist monks learn about Buddhism? Which part of their enormous canonical and non-canonical literature do they choose to focus on as the required curriculum in their training, and what do they elect to leave out? The cultural depository of Buddhism includes some four thousand canonical texts, hundreds of other historical works, modern textbooks, oral traditions, and more recently, an increasingly growing body of online material. The sheer diversity of this mass of information makes the pedagogical choices of monastics worthy of close study. Monastic Education in Korea is essentially a biography of the Korean Buddhist monastic curriculum over the past five centuries. Based on extensive ethnographic work and archival research in Korean monasteries, it illustrates how a particular premodern syllabus was reimagined in the twentieth century to become the sole national Korean monastic pedagogical program—only to be criticized and completely restructured in recent years. Through a detailed analysis of these modifications, the work demonstrates how Korean Buddhist reformers today tend to imitate the educational practices and canonize the textual totems of the contemporary international discipline of Buddhist studies, and how, by doing so, they ultimately transform the local Korean tradition from a particular brand of Chinese-centered scholastic Chan into the inclusive, pluralistic, Indian-focused Buddhism common in English-language introductions to the religion. The book further examines the proliferation of diverse graduate schools for the sangha, as well as the creation of a novel examination system for all monastics. It reveals some of the realities of operating large monastic organizations in contemporary Asia and portrays a living, vibrant Buddhist community that is constantly negotiating with modern values and reformulating its core orthodoxies.
Book Synopsis A Partial Enlightenment by : Avram Alpert
Download or read book A Partial Enlightenment written by Avram Alpert and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-06 with total page 119 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In many ways, Buddhism has become the global religion of the modern world. For its contemporary followers, the ideal of enlightenment promises inner peace and worldly harmony. And whereas other philosophies feel abstract and disembodied, Buddhism offers meditation as a means to realize this ideal. If we could all be as enlightened as Buddhists, some imagine, we could live in a much better world. For some time now, however, this beatific image of Buddhism has been under attack. Scholars and practitioners have criticized it as a Western fantasy that has nothing to do with the actual experiences of Buddhists. Avram Alpert combines personal experience and readings of modern novels to offer another way to understand modern Buddhism. He argues that it represents a rich resource not for attaining perfection but rather for finding meaning and purpose in a chaotic world. Finding unexpected affinities across world literature—Rudyard Kipling in colonial India, Yukio Mishima in postwar Japan, Bessie Head escaping apartheid South Africa—as well as in his own experiences living with Tibetan exiles, Alpert shows how these stories illuminate a world in which suffering is inevitable and total enlightenment is impossible. Yet they also give us access to partial enlightenments: powerful insights that become available when we come to terms with imperfection and stop looking for wholeness. A Partial Enlightenment reveals the moments of personal and social transformation that the inventions of modern Buddhism help make possible.
Book Synopsis Rescued from the Nation by : Steven Kemper
Download or read book Rescued from the Nation written by Steven Kemper and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-01-13 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dharmapala is a galvanizing figure in Sri Lanka's recent history, widely regarded as the nationalist hero who saved the Sinhala people from cultural collapse and whose 'protestant' reformation of Buddhism drove monks toward increased political involvement and ethnic confrontation. Yet he spent the vast majority of his life abroad, dealing with other concerns. Steven Kemper re-evaluates this important figure in the light of an unprecedented number of his writings that paint a picture not of a nationalist zealot but of a spiritual seeker earnest in his pursuit of salvation.
Book Synopsis India and the Traveller by : Rita Banerjee
Download or read book India and the Traveller written by Rita Banerjee and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-11-18 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: India and the Traveller: Aspects of Travelling Identity, a collection of essays on travel writings related to India, focuses on the evolving persona of travelers to India as well as Indians journeying to other lands or within India. It examines India as a space, reflected on and interrogated by others, as also people associated intrinsically with this space, who move in and out of it. The essays focus on the self-fashioning of the traveller - Buddhist pilgrims of Asia, European visitors to the Mughal court, the British colonizer, the Indian anthropologist, historian or whimsical civil servant, the wanderer seeking spiritual insight in nature, and the woman traveller with her distinct perceptions and sensitivities. Engaging with issues related to identity, this book explores the need for cultural accommodation by African and European travellers, the discovery of affinity by Asian travellers, the instability of postcolonial selves and travel as a means of negotiating complex problems of fashioning personae in literary works.
Book Synopsis Survey Practices and Landscape Photography Across the Globe by : Sophie Junge
Download or read book Survey Practices and Landscape Photography Across the Globe written by Sophie Junge and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-11-30 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited volume considers the many ways in which landscape (seen and unseen) is fundamental to placemaking, colonial settlement, and identity formation. Collectively, the book’s authors map a constellation of interlocking photographic histories and survey practices, decentering Europe as the origin of camera-based surveillance. The volume charts a conversation across continents - connecting Europe, Africa, the Arab World, Asia, and the Americas. It does not segregate places, histories, and traditions but rather puts them in dialogue with one another, establishing solidarity across ever-shifting national, linguistic, racial, religious, and ethnic. Refusing the neat organization of survey photographs into national or imperial narratives, these essays celebrate the messy, cross-cultural reverberations of landscape over the past 170 years. Considering the visual, social, and historical networks in which these images circulate, this anthology connects the many entangled and political histories of photography in order to reframe survey practices and the multidimensionality of landscape as an international phenomenon. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, history of photography, and landscape history.
Book Synopsis Placing the Origins of the Buddha by : Bhadrajee S. Hewage
Download or read book Placing the Origins of the Buddha written by Bhadrajee S. Hewage and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2022-08-04 with total page 133 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our understanding that the Buddha emerged from the Middle Gangetic region of the Indian subcontinent has been largely unchallenged for the past 200 years. However, can we truly trust our existing knowledge regarding the geographical locations associated with early Buddhism? Could the Buddha’s origins, in fact, lie elsewhere? Tracking the general theory explaining the Buddha’s emergence from the Middle Ganges, this book explores the lesser-known story of colonial Sri Lanka’s connections to the wider nineteenth-century orientalist quest of placing the Buddha across the northern expanses of the subcontinent. By doing so, this book highlights the many flaws and inconsistencies that continue to inform our current understanding of the Buddha’s geographical origins and urges us to rethink the very foundation on which our knowledge of early Buddhism is based.
Book Synopsis Global Origins of the Modern Self, from Montaigne to Suzuki by : Avram Alpert
Download or read book Global Origins of the Modern Self, from Montaigne to Suzuki written by Avram Alpert and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2019-05-01 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores how writers across five continents and four centuries have debated ideas about what it means to be an individual, and shows that the modern self is an ongoing project of global history. In Global Origins of the Modern Self, from Montaigne to Suzuki, Avram Alpert contends that scholars have yet to fully grasp the constitutive force of global connections in the making of modern selfhood. Alpert argues that canonical moments of self-making from around the world share a surprising origin in the colonial anthropology of Europeans in the Americas. While most intellectual histories of modernity begin with the Cartesian inward turn, Alpertshows how this turn itself was an evasion of the impact of the colonial encounter. He charts a counter-history of the modern self, tracing lines of influence that stretch from Michel de Montaigne’s encounter with the Tupi through the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau into German Idealism, American Transcendentalism, postcolonial critique, and modern Zen. Alpert considers an unusually wide range of thinkers, including Kant, Hegel, Fanon, Emerson, Du Bois, Senghor, and Suzuki. This book not only breaks with disciplinary conventions about period and geography but also argues that these conventions obscure our ability to understand the modern condition. “Alpert’s scholarship is impressive, offering a focused sweep of intellectual history and incisive readings of many important figures (and the scholarly literature devoted to them). He is a fantastic writer. His prose is direct and evocative, conveying complex ideas in clear and probing terms. This style transforms a long text into a relatively quick and, at times, gripping read.” — Jane Anna Gordon, author of Creolizing Political Theory: Reading Rousseau through Fanon “Through textual and historical analyses and great interpretive abilities, Alpert shows persuasively that Montaigne, Rousseau, Emerson, Suzuki, and others—separately and together—are thinkers not of a Western (monopolizing the sense of modern) tradition, but of global, pluralist thought. His way of reading these thinkers can be a model for others interested in decolonizing and deracializing modern thought while preserving much of the canon with its present membership; with its male, Western-European and Anglo-American membership. But Alpert has done more. Through his arguments he has made room for Du Bois, Fanon, and Suzuki to be included in the canon. This is intellectually progressive and politically significant, and will make a fresh reading experience for many readers.” — Peter K. J. Park, author of Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy: Racism in the Formation of the Philosophical Canon, 1780–1830
Download or read book Asianisms written by Marc Frey and published by NUS Press. This book was released on 2015-11-11 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the core of this book is a seemingly simple question: What is Asia? In search of common historical roots, traditions and visions of political-cultural integration, first Japanese, then Chinese, Korean and Indian intellectuals, politicians and writers understood Asianisms as an umbrella for all conceptions, imaginations and processes which emphasized commonalities or common interests among different Asian regions and nations. This book investigates the multifarious discursive and material constructions of Asia within the region and in the West. It reconstructs regional constellations, intersections and relations in their national, transnational and global contexts. Moving far beyond the more well-known Japanese Pan-Asianism of the first half of the twentieth century, the chapters investigate visions of Asia that have sought to provide common meanings and political projects in efforts to trace, and construct, Asia as a united and common space of interaction. By tracing the imagination of civil society actors throughout Asia, the volume leaves behind state-centered approaches to regional integration and uncovers the richness and depth of complex identities within a large and culturally heterogeneous space.
Book Synopsis The Irish Buddhist by : Alicia Turner
Download or read book The Irish Buddhist written by Alicia Turner and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ""The Irish Buddhist tells the story of a poor Irishman who worked his way across America as a migrant worker, became one of the very first Western Buddhist monks, and traveled the length and breadth of Asia, from Burma and present-day Thailand to China and Japan, and from India and Sri Lanka to Singapore and Australia. Defying racial boundaries, he scandalized the colonial establishment of the 1900s. As a Buddhist monk, he energetically challenged the values and power of the British empire. U Dhammaloka was a radical celebrity who rallied Buddhists across Asia, set up schools, and argued down Christian missionaries - often using western atheist arguments. He was tried for sedition, tracked by police and intelligence services, and died at least twice. His early years and final days are shrouded in mystery despite his adept use of mass media. His story illuminates the forgotten margins and interstices of imperial power, the complexities of class, ethnicity and religious belonging in colonial Asia, and the fluidity of identity in the high Victorian period. Too often, the story of the pan-Asian Buddhist revival movement and Buddhism's remaking as a world religion has been told "from above," highlighting scholarly writers, middle-class reformers and ecclesiastical hierarchies. By contrast, Dhammaloka's adventures "from below" highlight the changing and contested meanings of Buddhism in colonial Asia. They offer a window into the worlds of ethnic minorities and diasporas, transnational networks, poor whites, and social movements, all developing different visions of Buddhist and post-imperial modernities. ""--
Book Synopsis A Buddhist Crossroads by : Brian Bocking
Download or read book A Buddhist Crossroads written by Brian Bocking and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-14 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Buddhism in Asia was transformed by the impact of colonial modernity and new technologies and began to spread in earnest to the West. Transnational networking among Asian Buddhists and early western converts engendered pioneering attempts to develop new kinds of Buddhism for a globalized world, in ways not controlled by any single sect or region. Drawing on new research by scholars worldwide, this book brings together some of the most extraordinary episodes and personalities of a period of almost a century from 1860-1960. Examples include Indian intellectuals who saw Buddhism as a homegrown path for a modern post-colonial future, poor whites ‘going native’ as Asian monks, a Brooklyn-born monk who sought to convert Mussolini, and the failed 1950s attempt to train British monks to establish a Thai sangha in Britain. Some of these stories represent creative failures, paths not taken, which may show us alternative possibilities for a more diverse Buddhism in a world dominated by religious nationalisms. Other pioneers paved the way for the mainstreaming of new forms of Buddhism in later decades, in time for the post-1960s takeoff of ‘global Buddhism’. This book was originally published as a special issue of Contemporary Buddhism.
Book Synopsis Locations of Buddhism by : Anne M. Blackburn
Download or read book Locations of Buddhism written by Anne M. Blackburn and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-04-15 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modernizing and colonizing forces brought nineteenth-century Sri Lankan Buddhists both challenges and opportunities. How did Buddhists deal with social and economic change; new forms of political, religious, and educational discourse; and Christianity? And how did Sri Lankan Buddhists, collaborating with other Asian Buddhists, respond to colonial rule? To answer these questions, Anne M. Blackburn focuses on the life of leading monk and educator Hikkaduve Sumangala (1827–1911) to examine more broadly Buddhist life under foreign rule. In Locations of Buddhism, Blackburn reveals that during Sri Lanka’s crucial decades of deepening colonial control and modernization, there was a surprising stability in the central religious activities of Hikkaduve and the Buddhists among whom he worked. At the same time, they developed new institutions and forms of association, drawing on pre-colonial intellectual heritage as well as colonial-period technologies and discourse. Advocating a new way of studying the impact of colonialism on colonized societies, Blackburn is particularly attuned here to human experience, paying attention to the habits of thought and modes of affiliation that characterized individuals and smaller scale groups. Locations of Buddhism is a wholly original contribution to the study of Sri Lanka and the history of Buddhism more generally.
Book Synopsis New Perspectives in Modern Korean Buddhism by : Hwansoo Ilmee Kim
Download or read book New Perspectives in Modern Korean Buddhism written by Hwansoo Ilmee Kim and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2022-12-01 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New Perspectives in Modern Korean Buddhism moves beyond nationalistic, modernist, and ethnocentric historiographies of modern Korean Buddhism by carefully examining individuals' lived experiences, the institutional dimensions of Korean Buddhism, and its place in transnational conversations. Drawing upon rich archives as well as historical, anthropological, and literary approaches, the book examines four themes that have gained attention in recent years: perennial existential concerns and the persistent relevance of religious practice; the role of female Buddhists; clerical marriage and scandals; and engagement with secular society. The book reveals the limits of metanarratives, such as those of colonialism, nationalism, and modernity, in understanding the complex and contested identities of both monastics and laity, thus demanding that we diversify the methods by which we articulate the history of modern Korean Buddhism.
Book Synopsis Empire, Religion, and Identity by : Soumen Mukherjee
Download or read book Empire, Religion, and Identity written by Soumen Mukherjee and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2024-02-19 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection brings together case studies that cover a wide spectrum: from Hindu, Buddhist, Jaina traditions through reformist ventures such as the Brahmos, to issues in modern Islam and Judaism. The first part of the book explores idioms of self-fashioning in global platforms and religious congresses. The second part explicates the nature of movements of such ideas. Cumulatively, they offer fresh and invaluable insights into their histories in modern South Asia against the backdrop of, and in relation to, wider transcultural global flows. Contributors: Soumen Mukherjee, Toshio Akai, Jeffery D. Long, Arpita Mitra, Philip Goldberg, Ankur Barua, Oyndrila Sarkar, Madhuparna Roychowdhury, Navras J. Aafreedi, and Faridah Zaman.
Book Synopsis Educating Monks by : Thomas A. Borchert
Download or read book Educating Monks written by Thomas A. Borchert and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2017-05-31 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most studies of Buddhist communities tend to be limited to villages, individual temple communities, or a single national community. Buddhist monastics, however, cross a number of these different framings: They are part of local communities, are governed through national legal frameworks, and participate in both national and transnational Buddhist networks. Educating Monks makes visible the ways Buddhist communities are shaped by all of the above—collectively and often simultaneously. Educating Monks examines a minority Buddhist community in Sipsongpannā, a region located on China’s southwest border with Myanmar and Laos. Its people, the Dai-lue, are “double minorities”: They are recognized by the Chinese state as part of a minority group, and they practice Theravāda Buddhism, a minority form within China, where Mahāyāna Buddhism is the norm. Theravāda has long been the primary training ground for Dai-lue men, and since the return of Buddhism to the area in the years following Mao Zedong’s death, the Dai-lue have put many of their resources into providing monastic education for their sons. However, the author’s analysis of institutional organization within Sipsongpannā, the governance of religion there, and the movements of monks (revealing the “ethnoscapes” that the monks of Sipsongpannā participate in) points to educational contexts that depend not just on local villagers, but also resources from the local (Communist) government and aid form Chinese Mahāyāna monks and Theravāda monks from Thailand and Myanmar. While the Dai-lue monks draw on these various resources for the development of the sangha, they do not share the same agenda and must continually engage in a careful political dance between villagers who want to revive traditional forms of Buddhism, a Chinese state that is at best indifferent to the continuation of Buddhism, and transnational monks that want to import their own modern forms of Buddhism into the region. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with Dai-lue monks in China, Thailand, and Singapore, this ambitious and sophisticated study will find a ready audience among students and scholars of the anthropology of Buddhism, and religion, education, and transnationalism in Southeast and East Asia.
Book Synopsis Buddhism and Modernity by : Orion Klautau
Download or read book Buddhism and Modernity written by Orion Klautau and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2021-03-31 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Japan was the first Asian nation to face the full impact of modernity. Like the rest of Japanese society, Buddhist institutions, individuals, and thought were drawn into the dynamics of confronting the modern age. Japanese Buddhism had to face multiple challenges, but it also contributed to modern Japanese society in numerous ways. Buddhism and Modernity: Sources from Nineteenth-Century Japan makes accessible the voices of Japanese Buddhists during the early phase of high modernity. The volume offers original translations of key texts—many available for the first time in English—by central actors in Japan’s transition to the modern era, including the works of Inoue Enryō, Gesshō, Hara Tanzan, Shimaji Mokurai, Kiyozawa Manshi, Murakami Senshō, Tanaka Chigaku, and Shaku Sōen. All of these writers are well recognized by Buddhist studies scholars and Japanese historians but have drawn little attention elsewhere; this stands in marked contrast to the reception of Japanese Buddhism since D. T. Suzuki, the towering figure of Japanese Zen in the first half of the twentieth century. The present book fills the chronological gap between the premodern era and the twentieth century by focusing on the crucial transition period of the nineteenth century. Issues central to the interaction of Japanese Buddhism with modernity inform the five major parts of the work: sectarian reform, the nation, science and philosophy, social reform, and Japan and Asia. Throughout the chapters, the globally entangled dimension—both in relation to the West, especially the direct and indirect impact of Christianity, and to Buddhist Asia—is of great importance. The Introduction emphasizes not only how Japanese Buddhism was part of a broader, globally shared reaction of religions to the specific challenges of modernity, but also goes into great detail in laying out the specifics of the Japanese case.
