From Monk to Modernity, Second Edition

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Publisher : Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN 13 : 1532671970
Total Pages : 209 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (326 download)

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Book Synopsis From Monk to Modernity, Second Edition by : Dominic Kirkham

Download or read book From Monk to Modernity, Second Edition written by Dominic Kirkham and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2019-01-08 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After spending many years in a religious order, Dominic Kirkham describes how he was driven to meet the challenge of modern thinking, an exercise that has proved both freeing and frightening. He says this has been “something of a personal odyssey, which now spans a lifetime of over six decades and is still ongoing.” He adds that “the presumption of the book is that this is of more than personal interest because the subject matter affects everyone; my personal journey will no doubt reflect that of many others.” In a broad sweep from Neolithic times to the twenty-first century, he considers our human quest for meaning and a good life, and how we can engage in it today.

True and Living Prophet of Destruction

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Publisher : UNM Press
ISBN 13 : 082635680X
Total Pages : 298 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (263 download)

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Book Synopsis True and Living Prophet of Destruction by : Nicholas Monk

Download or read book True and Living Prophet of Destruction written by Nicholas Monk and published by UNM Press. This book was released on 2016-05-15 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cormac McCarthy’s work sounds warnings of impending apocalypse, but it also implies that redemption remains available. Nicholas Monk argues that McCarthy’s response to the modern world is more subtle and less laden with despair than many realize, and that his work represents an understanding of the world that transcends the political divisions of right and left, escapes the reductive nature of identity politics, and looks to futures beyond the immediately adjacent. He positions McCarthy as an acute chronicler of the American condition at the beginning of a new century. Tracing the development of modernity, Monk explores the associated political and philosophical undercurrents in McCarthy and identifies how they are generated and what they oppose. He focuses on language, aesthetics, violence, the spiritual, and the natural environment and the animals that inhabit it. He examines the experience of engaging with McCarthy’s fiction in order to reveal why so many people report that “reading Cormac McCarthy changed my life.”

Monks in Motion

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Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190090995
Total Pages : 301 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (9 download)

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Book Synopsis Monks in Motion by : Jack Meng-Tat Chia

Download or read book Monks in Motion written by Jack Meng-Tat Chia and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-08-25 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chinese Buddhists have never remained stationary. They have always been on the move. In Monks in Motion, Jack Meng-Tat Chia explores why Buddhist monks migrated from China to Southeast Asia, and how they participated in transregional Buddhist networks across the South China Sea. This book tells the story of three prominent monks Chuk Mor (1913-2002), Yen Pei (1917-1996), and Ashin Jinarakkhita (1923-2002) and examines the connected history of Buddhist communities in China and maritime Southeast Asia in the twentieth century. Monks in Motion is the first book to offer a history of what Chia terms "South China Sea Buddhism," referring to a Buddhism that emerged from a swirl of correspondence networks, forced exiles, voluntary visits, evangelizing missions, institution-building campaigns, and the organizational efforts of countless Chinese and Chinese diasporic Buddhist monks. Drawing on multilingual research conducted in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, Chia challenges the conventional categories of "Chinese Buddhism" and "Southeast Asian Buddhism" by focusing on the lesser-known--yet no less significant--Chinese Buddhist communities of maritime Southeast Asia. By crossing the artificial spatial frontier between China and Southeast Asia, Monks in Motion breaks new ground, bringing Southeast Asia into the study of Chinese Buddhism and Chinese Buddhism into the study of Southeast Asia.

The Modern Monk

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Publisher : Penguin UK
ISBN 13 : 9385990349
Total Pages : 187 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (859 download)

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Book Synopsis The Modern Monk by : Hindol Sengupta

Download or read book The Modern Monk written by Hindol Sengupta and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2016-12-16 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: He loved French cookbooks, invented a new way of making khichdi, was interested in the engineering behind ship-building and the technology that makes ammunition. More than 100 years after his death, do we really know or understand the bewildering, fascinating, complex man Swami Vivekananda was? Vivekananda is one of the most important figures in the modern imagination of India. He is also an utterly modern man, consistently challenging his own views, and embracing diverse, even conflicting arguments. It is his modernity that appeals to us today. He is unlike any monk we have known. He is confined neither by history nor by ritual, and is constantly questioning everything around him, including himself. It is in Vivekananda’s contradictions, his doubts, his fears and his failings that he recognise his profoundly compelling divinity—he teaches us that to try and understand God, first one must truly comprehend one’s own self. This book is an argument that it is not just because he is close to God but also because he is so tantalisingly immersed in being human that keeps us returning to Vivekananda and his immortal wisdom.

The Birth of Insight

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Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022600094X
Total Pages : 274 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (26 download)

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Book Synopsis The Birth of Insight by : Erik Braun

Download or read book The Birth of Insight written by Erik Braun and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-11-19 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Insight meditation, which claims to offer practitioners a chance to escape all suffering by perceiving the true nature of reality, is one of the most popular forms of meditation today. The Theravada Buddhist cultures of South and Southeast Asia often see it as the Buddha’s most important gift to humanity. In the first book to examine how this practice came to play such a dominant—and relatively recent—role in Buddhism, Erik Braun takes readers to Burma, revealing that Burmese Buddhists in the colonial period were pioneers in making insight meditation indispensable to modern Buddhism. Braun focuses on the Burmese monk Ledi Sayadaw, a pivotal architect of modern insight meditation, and explores Ledi’s popularization of the study of crucial Buddhist philosophical texts in the early twentieth century. By promoting the study of such abstruse texts, Braun shows, Ledi was able to standardize and simplify meditation methods and make them widely accessible—in part to protect Buddhism in Burma after the British takeover in 1885. Braun also addresses the question of what really constitutes the “modern” in colonial and postcolonial forms of Buddhism, arguing that the emergence of this type of meditation was caused by precolonial factors in Burmese culture as well as the disruptive forces of the colonial era. Offering a readable narrative of the life and legacy of one of modern Buddhism’s most important figures, The Birth of Insight provides an original account of the development of mass meditation.

Revolutions in Communication

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Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 : 1628924780
Total Pages : 481 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (289 download)

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Book Synopsis Revolutions in Communication by : Bill Kovarik

Download or read book Revolutions in Communication written by Bill Kovarik and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2015-11-19 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Revolutions in Communication offers a new approach to media history, presenting an encyclopedic look at the way technological change has linked social and ideological communities. Using key figures in history to benchmark the chronology of technical innovation, Kovarik's exhaustive scholarship narrates the story of revolutions in printing, electronic communication and digital information, while drawing parallels between the past and present. Updated to reflect new research that has surfaced these past few years, Revolutions in Communication continues to provide students and teachers with the most readable history of communications, while including enough international perspective to get the most accurate sense of the field. The supplemental reading materials on the companion website include slideshows, podcasts and video demonstration plans in order to facilitate further reading.

The Lovelorn Ghost and the Magical Monk

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Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231153767
Total Pages : 362 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (311 download)

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Book Synopsis The Lovelorn Ghost and the Magical Monk by : Justin McDaniel

Download or read book The Lovelorn Ghost and the Magical Monk written by Justin McDaniel and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Focusing on representations of the ghost and monk from the late eighteenth century to the present, Justin Thomas McDaniel builds a case for interpreting modern Thai Buddhist practice through the movements of these transformative figures ... Listening to popular Thai Buddhist ghost stories, visiting crowded shrines and temples, he finds concepts of attachment, love, wealth, beauty, entertainment, graciousness, security, and nationalism all spring from engagement with the ghost and the monk and are as vital to the making of Thai Buddhism as venerating the Buddha himself."--Jacket.

The Handsome Monk and Other Stories

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Author :
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231548788
Total Pages : 165 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (315 download)

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Book Synopsis The Handsome Monk and Other Stories by : Tsering Dondrup

Download or read book The Handsome Monk and Other Stories written by Tsering Dondrup and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-08 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tsering Döndrup is one of the most popular and critically acclaimed authors writing in Tibetan today. In a distinct voice rich in black humor and irony, he describes the lives of Tibetans in contemporary China with wit, empathy, and a passionate sense of justice. The Handsome Monk and Other Stories brings together short stories from across Tsering Döndrup’s career to create a panorama of Tibetan society. With a love for the sparse yet vivid language of traditional Tibetan life, Tsering Döndrup tells tales of hypocritical lamas, crooked officials, violent conflicts, and loyal yaks. His nomad characters find themselves in scenarios that are at once strange and familiar, satirical yet poignant. The stories are set in the fictional county of Tsezhung, where Tsering Döndrup’s characters live their lives against the striking backdrop of Tibet’s natural landscape and go about their daily business to the ever-present rhythms of Tibetan religious life. Tsering Döndrup confronts pressing issues: the corruption of religious institutions; the indignities and injustices of Chinese rule; poverty and social ills such as gambling and alcoholism; and the hardships of a minority group struggling to maintain its identity in the face of overwhelming odds. Ranging in style from playful updates of traditional storytelling techniques to narrative experimentation, Tsering Döndrup’s tales pay tribute to the resilience of Tibetan culture.

Locations of Buddhism

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Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226055094
Total Pages : 261 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (26 download)

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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 261 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.

Figures of Buddhist Modernity in Asia

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Publisher : University of Hawaii Press
ISBN 13 : 0824858581
Total Pages : 241 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (248 download)

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Book Synopsis Figures of Buddhist Modernity in Asia by : Jeffrey Samuels

Download or read book Figures of Buddhist Modernity in Asia written by Jeffrey Samuels and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2016-07-31 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book introduces contemporary Buddhists from across Asia and from various walks of life. Eschewing traditional hagiographies, the editors have collected sixty-six profiles of individuals who would be excluded from most Buddhist histories and ethnographies. In addition to monks and nuns, readers will encounter artists, psychologists, social workers, part-time priests, healers, and librarians as well as charlatans, hucksters, profiteers, and rabble-rousers—all whose lives reflect changes in modern Buddhism even as they themselves shape the course of these changes. The editors and contributors are fundamentally concerned with how individual Buddhists make meaning and display this understanding to others. Some practitioners profiled look to the past, lamenting the transformations Buddhism has undergone in recent times, while others embrace these. Some have adopted a “new asceticism,” while others are eager to explore different religious traditions as they think about their own ways of being Buddhist. Arranging the profiles according to these themes—looking backward, forward, inward, and outward—reveals the value of studying individual Buddhists and their idiosyncratic religious backgrounds and attitudes, thus highlighting the diversity of approaches to the practice and study of Buddhism in Asia today. Students and teachers will welcome sections on further readings and additional tables of contents that organize the profiles thematically, as well as by tradition (Theravada, Mahayana, Vajrayana), region, and country.

Figures of Southeast Asian Modernity

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Publisher : University of Hawaii Press
ISBN 13 : 0824837797
Total Pages : 322 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (248 download)

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Book Synopsis Figures of Southeast Asian Modernity by : Joshua Barker

Download or read book Figures of Southeast Asian Modernity written by Joshua Barker and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2013-07-31 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We live in a world populated not just by individuals but by figures, those larger-than-life people who in some way express and challenge our conventional understandings of social types. This innovative and collaborative work takes up the wide range of figures that populate the social and cultural imaginaries of contemporary Southeast Asia—some familiar only in specific places, others recognizable across the region and even globally. It puts forward a series of ethnographic portraits of figures that represent and give voice to something larger than themselves, offering a view into social life that is at once highly particular and general. They include the Muslim Television Preacher in Indonesia, Miss Beer Lao, the Rural DJ in Thailand, the Korean Soap Opera Junkie in Burma, the Filipino Seaman, and the Photo Retoucher in Vietnam. Figures of Southeast Asian Modernity brings together the fieldwork of over eighty scholars and covers the nine major countries of the region: Burma (Myanmar), Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. An introduction outlines important social transformations in Southeast Asia and key theoretical and methodological innovations that result from ethnographic attention to the study of key figures. Each section begins with an introduction by a country editor followed by short essays offering vivid and intimate portraits set against the background of contemporary Southeast Asia. The result is a volume that combines scholarly rigor with a meaningful, up-to-date portrayal of a region of the world undergoing rapid change. A reference bibliography offers suggestions for further reading. Figures of Southeast Asia Modernity is an ideal teaching tool for introductory classes to Southeast Asia studies, anthropology, and geography.

Modernity and Re-enchantment

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Publisher : Lexington Books
ISBN 13 : 9780739127391
Total Pages : 510 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (273 download)

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Book Synopsis Modernity and Re-enchantment by : Philip Taylor

Download or read book Modernity and Re-enchantment written by Philip Taylor and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2008 with total page 510 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Representative of a new wave of anthropological research on religion in Vietnam, Modernity and Re-enchantment brings together in a single book the latest and best research available on this topic. Its lively and original descriptions deftly evoke the burgeoning field of religiosity in contemporary Vietnam. With case studies into a great variety of religious practices, it covers more ground than the small handful of single-authored books currently available on religion in Vietnam.

The Madman's Middle Way

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Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226493172
Total Pages : 273 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (264 download)

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Book Synopsis The Madman's Middle Way by : Donald S. Lopez Jr.

Download or read book The Madman's Middle Way written by Donald S. Lopez Jr. and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2007-05-15 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gendun Chopel is considered the most important Tibetan intellectual of the twentieth century. His life spanned the two defining moments in modern Tibetan history: the entry into Lhasa by British troops in 1904 and by Chinese troops in 1951. Recognized as an incarnate lama while he was a child, Gendun Chopel excelled in the traditional monastic curriculum and went on to become expert in fields as diverse as philosophy, history, linguistics, geography, and tantric Buddhism. Near the end of his life, before he was persecuted and imprisoned by the government of the young Dalai Lama, he would dictate the Adornment for Nagarjuna’s Thought, a work on Madhyamaka, or “Middle Way,” philosophy. It sparked controversy immediately upon its publication and continues to do so today. The Madman’s Middle Way presents the first English translation of this major Tibetan Buddhist work, accompanied by an essay on Gendun Chopel’s life liberally interspersed with passages from his writings. Donald S. Lopez Jr. also provides a commentary that sheds light on the doctrinal context of the Adornment and summarizes its key arguments. Ultimately, Lopez examines the long-standing debate over whether Gendun Chopel in fact is the author of the Adornment; the heated critical response to the work by Tibetan monks of the Dalai Lama’s sect; and what the Adornment tells us about Tibetan Buddhism’s encounter with modernity. The result is an insightful glimpse into a provocative and enigmatic workthatwill be of great interest to anyone seriously interested in Buddhism or Asian religions.

Gender, Continuity, and the Shaping of Modernity in the Arts of East Asia, 16th–20th Centuries

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Author :
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 9004348956
Total Pages : 354 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (43 download)

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Book Synopsis Gender, Continuity, and the Shaping of Modernity in the Arts of East Asia, 16th–20th Centuries by :

Download or read book Gender, Continuity, and the Shaping of Modernity in the Arts of East Asia, 16th–20th Centuries written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-10-10 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gender, Continuity, and the Shaping of Modernity in the Arts of East Asia, 16th–20th Centuries explores women’s and men’s contributions to the arts and gendered visual representations in China, Korea, and Japan from the premodern through modern eras. A critical introduction and nine essays consider how threads of continuity and exchanges between the cultures of East Asia, Europe, and the United States helped to shape modernity in this region, in the process revealing East Asia as a vital component of the trans-Pacific world. The essays are organized into three themes: representations of femininity, women as makers, and constructions of gender, and they consider examples of architecture, painting, woodblock prints and illustrated books, photography, and textiles. Contributors are: Lara C. W. Blanchard, Kristen L. Chiem, Charlotte Horlyck, Ikumi Kaminishi, Nayeon Kim, Sunglim Kim, Radu Leca, Elizabeth Lillehoj, Ying-chen Peng, and Christina M. Spiker. Gender, Continuity, and the Shaping of Modernity in the Arts of East Asia, 16th–20th Centuries is now available in paperback for individual customers.

Ethics Lost in Modernity

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Publisher : Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN 13 : 1666747203
Total Pages : 275 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (667 download)

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Book Synopsis Ethics Lost in Modernity by : Matthew Vest

Download or read book Ethics Lost in Modernity written by Matthew Vest and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2023-07-21 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ethics Lost in Modernity: Reflections on Wittgenstein and Bioethics turns to the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein as a guide to understand the immense success—yet great danger—of bioethics. Matthew Vest traces the story of bioethics since its inception in the late 1960s as a way to uncover a number of hidden assumptions within modern ethics that relies upon scientific theorizing as the fundamental way of thinking. Autonomy and utilitarianism, in particular, are two nearly unquestioned goals of scientific theorizing that are easily accessible, but at what cost? Vest argues that such an ethics enacts a thin moral calculation that runs the risk of enslaving ethics to scientism. Far from the depth of religious ethos and practices of virtue, modern ethics is lost amidst thin ethical theories, enacting a language game that instrumentalizes ethics in service of technological, bureaucratic, and professional end goals. He proposes that true moral living is far from anti–science, but rather is envisioned best when ethics and science are balanced with keen insights from ancient sacred cosmology.

The Making of Buddhist Modernism

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Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199720290
Total Pages : 310 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (997 download)

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Book Synopsis The Making of Buddhist Modernism by : David L. McMahan

Download or read book The Making of Buddhist Modernism written by David L. McMahan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-11-14 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A great deal of Buddhist literature and scholarly writing about Buddhism of the past 150 years reflects, and indeed constructs, a historically unique modern Buddhism, even while purporting to represent ancient tradition, timeless teaching, or the "essentials" of Buddhism. This literature, Asian as well as Western, weaves together the strands of different traditions to create a novel hybrid that brings Buddhism into alignment with many of the ideologies and sensibilities of the post-Enlightenment West. In this book, David McMahan charts the development of this "Buddhist modernism." McMahan examines and analyzes a wide range of popular and scholarly writings produced by Buddhists around the globe. He focuses on ideological and imaginative encounters between Buddhism and modernity, for example in the realms of science, mythology, literature, art, psychology, and religious pluralism. He shows how certain themes cut across cultural and geographical contexts, and how this form of Buddhism has been created by multiple agents in a variety of times and places. His position is critical but empathetic: while he presents Buddhist modernism as a construction of numerous parties with varying interests, he does not reduce it to a mistake, a misrepresentation, or fabrication. Rather, he presents it as a complex historical process constituted by a variety of responses -- sometimes trivial, often profound -- to some of the most important concerns of the modern era.

A Modernity Set to a Pre-Modern Tune

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Author :
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 9004310800
Total Pages : 265 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (43 download)

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Book Synopsis A Modernity Set to a Pre-Modern Tune by : Haosheng Yang

Download or read book A Modernity Set to a Pre-Modern Tune written by Haosheng Yang and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-03-11 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In A Modernity Set to a Pre-Modern Tune, Haosheng Yang provides an in-depth study of the classical-style poems of the most iconoclastic May Fourth Chinese writers (Lu Xun, Yu Dafu, Zhou Zuoren, Guo Moruo, and Nie Gannu) and highlights the five literary masters’ engagement with traditional lyricism as their critical response to the sociopolitical turbulence of twentieth-century China. This study challenges the bias against classical forms as allegedly outdated modes incapable of representing modern reality in current Chinese literary history. Yang’s fascinating book positions modern Chinese literature’s formalistic nonlinearity, representational experiences, and aspiration for a new voice through an old form as factors that are all crucial to exploring more fully the blurred boundary between the traditional and the modern.