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Buddhist History in the Vernacular

Buddhist History in the Vernacular PDF Author: Stephen C. Berkwitz
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004139109
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 370

Book Description
This book on vernacular Buddhist histories written in late medieval Sri Lanka demonstrates that narrative representations of the past were designed to effectively constructing new moral communities in translocal spaces.

Buddhist History in the Vernacular

Buddhist History in the Vernacular PDF Author: Stephen C. Berkwitz
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004139109
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 370

Book Description
This book on vernacular Buddhist histories written in late medieval Sri Lanka demonstrates that narrative representations of the past were designed to effectively constructing new moral communities in translocal spaces.

Ghostly Desires

Ghostly Desires PDF Author: Arnika Fuhrmann
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822374250
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 271

Book Description
Through an examination of post-1997 Thai cinema and video art Arnika Fuhrmann shows how vernacular Buddhist tenets, stories, and images combine with sexual politics in figuring current struggles over notions of personhood, sexuality, and collective life. The drama, horror, heritage, and experimental art films she analyzes draw on Buddhist-informed conceptions of impermanence and prominently feature the motif of the female ghost. In these films the characters' eroticization in the spheres of loss and death represents an improvisation on the Buddhist disavowal of attachment and highlights under-recognized female and queer desire and persistence. Her feminist and queer readings reveal the entangled relationships between film, sexuality, Buddhist ideas, and the Thai state's regulation of heteronormative sexuality. Fuhrmann thereby provides insights into the configuration of contemporary Thailand while opening up new possibilities for thinking about queer personhood and femininity.

Popularizing Buddhism

Popularizing Buddhism PDF Author: Mahinda Deegalle
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791481026
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Book Description
Explores the ritual practice of Buddhist preaching.

Curators of the Buddha

Curators of the Buddha PDF Author: Donald S. Lopez Jr.
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226493091
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Book Description
A critical history of the study of Buddhism in the West, incorporating insights of colonial and post-colonial cultural studies. Social, political and cultural conditions that have shaped the course of Buddhist studies are discussed.

The History of the Buddha's Relic Shrine

The History of the Buddha's Relic Shrine PDF Author: Parākrama Paṇḍita
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195301390
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Book Description
Buddhist chronicles have long been had a central place in the study of Buddhism. Scholars, however, have relied almost exclusively on Pali works that were composed by elites for learned audiences, to the neglect of a large number of Buddhist histories written in local languages for popular consumption. The Sinhala Thupavamsa, composed by Parakama Pandita in thirteenth-century Sri Lanka, is an important example of a Buddhist chronicle written in the vernacular Sinhala language. Furthermore, it is among those works that inform public discussion and debate over the place of Buddhism in the Sri Lankan nation state and the role of Buddhist monks in contemporary politics.In this book Stephen Berkwitz offers the first complete English translation of the Sinhala Thupavamsa. Composed in a literary dialect of Sinhala, it contains a richly descriptive account of how Buddhism spread outside of India, replete with poetic embellishments and interpolations not found in other accounts of those events. Aside from being an important literary work, the Sinhala Thupavamsa. is a text of considerable historical and religious significance. It comprises several narrative strands that relate the life story of the Buddha and the manner in which Buddhist teachings and institutions were established on the island of Sri Lanka in ancient times. The central focus of this work concerns the variety of relics associated with the historical Buddha, particularly how the relics were acquired and the presumed benefits of venerating them. The text also relates the mythological history of the Buddha's previous lives as a bodhisattva and concludes with a prediction about the future Buddha Maitreya. Reflection on Buddhist ethics and instruction on the Dharma, or the Buddha's teaching, are found throughout the work, indicating that this historical narrative was meant both to recall the past and give rise to religious practice among contemporary readers and listeners.This new translation makes a significant work more widely accessible in the West and adds to our knowledge of how local Buddhist communities imagined and represented their religious and cultural heritages in written works.

Gathering Leaves and Lifting Words

Gathering Leaves and Lifting Words PDF Author: Justin Thomas McDaniel
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 029598922X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 384

Book Description
Winner of the Henry J. Benda Prize sponsored by the Association for Asian Studies Gathering Leaves and Lifting Words examines modern and premodern Buddhist monastic education traditions in Laos and Thailand. Through five centuries of adaptation and reinterpretation of sacred texts and commentaries, Justin McDaniel traces curricular variations in Buddhist oral and written education that reflect a wide array of community goals and values. He depicts Buddhism as a series of overlapping processes, bringing fresh attention to the continuities of Theravada monastic communities that have endured despite regional and linguistic variations. Incorporating both primary and secondary sources from Thailand and Laos, he examines premodern inscriptional, codicological, anthropological, art historical, ecclesiastical, royal, and French colonial records. By looking at modern sermons, and even television programs and websites, he traces how pedagogical techniques found in premodern palm-leaf manuscripts are pervasive in modern education. As the first comprehensive study of monastic education in Thailand and Laos, Gathering Leaves and Lifting Words will appeal to a wide audience of scholars and students interested in religious studies, anthropology, social and intellectual history, and pedagogy.

Engendering the Buddhist State

Engendering the Buddhist State PDF Author: Ashley Thompson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317218191
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 249

Book Description
Drawing from more than a decade of field and archival research, this monograph concerns Cambodian cultural history and historiography, with an ultimate aim of broadening and deepening bases for understanding the Cambodian Theravadin politico-cultural complex. The book takes the form of an interdisciplinary analysis of performative and representational strategies for constituting social collectivities, largely developed at Angkor. The analysis involves extended close readings of a wide range of cultural artefacts including epigraphic and manuscript texts, sculpture and ritual practices. The author proposes a critical re-evaluation of dominant paradigms of Cambodian historiography in view of engendering new histories, or hybrid histories, which make room for previously absent perspectives and voices, while developing new theoretical tools engaging with and partially derived from "indigenous" narrative practices in the broadest sense. In this history-making process the historical event is shown to never be entirely separable from its aesthetic representation. Particular attention is paid to the roles of sexual difference in such (re)constructions of history. The book presents a theory of power capable of accounting for the historical phenomena by which vernacular cultures appropriate, subvert and submit to cosmopolitan forces. It charts out a novel approach to the study of classical Southeast Asian materials, and is of interest to students and scholars of Asian Art, Religion and Philosophy, Buddhism and Southeast Asian History.

Sacred Biography in the Buddhist Traditions of South and Southeast Asia

Sacred Biography in the Buddhist Traditions of South and Southeast Asia PDF Author: Juliane Schober
Publisher: Motilal Banarsidass Publ.
ISBN: 9788120818125
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 396

Book Description
This interdisciplinary collection of essays explores the biographical genre of the Buddhist traditions of South and Southeast Asia. Scholars in the history of religions, anthropology, literature and art history present a broad range of explorations into sacred biography as an interpretive genre. Easch essay makes unique contributions and the collection as a whole engages methodological and interpretive approaches that are central to scholars of Buddhism and those specializing in the study of south and Southeast Asia.

Buddhist Encounters and Identities Across East Asia

Buddhist Encounters and Identities Across East Asia PDF Author: Ann Heirman
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004366156
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 453

Book Description
Encounters, networks, identities and diversity are at the core of the history of Buddhism. They are also the focus of Buddhist Encounters and Identities across East Asia, edited by Ann Heirman, Carmen Meinert and Christoph Anderl. While long-distance networks allowed Buddhist ideas to travel to all parts of East Asia, it was through local and trans-local networks and encounters, and a diversity of people and societies, that identities were made and negotiated. This book undertakes a detailed examination of discrete Buddhist identities rooted in unique cultural practices, beliefs and indigenous socio-political conditions. Moreover, it presents a fascinating picture of the intricacies of the regional and cross-regional networks that connected South and East Asia.

Buddhist Literature of Ancient Gandhara

Buddhist Literature of Ancient Gandhara PDF Author: Salomon Richard
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1614291853
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 479

Book Description
Discover the fascinating history of a long-hidden Buddhist culture at a historic crossroads. In the years following Alexander the Great’s conquest of the East, a series of empires rose up along the Silk Road. In what is now northern Pakistan, the civilizations in the region called Gandhara became increasingly important centers for the development of Buddhism, reaching their apex under King Kaniska of the Kusanas in the second century CE. Gandhara has long been known for its Greek-Indian synthesis in architecture and statuary, but until about twenty years ago, almost nothing was known about its literature. The insights provided by manuscripts unearthed over the last few decades show that Gandhara was indeed a vital link in the early development of Buddhism, instrumental in both the transmission of Buddhism to China and the rise of the Mahayana tradition. The Buddhist Literature of Ancient Gandhara surveys what we know about Gandhara and its Buddhism, and it also provides translations of a dozen different short texts, from similes and stories to treatises on time and reality.