Buddhist History in the Vernacular

Buddhist History in the Vernacular PDF Author: Stephen Berkwitz
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047413474
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 369

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Index Buddhicus is the first classified comprehensive bibliography of Buddhist Studies. It describes secondary material ranging from articles, papers and chapters appearing in journals, proceedings and collections, through reference works, monographs, editions and theses, to digital resources. All entries are linked to an elaborate index of both proper names and thematic, and cross referenced to related material. The Index is available as an online resource.

Buddhist History in the Vernacular

Buddhist History in the Vernacular PDF Author: Stephen Berkwitz
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047413474
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 369

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Index Buddhicus is the first classified comprehensive bibliography of Buddhist Studies. It describes secondary material ranging from articles, papers and chapters appearing in journals, proceedings and collections, through reference works, monographs, editions and theses, to digital resources. All entries are linked to an elaborate index of both proper names and thematic, and cross referenced to related material. The Index is available as an online resource.

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

Get Book Here

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.

Tang Transformation Texts

Tang Transformation Texts PDF Author: Victor H. Mair
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684170044
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 309

Get Book Here

Book Description
This is the most comprehensive study of pien-wen (“transformation texts” i.e., tales of metamorphosis) in any language since the manuscripts were discovered at the beginning of the 20th century in a remote cave complex in northwest China. They are the earliest written vernacular narratives in China and are thus extremely important in the history of Chinese language and literature. Numerous scholarly controversies have surrounded the study of the texts in the last three quarters of a century; this volume seeks to resolve some of them—the extent, origins, and formal characteristics of the texts, the meaning of pien wen, the identity of the authors who composed these popular narratives and the scribes who copied them, the relationship of the texts to oral performance, and the reasons for the apparently sudden demise of the genre around the beginning of the Sung dynasty. This is a multi-disciplinary study that integrates findings from religious, literary, linguistic, sociological, and historical materials, carried out with intellectual rigor. It includes an extensive bibliography of relevant sources in many languages.

Popularizing Buddhism

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

Get Book Here

Book Description
Explores the ritual practice of Buddhist preaching.

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

Get Book Here

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.

Theravada Buddhism

Theravada Buddhism PDF Author: Richard Gombrich
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134903529
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 191

Get Book Here

Book Description
First Published in 1988. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Buddhism and the Rise of the Written Vernacular in East Asia

Buddhism and the Rise of the Written Vernacular in East Asia PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 45

Get Book Here

Book Description


Buddhism in World Cultures

Buddhism in World Cultures PDF Author: Stephen C. Berkwitz
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1851097872
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 388

Get Book Here

Book Description
A comprehensive overview of modern Buddhism across cultures, showing how this ancient religion has adapted to recent social and political change. Collecting the work of leading authorities on Buddhism in different societies around the world, this book details the state of the religion in Asian countries where it is a major cultural influence and in North America. The religion has changed to meet the challenges of modernity; its practitioners have incorporated those innovations and this work examines those changes in-depth. A comprehensive overview of historical Buddhist practice grounds the reader for the entire nine chapters, each of which is organized by geographical area and follows the path Buddhism took as it spread across Asia and into North America. Each chapter presents field research and critical reflection on what constitutes modern Buddhism in one of nine countries or regions. Histories of Buddhism are common; this is the only source for in-depth information on modern Buddhism.

Defining Buddhism(s)

Defining Buddhism(s) PDF Author: Karen Derris
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134937253
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 353

Get Book Here

Book Description
'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.

Buddhist Poetry and Colonialism

Buddhist Poetry and Colonialism PDF Author: Stephen C. Berkwitz
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199935777
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 327

Get Book Here

Book Description
Many researchers have explored the impact of British and French Orientalism in the reinterpretations of Buddhism in South and Southeast Asia during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Less noticed, however, and infrequently discussed is the impact of Portuguese colonialists and missionaries upon Buddhist communities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries across Asia. Stephen C. Berkwitz addresses this theme by examining five poetic works by Alagiyavanna Mukaveti (b.1552), a renowned Sinhala poet who participated directly in the convergence of local and trans-local cultures in early modern Sri Lanka. Berkwitz follows the written works of the poet from his position in the court of a Sinhala king, through the cultural upheavals of warfare and the expansion of colonial rule, and finally to his eventual conversion to Catholicism and employment under the Portuguese Crown. In so doing, Berkwitz explores the transformations in religion and literature rendered by what was arguably the earliest sustained encounter between Asian Buddhists and European colonialists in world history. Alagiyavanna's poetic works give expression to both a discourse of nostalgia for the local religious and cultural order in the late sixteenth century, and a discourse of cultural assimilation with the new colonial order during its ascendancy in the early seventeenth century. Employing an interdisciplinary approach that combines Buddhist Studies, History, Literary Criticism, and Postcolonial Studies, this book yields important insights into how the colonial experience contributed to the transformation of Buddhist culture in early modernity.