Author: Stephen C. Berkwitz
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199935785
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 327
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Book Description
This title examines five works by the poet Alagiyavanna to demonstrate how Buddhism in Sri Lanka was transformed by the encounters with Portuguese colonialism in the 16th and 17th centuries.
Author: Stephen C. Berkwitz
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0199935785
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 336
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Book Description
Buddhist Poetry and Colonialism examines five works by the poet Alagiyavanna to demonstrate how Buddhism in Sri Lanka was transformed by the encounters with Portuguese colonialism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Author: Thomas Borchert
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351620363
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 393
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Book Description
Over the course of the nineteenth century, most of the Theravada world of Southeast Asia came under the colonial domination of European powers. While this has long been seen as a central event in the development of modern forms of Theravada Buddhism, most discussions have focused on specific Buddhist communities or nations, and particularly their resistance to colonialism. The chapters in this book examine the many different colonial contexts and regimes that Theravada Buddhists experienced, not just those of European powers such as the British, French, but also the internal colonialism of China and Thailand. They show that while many Buddhists resisted colonialism, other Buddhists shared agendas with colonial powers, such as for the reform of the monastic community. They also show that in some places, such as Singapore and Malaysia, colonialism enabled the creation of Theravada Buddhist communities. The book demonstrates the importance of thinking about colonialism both locally and regionally. Providing a new understanding of the breadth of experiences of Theravada and colonialism across Asia., this book will be of interest to scholars in the field of Buddhist Studies, Asian History, Comparative World History, Southeast Asian Studies and Religious Studies.
Author: Jason Protass
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 082488907X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 353
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Book Description
Chinese Buddhist monks of the Song dynasty (960–1279) called the irresistible urge to compose poetry “the poetry demon.” In this ambitious study, Jason Protass seeks to bridge the fields of Buddhist studies and Chinese literature to examine the place of poetry in the lives of Song monks. Although much has been written about verses in the gong’an (Jpn. kōan) tradition, very little is known about the large corpora—roughly 30,000 extant poems—composed by these monastics. Protass addresses the oversight by using strategies associated with religious studies, literary studies, and sociology. He weaves together poetry with a wide range of monastic sources and in doing so argues against positing a “literary Chan” movement that wrote poetry as a path to awakening; he instead presents an understanding of monks’ poetry grounded in the Song discourse of monks themselves. The work begins by examining how monks fashioned new genres, created their own books, and fueled a monastic audience for monks’ poetry. It traces the evolution of gāthā from hymns found in Buddhist scripture to an independent genre for poems associated with Chan masters as living buddhas. While Song monastic culture produced a prodigious amount of verse, at the same time it promoted prohibitions against monks’ participation in poetry as a worldly or Confucian art: This constructive tension was an animating force. The Poetry Demon highlights this and other intersections of Buddhist doctrine with literary sociality and charts productive pathways through numerous materials, including collections of Chan “recorded sayings,” monastic rulebooks, “eminent monk” and “flame record” hagiographies, manuscripts of poetry, Buddhist encyclopedia, primers, and sūtra commentary. Two chapter-length case studies illustrate how Song monks participated in two of the most prominent and conservative modes of poetry of the time, those of parting and mourning. Protass reveals how monks used Chan humor with reference to emptiness to transform acts of separation into Buddhist teachings. In another chapter, monks in mourning expressed their grief and dharma through poetry. The Poetry Demon impressively uncovers new and creative ways to study Chinese Buddhist monks’ poetry while contributing to the broader study of Chinese religion and literature.
Author: Vanessa R. Sasson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197649467
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 281
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Book Description
Retellings of the Buddha's life story have animated and sustained Buddhist thought and practice through some 2,500 years of history. To this day, Buddhist holidays and rituals are pinned to the arc of his biography, celebrating his birth, awakening, teaching, and final nirvana. His story is the model that exemplary Buddhists follow. Often, there is a moment of insight akin to the Buddha's experience with the Four Sights, followed by a great departure from home, and a period of searching that it is hoped will lead to final awakening. The Buddha's story is not just the Buddha's story; it is the story of Buddhism. In this book, twelve leading scholars of South Asian texts and traditions articulate the Buddha-life blueprint--the underlying and foundational pattern that holds the life story of a buddha together. They retell the episodes of Buddha Gautama's extended life story, while keeping in mind the cosmic, paradigmatic arc of his narrative. The contributors have dedicated their careers to exploring hagiographical materials, each applying their own methodological and theoretical interests to shed new light on the enduring story of Buddhism. Using multiple perspectives, voices, and sources, this volume underscores the multivalent centrality of this story. The book will be an invaluable resource to practicing Buddhists and students of Buddhist Studies to help them engage in the most foundational story of the tradition.
Author: Zoltán Biedermann
Publisher: UCL Press
ISBN: 1911307843
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 357
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Book Description
The peoples of Sri Lanka have participated in far-flung trading networks, religious formations, and Asian and European empires for millennia. This interdisciplinary volume sets out to draw Sri Lanka into the field of Asian and Global History by showing how the latest wave of scholarship has explored the island as a ‘crossroads’, a place defined by its openness to movement across the Indian Ocean.Experts in the history, archaeology, literature and art of the island from c.500 BCE to c.1850 CE use Lankan material to explore a number of pressing scholarly debates. They address these matters from their varied disciplinary perspectives and diverse array of sources, critically assessing concepts such as ethnicity, cosmopolitanism and localisation, and elucidating the subtle ways in which the foreign may be resisted and embraced at the same time. The individual chapters, and the volume as a whole, are a welcome addition to the history and historiography of Sri Lanka, as well as studies of the Indian Ocean region, kingship, colonialism, imperialism, and early modernity.
Author: Alexandra Cuffel
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351171704
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 330
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Book Description
The ambiguity concerning the interpretation of the ‘physical body’ in religious thought is not peculiar to any given religion, but is discernible in the scriptures, practices, and disciplines in most of the world’s major religious traditions. This book seeks to address the nuances of difference within and between religious traditions in the treatment and understanding of what constitutes the body as a carrier of religious meaning and/or vindication of doctrine. Bringing together an international team of contributors from different disciplines, this collection addresses the intersection of religion, gender, corporeality and/or sexuality in various Western and Eastern cultures. The book analyses instances when religious meaning is attributed to the human body’s physicality and its mechanics in contrast to imagined or metaphorical bodies. In other cases, it is shown that the body may function either as a vehicle or a hindrance for mystical knowledge. The chapters are arranged chronologically and across religious orientations, to offer a differentiated view on the body from a global perspective. This collection is an exciting exploration of religion and the human body. As such, it will be of great interest to scholars in religious studies, theology, Islamic studies, South Asian studies, history of religions and gender studies.
Author: Reinhold Glei
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004335064
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 381
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Book Description
This collection of articles is an innovative contribution to religious studies, because it picks up concepts developed in the wake of the so-called "spatial turn". Religions are always located in a certain cultural and spatial environment, but often tend to locate (or translocate) themselves beyond that original setting. Also, many religious traditions are not only tied to or associated with the area its respective adherent live in, but are in fact "bi-local" or even "multi-local", as they closely relate to various spatial centers or plains at once. This spatial diversity inherent to many religions is a corollary to religious diversity or plurality that merits in-depth research. The articles in this volume present important findings from a series of settings within and between Asia and Europe. Contributors are: Anna Akasoy, Christopher I. Beckwith, Stephen C. Berkwitz, Alexandra Cuffel, Ana Echevarria, Reinhold F. Glei, Tsering Gonkatsang, Georgios T. Halkias, Nikolas Jaspert, Adam Knobler, Zara Pogossian, Henrik H. Sörensen, Knut Martin Stünkel, John Tolan, Dorothea Weltecke, and Michael Willis.
Author: Sujatha Arundathi Meegama
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824894960
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 250
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Book Description
Temples to the Buddha and the Gods analyzes the patronage of diverse image houses built in the transnational Drāviḍa tradition of architecture in Sri Lanka—an architectural tradition that has been adopted across the Indian Ocean, from the premodern to the contemporary. Although the Drāviḍa tradition is generally associated with Hindu temple architecture, in Sri Lanka it was deployed to build temples to the Buddha as well as to Hindu and Buddhist deities. Framed along ethno-religious binaries, it is seen as “foreign” or “provincial” in previous studies of Sri Lanka’s art histories. In contrast, this book argues that temples constructed in the Drāviḍa architectural tradition in the medieval and the early modern periods in Sri Lanka should be understood as part of the larger transnational architectural tradition. Sujatha Arundathi Meegama brings together different types of image houses built by various patrons (e.g., monarchs, monks, ministers, and merchants) that were previously considered in isolation and rarely included in the Sri Lankan art historical canon. Examining a range of evidence—architecture, inscriptions, and poetry—and synthesizing disparate scholarship on the religious cultures and the art histories of Sri Lanka, the author illustrates that there was a strong presence of shared architectural traditions, shared patterns of patronage, and shared religious practices among the diverse communities on this island. Generally, scholarship on South Asian architecture focuses on the role of rulers and other secular or religious elites as agents of religious architecture; in addition to these actors, this study highlights the roles of architects who specialized in the Drāviḍa tradition and those who experimented with it in stone, brick, and timber in different time periods. Revealing the centrality of this architectural tradition, Temples to the Buddha and the Gods offers a new perspective that contextualizes the cultural tradition of Sri Lanka and its place in the interconnected world of the Indian Ocean.
Author: Patrick Peebles
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442255854
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 495
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Book Description
Sri Lanka has had a celebrated history, a long colonial past, and since independence in 1948 has passed through a series of crises and political experiments. It has had a remarkable record of voters turning out unpopular governments, often by sweeping margins. On 8 January 2015 voters again performed this feat when Maithripala Sirisena, representing a coalition of disparate parties, defeated Mahinda Rajapaksa for the presidency. Rajapaksa was turning the nation away from its democratic heritage towards authoritarianism and militarism. Independent Sri Lanka’s economy stagnated for decades before it began to grow in the 1980s. It has had significant economic growth since the end of the 26-year war against the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in 2009. Although reconciliation between the Sinhalese Buddhist majority and Hindu, Muslim and Christian minorities seems distant, prospects for Sri Lanka seem better than they have been for decades. The Historical Dictionary of Sri Lanka contains a chronology, an introduction, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 700 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Sri Lanka.
