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Author: Bryan D. Lowe
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 082485943X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 297
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Book Description
Ritualized Writing takes readers into the fascinating world of Japanese Buddhist manuscript cultures. Using archival sources that have received scant attention in English, primarily documents from an eighth-century Japanese scriptorium and colophons from sutra manuscripts, Bryan D. Lowe uncovers the ways in which the transcription of Buddhist scripture was a highly ritualized endeavor. He takes a ground-level approach by emphasizing the activities and beliefs of a wide range of individuals, including scribes, provincial patrons, and royals, to reassess the meaning of scripture and reevaluate scholarly narratives of Japanese Buddhist history. Copying scripture is a central Buddhist practice and one that thrived in East Asia. Despite this, there are no other books dedicated to the topic. This work demonstrates that patrons and scribes treated sutras differently from other modes of writing. Scribes purified their bodies prior to transcription. Patrons held dedicatory ceremonies on days of abstinence, when prayers were pronounced and sutras were recited. Transcribing sutras helped scribes and patrons alike realize this- and other-worldly ambitions and cultivate themselves in accord with Buddhist norms. Sutra copying thus functioned as a form of ritualized writing, a strategic practice that set apart scripture as uniquely efficacious and venerable. Lowe employs this notion of ritualized writing to challenge historical narratives about ancient Japan (late seventh through early ninth centuries), a period when sutra copying flourished. He contends that Buddhist practice fulfilled a variety of social, political, and spiritual roles beyond ideological justification. Moreover, he demonstrates the inadequacy of state-folk dichotomies for understanding the social groups, institutions, and individual beliefs and practices of ancient Japanese Buddhism, highlighting instead common organizations across social class and using models that reveal shared concerns among believers from diverse social backgrounds. Ritualized Writing makes broader contributions to the study of ritual and scripture by introducing the notion of scriptural cultures, an analytic tool that denotes a series of dynamic relationships and practices involving texts that have been strategically set apart or ritualized. Scripture, Lowe concludes, is at once a category created by humans and a body of texts that transforms individuals and social organizations who come into contact with it.
Author: Bryan D. Lowe
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 082485943X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 297
Get Book Here
Book Description
Ritualized Writing takes readers into the fascinating world of Japanese Buddhist manuscript cultures. Using archival sources that have received scant attention in English, primarily documents from an eighth-century Japanese scriptorium and colophons from sutra manuscripts, Bryan D. Lowe uncovers the ways in which the transcription of Buddhist scripture was a highly ritualized endeavor. He takes a ground-level approach by emphasizing the activities and beliefs of a wide range of individuals, including scribes, provincial patrons, and royals, to reassess the meaning of scripture and reevaluate scholarly narratives of Japanese Buddhist history. Copying scripture is a central Buddhist practice and one that thrived in East Asia. Despite this, there are no other books dedicated to the topic. This work demonstrates that patrons and scribes treated sutras differently from other modes of writing. Scribes purified their bodies prior to transcription. Patrons held dedicatory ceremonies on days of abstinence, when prayers were pronounced and sutras were recited. Transcribing sutras helped scribes and patrons alike realize this- and other-worldly ambitions and cultivate themselves in accord with Buddhist norms. Sutra copying thus functioned as a form of ritualized writing, a strategic practice that set apart scripture as uniquely efficacious and venerable. Lowe employs this notion of ritualized writing to challenge historical narratives about ancient Japan (late seventh through early ninth centuries), a period when sutra copying flourished. He contends that Buddhist practice fulfilled a variety of social, political, and spiritual roles beyond ideological justification. Moreover, he demonstrates the inadequacy of state-folk dichotomies for understanding the social groups, institutions, and individual beliefs and practices of ancient Japanese Buddhism, highlighting instead common organizations across social class and using models that reveal shared concerns among believers from diverse social backgrounds. Ritualized Writing makes broader contributions to the study of ritual and scripture by introducing the notion of scriptural cultures, an analytic tool that denotes a series of dynamic relationships and practices involving texts that have been strategically set apart or ritualized. Scripture, Lowe concludes, is at once a category created by humans and a body of texts that transforms individuals and social organizations who come into contact with it.
Author: Catherine Bell
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195176456
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 313
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Book Description
Many teachers share an interest in bringing a better appreciation of ritual into their religious studies classes, but are uncertain how to do it. Religious studies faculty know how to teach texts, but they often have difficulty teaching something for which the meaning lies in the doing. How do you teach such "doing"? How much need be done? How does the teacher talk about the religiosity that exists in personalized relationships, not textual descriptions or prescriptions?These practical issues also give rise to theoretical questions. Giving more attention to ritual effectively suggests a reinterpretation of religion itself-an understanding less focused on what people have thought and written, and more focused on how they engage their universe. Many useful analyses of ritual derive from anthropological and sociological premises, which may be foreign to religious studies faculty and even seen by some as theologically problematic. This is the first resource to address the issues specific to teaching this subject. A stellar cast of contributors, all scholars of ritual and teachers experienced in using ritual in a wide variety of courses and settings, explain what has worked for them in the classroom, what has not, and what they have learned from the experience of being more real about religion. Their voices range from personal to formal, their topics from ways to use field trips to the role of architecture. The result is a rich guide for teachers who are new to the subject as well as the experienced willing to think about new angles and fresh approaches.
Author: Jeffrey K. Zeig
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134859740
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 517
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Book Description
First published in 1994. Ericksonian Methods: The Essence of the Story contains the proceedings of the Fifth International Congress on Erickson Approaches to Hypnosis and Psychotherapy. It consists of the keynote speeches and invited addresses from the Congress.
Author: Joshua Frydman
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004527788
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 268
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Book Description
The introduction of writing enables new forms of literature, but these can be invisible in works that survive as manuscripts. Through looking at inscriptions of poetry on garbage and as graffiti, we can glimpse how literature spread along with writing. This study uses these lesser-studied sources, including inscriptions on pottery, architecture, and especially wooden tablets known as mokkan, to uncover how poetry, and literature more broadly, was used, shared and thrown away in early Japan. Through looking at these disposable and informal sources, we explore the development of early Japanese literature, and even propose parallels to similar developments in other societies across space and time.
Author: Bryan D. Bibb
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0567513033
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 191
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Book Description
This book argues that literary features and ritual dynamics within the book of Leviticus enlighten each other. The first two chapters establish that one may read Leviticus as a coherent literary work and define the genre of Leviticus as "narrativized ritual," a complex blending of descriptive narrative and prescriptive ritual. In conversation with Catherine Bell, they present several aspects of the text that are ritualized and show how this ritualization implies a negotiation of power relations among participants. The third and fourth chapters examine the first half of Leviticus, both the legal sections in Lev. 1-7 and 11-15 and the narratives in Lev. 8-10 and 16. These sections alternate between establishing the ritual system and exposing gaps and ambiguities in that system.Chapter 5 turns to the second half of Leviticus, traditionally called the Holiness Code. The ritual language found in this section is less formal and precise, mirroring the way in which the concept of holiness is expanded and extended to the whole people. As this material concludes the book, it relativizes and democratizes the strict ritual system contained in the first half.
Author: Isabel Laack
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004392017
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 455
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Book Description
Winner of the 2020 Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion: Historical Studies In her groundbreaking investigation from the perspective of the aesthetics of religion, Isabel Laack explores the religion and art of writing of the pre-Hispanic Aztecs of Mexico. Inspired by postcolonial approaches, she reveals Eurocentric biases in academic representations of Aztec cosmovision, ontology, epistemology, ritual, aesthetics, and the writing system to provide a powerful interpretation of the Nahua sense of reality. Laack transcends the concept of “sacred scripture” traditionally employed in religions studies in order to reconstruct the Indigenous semiotic theory and to reveal how Aztec pictography can express complex aspects of embodied meaning. Her study offers an innovative approach to nonphonographic semiotic systems, as created in many world cultures, and expands our understanding of human recorded visual communication. This book will be essential reading for scholars and readers interested in the history of religions, Mesoamerican studies, and the ancient civilizations of the Americas. "This excellent book, written with intellectual courage and critical self-awareness, is a brilliant, multilayered thought experiment into the images and stories that made up the Nahua sense of reality as woven into their sensational ritual performances and colorful symbolic writing system." - Davíd Carrasco, Harvard University
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900440595X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 267
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Book Description
Ritual Dynamics in Jewish and Christian Contexts investigates questions that arise in modern ritual studies concerning Jewish and Christian religious communities: How did their religious rituals develop? Where did different ritual communities and their ritual texts interact? How did religious communities and their authoritative texts respond to change, and how did change influence religious rituals? The volume is a product of the interdisciplinary and international research efforts taken by the Research Centre “Dynamics of Jewish Ritual Practices in Pluralistic Contexts from Antiquity to the Present” at the Universität Erfurt (Germany) and unites the voices of important senior and emerging scholars in the field. It focuses on antiquity and the medieval period but also considers examples from the early modern and modern period in Europe
Author: Ronald L. Grimes
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190207809
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 216
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Book Description
Much ritual studies scholarship still focuses on central religious rites. For this reason, Grimes argues, dominant theories, like the data they consider, remain stubbornly conservative. This book issues a challenge to these theories and to popular conceptions of ritual. Rite Out of Place collects 10 revised essays originally published in widely varied sources across the past five years. Grimes has selected for inclusion those essays that track ritual as it haunts the edges of cultural boundaries-ritual converging with theater, ritual on television, ritual at the edge of natural environments and so on. The writing is non-technical, and the implied audience is sufficiently broad than any educated person interested in religion and public life should find it intelligible and engaging.
Author: Kevin Trainor
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190632925
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 689
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Book Description
"This Handbook provides a state-of-the-art exploration of several key dynamics in current studies of the Buddhist tradition with a focus on practice. Embodiment, materiality, emotion, and gender shape the way most Buddhists engage with their traditions, in contrast to popular representations of Buddhism as spiritual, disembodied, and largely devoid of ritual. This volume highlights how practice often represents a fluid, dynamic, and strategic means of defining identity and negotiating the challenges of everyday life. Essays explore the transformational aims of practices that require practitioners to move, gesture, and emote in prescribed ways, including the ways that scholars' own embodied practices are integral to their research methodology. The chapters are written by acknowledged experts in their respective subject areas and taken together offer an overview of current thinking in the field. The volume is of particular value to scholars who seek an orientation to current perspectives on important conceptual, theoretical, and methodological concerns that are shaping the field in areas outside their primary expertise. The inclusion of substantial, up-to-date bibliographies also makes the volume an important guide to current scholarship"--
Author: Eric Nelson Newberg
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1625647239
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 389
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Book Description
This volume of essays, dedicated to Stan and Ruth Burgess, has been written by their colleagues and students to honor them as they retire after many years of distinguished service to Evangel University, Southwest Missouri State University, and Regent University. Several meanings can be subsumed under the title Children of the Calling. Stan and Ruth grew up in India, children of Pentecostal missionaries who felt they had "divine callings." They were influenced not only by the religious callings of their parents, but also by the cultural milieu of India. Though they did not personally take on board the specific missionary calling of their parents, they charted life maps that benefitted from the cross-cultural proficiencies developed in their childhoods in India, which to a large extent colored the influence they would have on their children, academic colleagues, and students, some of whom have submitted essays for this Festschrift. The diversity of subjects in this volume attests to the breadth of the scholarly work of Stan and Ruth Burgess. The first section narrates the major highlights of Stan and Ruth's academic biographies, the second presents pioneering studies of biblical studies and church history, and the third offers application-based research and personal reminiscences.
