Buddhism beyond Borders

Buddhism beyond Borders PDF Author: Scott A. Mitchell
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438456379
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
Explores facets of North American Buddhism while taking into account the impact of globalization and increasing interconnectivity. Buddhism beyond Borders provides a fresh consideration of Buddhism in the American context. It includes both theoretical discussions and case studies to highlight the tension between studies that locate Buddhist communities in regionally specific areas and those that highlight the translocal nature of an increasingly interconnected world. Whereas previous examinations of Buddhism in North America have assumed a more or less essentialized and homogeneous “American” culture, the essays in this volume offer a corrective, situating American Buddhist groups within the framework of globalized cultural flows, while exploring the effects of local forces. Contributors examine regionalism within American Buddhisms, Buddhist identity and ethnicity as academic typologies, Buddhist modernities, the secularization and hybridization of Buddhism, Buddhist fiction, and Buddhist controversies involving the Internet, among other issues.

Buddhism beyond Borders

Buddhism beyond Borders PDF Author: Scott A. Mitchell
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438456379
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 308

Get Book Here

Book Description
Explores facets of North American Buddhism while taking into account the impact of globalization and increasing interconnectivity. Buddhism beyond Borders provides a fresh consideration of Buddhism in the American context. It includes both theoretical discussions and case studies to highlight the tension between studies that locate Buddhist communities in regionally specific areas and those that highlight the translocal nature of an increasingly interconnected world. Whereas previous examinations of Buddhism in North America have assumed a more or less essentialized and homogeneous “American” culture, the essays in this volume offer a corrective, situating American Buddhist groups within the framework of globalized cultural flows, while exploring the effects of local forces. Contributors examine regionalism within American Buddhisms, Buddhist identity and ethnicity as academic typologies, Buddhist modernities, the secularization and hybridization of Buddhism, Buddhist fiction, and Buddhist controversies involving the Internet, among other issues.

The Buddha on Mecca’s Verandah

The Buddha on Mecca’s Verandah PDF Author: Irving Chan Johnson
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295804416
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
The Buddha on Mecca's Verandah examines the many ways in which people living along an international border negotiate their ethnic, cultural, and political identities. This ethnography of a small community of Thai Buddhists in the Malaysian state of Kelantan draws on rich, original vignettes to show how issues such as territoriality, identity, and power frame the experiences of borderland residents. Although the Thai represent less than 10 percent of the Kelantan population, they are vocal about their identity as non-Muslim, non-Malay citizens. They have built some of the world's largest Buddhist statues in their tiny villages, in a state that has traditionally been a seat of Islamic governance. At the same time, the Thai grapple with feelings of social and political powerlessness, being neither Thai citizens nor Muslim Malaysians. This thoughtful study offers new perspectives and challenges the classical definition of boundaries and borders as spaces that enforce separation and distance. With insights applicable to comparative border and frontier studies around the world, The Buddha on Mecca's Verandah will appeal not only to anthropologists but also to specialists in Asian and Southeast Asian studies, cultural geography, religious and ethnic studies, globalization, and cosmopolitanism.

The Buddha and the Borderline

The Buddha and the Borderline PDF Author: Kiera Van Gelder
Publisher: New Harbinger Publications
ISBN: 1572248254
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Kiera Van Gelder's first suicide attempt at the age of twelve marked the onset of her struggles with drug addiction, depression, post-traumatic stress, self-harm, and chaotic romantic relationships-all of which eventually led to doctors' belated diagnosis of borderline personality disorder twenty years later. The Buddha and the Borderline is a window into this mysterious and debilitating condition, an unblinking portrayal of one woman's fight against the emotional devastation of borderline personality disorder. This haunting, intimate memoir chronicles both the devastating period that led to Kiera's eventual diagnosis and her inspirational recovery through therapy, Buddhist spirituality, and a few online dates gone wrong. Kiera's story sheds light on the private struggle to transform suffering into compassion for herself and others, and is essential reading for all seeking to understand what it truly means to recover and reclaim the desire to live.

Borders and Debordering

Borders and Debordering PDF Author: Tomaž Grušovnik
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 149857131X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
Borders / Debordering: Topologies, Praxes, Hospitableness engages from interdisciplinary and transnational perspectives some of the most important issues of the present, which lay at the intersection of physical, epistemological, spiritual, and existential borders. The book addresses a variety of topics connected with the role of the body at the threshold between subjective identities and intersubjective spaces that are drawn in ontology, epistemology and ethics, as well as with borders inscribed in intersubjective, social, and political spaces (such as gender/sexuality/race, human/animal/nature/technology divisions). The book is divided in three sections, covering various phenomena of borders and their possible debordering. The first section offers insights into bordering topologies, from reflections on the U.S. border to the development of the concept of the “border” in ancient China. The second section is dedicated to practices as well as intellectual ontologies with practical implications bound up with borders in different cultural and social spheres – from Buddhist nationalism in Sri Lanka and Myanmar to contemporary photography with its implications for political systems and reflections on human/animal border. The third section covers reflections on hospitality that relate to migration issues, emerging material ethics, and aerial hospitableness.

Song and Silence

Song and Silence PDF Author: Sara Leila Margaret Davis
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231135270
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
In the Sipsongpanna region of China, tourists watch festive displays of Tai Lüe folk song and dance. The Tai Lües are viewed by the Chinese government as a 'model minority'. Sara Davis describes how Tai Lües are reviving and reinventing their culture in ways that contest the official state version.

Buddhism and American Cinema

Buddhism and American Cinema PDF Author: John Whalen-Bridge
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438453493
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
Discusses both depictions of Buddhism in film and Buddhist takes on a variety of films. In 1989, the same year the Dalai Lama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, a decade-long boom of films dedicated to Buddhist people, history, and culture began. Offering the first scholarly treatment of Buddhism and cinema, the editors advise that there are two kinds of Buddhist film: those that are about Buddhists and those that are not. Focusing on contemporary American offerings, the contributors extend a two-pronged approach, discussing how Buddhism has been captured by directors and presenting Buddhist-oriented critiques of the worlds represented in films that would seem to have no connection with Buddhism. Films discussed range from those set in Tibet, such as Kundun and Lost Horizon, to those set well outside of any Buddhist milieu, such as Groundhog Day and The Matrix. The contributors explain the Buddhist theoretical concepts that emerge in these works, including karma, the bardo, and reincarnation, and consider them in relation to interpretive strategies that include feminism, postcolonialism, and contemplative psychological approaches.

Istanbul

Istanbul PDF Author: Bettany Hughes
Publisher: Da Capo Press
ISBN: 0306825856
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 666

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Book Description
Istanbul has long been a place where stories and histories collide, where perception is as potent as fact. From the Koran to Shakespeare, this city with three names--Byzantium, Constantinople, Istanbul -- resonates as an idea and a place, real and imagined. Standing as the gateway between East and West, North and South, it has been the capital city of the Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman Empires. For much of its history it was the very center of the world, known simply as "The City," but, as Bettany Hughes reveals, Istanbul is not just a city, but a global story. In this epic new biography, Hughes takes us on a dazzling historical journey from the Neolithic to the present, through the many incarnations of one of the world's greatest cities--exploring the ways that Istanbul's influence has spun out to shape the wider world. Hughes investigates what it takes to make a city and tells the story not just of emperors, viziers, caliphs, and sultans, but of the poor and the voiceless, of the women and men whose aspirations and dreams have continuously reinvented Istanbul. Written with energy and animation, award-winning historian Bettany Hughes deftly guides readers through Istanbul's rich layers of history. Based on meticulous research and new archaeological evidence, this captivating portrait of the momentous life of Istanbul is visceral, immediate, and authoritative -- narrative history at its finest.

Why Borders Matter

Why Borders Matter PDF Author: Frank Furedi
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000080161
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 163

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Book Description
Western society has become estranged from the borders and social boundaries that have for centuries given meaning to human experience. This book argues that the controversy surrounding mass migration and physical borders runs in parallel and is closely connected to the debates surrounding the symbolic boundaries people need to guide on the issues of everyday life. Numerous commentators claim that borders have become irrelevant in the age of mass migration and globalisation. Some go so far as to argue for ‘No Borders’. And it is not merely the boundaries that divide nations that are under attack! The traditional boundaries that separate adults from children, or men from women, or humans from animals, or citizens and non-citizens, or the private from the public sphere are often condemned as arbitrary, unnatural, and even unjust. Paradoxically, the attempt to alter or abolish conventional boundaries coexists with the imperative of constructing new ones. No-Border campaigners call for safe spaces. Opponents of cultural appropriation demand the policing of language and advocates of identity politics are busy building boundaries to keep out would-be encroachers on their identity. Furedi argues that the key driver of the confusion surrounding borders and boundaries is the difficulty that society has in endowing experience with meaning. The most striking symptom of this trend is the cultural devaluation of the act of judgment, which has led to a loss of clarity about the moral boundaries in everyday life. The infantilisation of adults that runs in tandem with the adultification of children offers a striking example of the consequence of non-judgmentalism. Written in a clear and direct style, this book will appeal to students and scholars in cultural sociology, sociology of knowledge, philosophy, political theory, and cultural studies.

Questioning Borders

Questioning Borders PDF Author: Robin Visser
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231553293
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
Indigenous knowledge of local ecosystems often challenges settler-colonial cosmologies that naturalize resource extraction and the relocation of nomadic, hunting, foraging, or fishing peoples. Questioning Borders explores recent ecoliterature by Han and non-Han Indigenous writers of China and Taiwan, analyzing relations among humans, animals, ecosystems, and the cosmos in search of alternative possibilities for creativity and consciousness. Informed by extensive field research, Robin Visser compares literary works by Bai, Bunun, Kazakh, Mongol, Tao, Tibetan, Uyghur, Wa, Yi, and Han Chinese writers set in Xinjiang, Tibet, Inner Mongolia, Southwest China, and Taiwan, sites of extensive development, migration, and climate change impacts. Visser contrasts the dominant Han Chinese cosmology of center and periphery that informs what she calls “Beijing Westerns” with Indigenous and hybridized ways of relating to the world that challenge borders, binaries, and hierarchies. By centering Indigenous cosmologies, this book aims to decolonize approaches to ecocriticism, comparative literature, and Chinese and Sinophone studies as well as to inspire new modes of sustainable flourishing in the Anthropocene.

Buddhism and Ireland

Buddhism and Ireland PDF Author: Laurence Cox
Publisher: Equinox Publishing (UK)
ISBN: 9781908049308
Category : Buddhism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Ireland and Buddhism have a long history. Shaped by colonialism, contested borders, religious wars, empire and massive diasporas, Irish people have encountered Asian Buddhism in many ways over fourteen centuries. From the thrill of travellers' tales in far-off lands to a religious alternative to Christianity, from the potential of anti-colonial solidarity to fears of 'going native', and from recent immigration to the secular spread of Buddhist meditation, Buddhism has meant many different things to people in Ireland. Knowledge of Buddhist Asia reached Ireland by the seventh century, with the first personal contact in the fourteenth - a tale remembered for five hundred years. The first Irish Buddhists appeared in the political and cultural crisis of the nineteenth century, in Dublin and the rural West, but also in Burma and Japan. Over the next hundred years, Buddhism competed with esoteric movements to become the alternative to mainstream religion. Since the 1960s, Buddhism has exploded to become Ireland's third-largest religion. Buddhism and Ireland is the first history of its subject, a rich and exciting story of extraordinary individuals and the journey of ideas across Europe and Asia.