Author: Richard M. Jaffe
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022662823X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 327
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Book Description
Though fascinated with the land of their tradition’s birth, virtually no Japanese Buddhists visited the Indian subcontinent before the nineteenth century. In the richly illustrated Seeking Śākyamuni, Richard M. Jaffe reveals the experiences of the first Japanese Buddhists who traveled to South Asia in search of Buddhist knowledge beginning in 1873. Analyzing the impact of these voyages on Japanese conceptions of Buddhism, he argues that South Asia developed into a pivotal nexus for the development of twentieth-century Japanese Buddhism. Jaffe shows that Japan’s growing economic ties to the subcontinent following World War I fostered even more Japanese pilgrimage and study at Buddhism’s foundational sites. Tracking the Japanese travelers who returned home, as well as South Asians who visited Japan, Jaffe describes how the resulting flows of knowledge, personal connections, linguistic expertise, and material artifacts of South and Southeast Asian Buddhism instantiated the growing popular consciousness of Buddhism as a pan-Asian tradition—in the heart of Japan.
Author: Richard M. Jaffe
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226391159
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 327
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Book Description
Though fascinated with the land of their tradition’s birth, virtually no Japanese Buddhists visited the Indian subcontinent before the nineteenth century. In the richly illustrated Seeking Śākyamuni, Richard M. Jaffe reveals the experiences of the first Japanese Buddhists who traveled to South Asia in search of Buddhist knowledge beginning in 1873. Analyzing the impact of these voyages on Japanese conceptions of Buddhism, he argues that South Asia developed into a pivotal nexus for the development of twentieth-century Japanese Buddhism. Jaffe shows that Japan’s growing economic ties to the subcontinent following World War I fostered even more Japanese pilgrimage and study at Buddhism’s foundational sites. Tracking the Japanese travelers who returned home, as well as South Asians who visited Japan, Jaffe describes how the resulting flows of knowledge, personal connections, linguistic expertise, and material artifacts of South and Southeast Asian Buddhism instantiated the growing popular consciousness of Buddhism as a pan-Asian tradition—in the heart of Japan.
Author: Micah L. Auerback
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022628638X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 371
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Book Description
This study traces the modern transformation of Japanese Buddhist concepts across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, specifically the notion of the historical Buddhai.e., the prince of ancient Indian descent who abandoned his wealth and power to become an awakened being. Since Buddhism arrived in Japan in the sixth century, the historical figure of the Buddha has repeatedly disappeared from view and returned, always in different forms and to different ends. Micah Auerback offers the first account of the changing fortunes of the Japanese Buddha, following the course of early modern and modern producers and consumers of both high and low culture, who found novel uses for the Buddha s story outside the confines of the Buddhist establishment. Auerback challenges the still-prevalent concept that Buddhism had grown ossified and irrelevant during Japan s early modernity, and complicates the image of Japanese Buddhism as a sui generis tradition within the Asian Buddhist world. Auerback also links the later Buddhist tradition in Japan to its roots on the Continent, and argues for the relevance of attention to narrative and the historical imagination in the study of Buddhist Asia more broadly conceived. And, Auerback engages the question of secularization by examining the after life of the Buddha in the hagiographic literature, demonstrating that the late Japanese Buddha did not, as is widely thought, fade into a ghost of its former self, but rather underwent a complete transformation and reincarnation. The book thus joins the larger discussion of secularization in modernity beyond Buddhism, Japanese religions, and the Asian continent."
Author: Bhadrajee S. Hewage
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527584712
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 133
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Book Description
Our understanding that the Buddha emerged from the Middle Gangetic region of the Indian subcontinent has been largely unchallenged for the past 200 years. However, can we truly trust our existing knowledge regarding the geographical locations associated with early Buddhism? Could the Buddha’s origins, in fact, lie elsewhere? Tracking the general theory explaining the Buddha’s emergence from the Middle Ganges, this book explores the lesser-known story of colonial Sri Lanka’s connections to the wider nineteenth-century orientalist quest of placing the Buddha across the northern expanses of the subcontinent. By doing so, this book highlights the many flaws and inconsistencies that continue to inform our current understanding of the Buddha’s geographical origins and urges us to rethink the very foundation on which our knowledge of early Buddhism is based.
Author: Jørn Borup
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003817629
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 205
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Book Description
Decolonising the Study of Religion analyses historical and contemporary discussions in the study of religion and Buddhism and critically investigates representations, possibilities, and challenges of a decolonial approach, addressing the important question: who owns Buddhism? The monograph offers a case-based perspective with which to examine the general study of religion, where new challenges require reflection and prospects for new directions. It focuses on Buddhism, one religion which has been studied in the West for centuries. Building on postcolonial theories and supplemented with a critical analysis of identity and postsecular engagement, the book offers new possibilities and challenges to the study of religion. It critically investigates decolonisation in the study of religion, subscribing to a third way between ‘objectivist’ and ‘subjectivist’ positions. Analysing the postcolonial and decolonial critique of the study of religion, with a particular focus on Buddhist studies in the West and in Japan, this book will be of interest to researchers in the field of Religious Studies, Buddhism, Japanese religions, anthropology, Asian Studies and those interested in religion and decolonisation.
Author: Joseph McQuade
Publisher: Hurst Publishers
ISBN: 1805262467
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 406
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Book Description
In 1912, Rash Behari Bose made his dramatic entrance into India's anti-colonial freedom movement when he orchestrated a bomb attack against the British Viceroy during a public procession in Delhi. Forced to flee his homeland, Bose settled in Japan, becoming the most influential Indian in Tokyo and earning the affectionate title 'Sensei' among Japanese youth, military personnel and far-right ultranationalists. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Bose remained a perpetual thorn in the side of the British Empire as he built and maintained a global network of anti-colonialists, radicals, smugglers and intellectuals. After siding with Imperial Japan against his British adversaries during the Second World War, Bose died in 1945--just two years before India gained its independence. A complex, controversial and often contradictory figure, Bose has been described as a committed democrat, an authoritarian, an advocate of religious harmony, a Hindu chauvinist, an anti-Communist, a political pragmatist, an idealist, a Japanese collaborator, an anti-racist, a cultural conservative, a Pan-Asianist, an Indian nationalist, and much more besides. Drawing on extensive archival research in India, Japan and the UK, this refreshing new biography brings to life the largely forgotten story of one of twentieth-century Asia's most daring revolutionaries.
Author: Thomas A. Borchert
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824866525
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 233
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Book Description
Most studies of Buddhist communities tend to be limited to villages, individual temple communities, or a single national community. Buddhist monastics, however, cross a number of these different framings: They are part of local communities, are governed through national legal frameworks, and participate in both national and transnational Buddhist networks. Educating Monks makes visible the ways Buddhist communities are shaped by all of the above—collectively and often simultaneously. Educating Monks examines a minority Buddhist community in Sipsongpannā, a region located on China’s southwest border with Myanmar and Laos. Its people, the Dai-lue, are “double minorities”: They are recognized by the Chinese state as part of a minority group, and they practice Theravāda Buddhism, a minority form within China, where Mahāyāna Buddhism is the norm. Theravāda has long been the primary training ground for Dai-lue men, and since the return of Buddhism to the area in the years following Mao Zedong’s death, the Dai-lue have put many of their resources into providing monastic education for their sons. However, the author’s analysis of institutional organization within Sipsongpannā, the governance of religion there, and the movements of monks (revealing the “ethnoscapes” that the monks of Sipsongpannā participate in) points to educational contexts that depend not just on local villagers, but also resources from the local (Communist) government and aid form Chinese Mahāyāna monks and Theravāda monks from Thailand and Myanmar. While the Dai-lue monks draw on these various resources for the development of the sangha, they do not share the same agenda and must continually engage in a careful political dance between villagers who want to revive traditional forms of Buddhism, a Chinese state that is at best indifferent to the continuation of Buddhism, and transnational monks that want to import their own modern forms of Buddhism into the region. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with Dai-lue monks in China, Thailand, and Singapore, this ambitious and sophisticated study will find a ready audience among students and scholars of the anthropology of Buddhism, and religion, education, and transnationalism in Southeast and East Asia.
Author: Xavier Guillaume
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136925961
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 189
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Book Description
This book examines the issue of collective political identity formation and expands the concept of international relations beyond the notion of states. It develops a dialogical theory of international relations and illustrates with a case study on Japan.
Author: Sucheta Mazumdar
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135211973
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 501
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Book Description
This book uses a historical and theoretical focus to examine the key of issues of the Enlightenment, Orientalism, concepts of identity and difference, and the contours of different modernities in relation to both local and global shaping forces, including the spread of capitalism. The contributors present eight in-depth studies and a substantial theoretical introduction, utilizing primary and secondary sources in Turkish, Farsi, Chinese, not to mention English, French and German in the effort to engage materials and cultural perspectives from diverse regions. It provides a critical attempt to think through the potentialities and limitations of area-studies and ‘civilizational’ approaches to the production of knowledge about the modern world, and the often obscured relationship between the fragment and the whole, or the particular and universal. The book is an intervention in one of the most fundamental debates confronting the social science and humanities, namely how to understand global and local historical processes as interconnected developments affecting human actors. From Orientalism to Postcolonialism will be of interest to academics and postgraduate students in Cultural and Postcolonial Studies and Asian studies and Middle Eastern studies.
Author: Alexandra Kent
Publisher: NIAS Press
ISBN: 8776940373
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 346
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Book Description
Much attention has been given to the killing fields' of Cambodia, Far less to how the country can recover and heal itself after such an experience. Crucial to this process has been the formation of a new moral order in Cambodia and hence the revival of religion in the country. Certainly the regeneration of the ritual life of a community may offer ways for people to formulate and relate to their collective stories through symbolism that recalls a shared cultural origin. However, this process requires that the representatives of religion and of morality do have credibility and moral authority, something that may be called into question by their past and present involvement in hegemonic political and secular affairs.
