Theravāda Buddhism and the British Encounter

Theravāda Buddhism and the British Encounter PDF Author: Elizabeth June Harris
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
This book explores the British encounter with Buddhism in nineteenth century Sri Lanka. Its central concern is the way Buddhism was represented and constructed by the British scholars, officials, missionaries, travelers and religious seekers who traveled to the country. The book traces three main historical phases in the encounter from 1796 to 1900 and gives a sensitive and nuanced exegesis of the cultural and political influences that shaped the early British understanding of Buddhism. This work fills a significant gap in scholarship on Theravāda Buddhism in Sri Lanka and its subsequent transmission to the West. Of particular significance is its coverage of how nineteenth century missionary writings on Buddhism affected both the development of Protestant Buddhism and Christian-Buddhist relations in the twentieth century. Through its exploration of original materials connected with several important pioneer writers on Buddhism, it expands the readers' understanding of inter-religious and inter-cultural relations under colonialism. --from back cover.

Theravāda Buddhism and the British Encounter

Theravāda Buddhism and the British Encounter PDF Author: Elizabeth June Harris
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 296

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book explores the British encounter with Buddhism in nineteenth century Sri Lanka. Its central concern is the way Buddhism was represented and constructed by the British scholars, officials, missionaries, travelers and religious seekers who traveled to the country. The book traces three main historical phases in the encounter from 1796 to 1900 and gives a sensitive and nuanced exegesis of the cultural and political influences that shaped the early British understanding of Buddhism. This work fills a significant gap in scholarship on Theravāda Buddhism in Sri Lanka and its subsequent transmission to the West. Of particular significance is its coverage of how nineteenth century missionary writings on Buddhism affected both the development of Protestant Buddhism and Christian-Buddhist relations in the twentieth century. Through its exploration of original materials connected with several important pioneer writers on Buddhism, it expands the readers' understanding of inter-religious and inter-cultural relations under colonialism. --from back cover.

Encountering Buddhism in Twentieth-Century British and American Literature

Encountering Buddhism in Twentieth-Century British and American Literature PDF Author: Lawrence Normand
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441101918
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
Encountering Buddhism in Twentieth-Century British and American Literature explores the ways in which 20th-century literature has been influenced by Buddhism, and has been, in turn, a major factor in bringing about Buddhism's increasing spread and influence in the West. Focussing on Britain and the United States, Buddhism's influence on a range of key literary texts will be examined in the context of those societies' evolving modernity. Writers discussed include T. S. Eliot, Hermann Hesse, Virginia Woolf, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, J. D. Salinger, Iris Murdoch, Maxine Hong Kingston. This book brings together for the first time a series of context-rich interpretations that demonstrate the importance of literature in this ongoing cultural change in Britain and the United States.

British Buddhism

British Buddhism PDF Author: Robert Bluck
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134158165
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 435

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Book Description
British Buddhism presents a useful insight into contemporary British Buddhist practice. It provides a survey of the seven largest Buddhist traditions in the United Kingdom, including the Forest Sangha (Theravada) and the Samatha Trust (Theravada), the Serene Reflection Meditation tradition (Soto Zen) and Soka Gakkai (both originally Japanese), the Tibetan Karma Kagyu and New Kadampa traditions and Friends of the Western Buddhist Order. Based on extensive fieldwork, this fascinating book determines how and to what extent British Buddhist groups are changing from their Asian roots, and whether any forms of British Buddhism are beginning to emerge. Despite the popularity of Buddhism in Britain, there has so far been no study documenting the full range of teachings and practice. This is an original study that fills this gap and serves as an important reference point for further studies in this increasingly popular field.

Theravāda Buddhist Encounters with Modernity

Theravāda Buddhist Encounters with Modernity PDF Author: Juliane Schober
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317268520
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Although recent scholarship has shown that the term ‘Theravāda’ in the familiar modern sense is a nineteenth- and twentieth-century construct, it is now used to refer to the more than 150 million people around the world who practice that form of Buddhism. Buddhist practices such as meditation, amulets, and merit making rituals have always been inseparable from the social formations that give rise to them, their authorizing discourses and the hegemonic relations they create. This book is composed of chapters written by established scholars in Buddhist studies who represent diverse disciplinary approaches from art history, religious studies, history and ethnography. It explores the historical forces, both external to and within the tradition of Theravāda Buddhism and discusses how modern forms of Buddhist practice have emerged in South and Southeast Asia, in case studies from Nepal to Sri Lanka, Burma, Cambodia and Southwest China. Specific studies contextualize general trends and draw on practices, institutions, and communities that have been identified with this civilizational tradition throughout its extensive history and across a highly diverse cultural geography. This book foreground diverse responses among Theravādins to the encroaching challenges of modern life ways, communications, and political organizations, and will be of interest to scholars of Asian Religion, Buddhism and South and Southeast Asian Studies.

Cultural Encounters and Homoeroticism in Sri Lanka

Cultural Encounters and Homoeroticism in Sri Lanka PDF Author: Robert Aldrich
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317805291
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
Ceylon, or Sri Lanka, was long known to travellers for its luxuriant landscapes, colourful temples and friendly inhabitants – the island once named Serendip. This book explores the sojourns of gay visitors from the late 1800s to the modern day, providing a history of homosexuality, travel and cultural encounter on the island. The book offers profiles of major figures in Sri Lankan culture and of homosexual visitors, both famous and infamous, to the island. It discusses the experiences of sojourners including the Victorian social reformer Edward Carpenter and the German naturalist Ernst Haeckel, such British and American writers as Paul Bowles and Arthur C. Clarke, and the Australian painter Donald Friend. It also pays particular attention to Lionel Wendt, one of the most important modernist photographers outside Europe. For these figures, an erotic appreciation of young men whom they encountered mixed with interest in Sinhalese art, Buddhist and Hindu spirituality, and the flora and fauna of the island. Their experiences influenced modern writing, art and dance. Cultural influences moved in both directions, however, and Sri Lankans also found inspiration from abroad. The book argues that homosexuals played a major role in the transmission of cultural influences from Sri Lanka to the rest of the world, and from the wider world to this Indian Ocean island. Providing an original analysis of gay cultures in Sri Lanka from Victorian encounters to the present day, this book is the first study of Sri Lanka as a site of gay travel. An excellent study of trans-national cultural exchange, sexuality and the relationships between them, it will be of interest to academics in the field of Asian Studies, Colonial History and Gay and Queer Studies.

The Irish Buddhist

The Irish Buddhist PDF Author: Alicia Turner
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190073101
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
The Irish Buddhist is the biography of an extraordinary Irish emigrant, sailor, and migrant worker who became a Buddhist monk and anti-colonial activist in early twentieth-century Asia. Born in Dublin in the 1850s, U Dhammaloka energetically challenged the values and power of the British Empire and scandalized the colonial establishment of the 1900s. He rallied Buddhists across Asia, set up schools, and argued down Christian missionaries--often using western atheist arguments. He was tried for sedition, tracked by police and intelligence services, and died at least twice. His story illuminates the forgotten margins and interstices of imperial power, the complexities of class, ethnicity and religious belonging in colonial Asia, and the fluidity of identity in the high Victorian period. Too often, the story of the pan-Asian Buddhist revival movement and Buddhism's remaking as a world religion has been told 'from above,' highlighting scholarly writers, middle-class reformers and ecclesiastical hierarchies. By turns fraught, hilarious, pioneering, and improbable, Dhammaloka's adventures 'from below' highlight the changing and contested meanings of Buddhism in colonial Asia. Through his story, authors Alicia Turner, Brian Bocking, and Laurence Cox offer a window into the worlds of ethnic minorities and diasporas, transnational networks, poor whites, and social movements. Dhammaloka's dramatic life rewrites the previously accepted story of how Buddhism became a modern global religion.

Christian Approaches to Other Faiths

Christian Approaches to Other Faiths PDF Author: Paul Hedges
Publisher: Hymns Ancient and Modern Ltd
ISBN: 0334041155
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
A reader designed to work on courses concerned with World Religions, Interfaith Dialogue and Interfaith Encounter.

Islanded

Islanded PDF Author: Sujit Sivasundaram
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022603836X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 381

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Book Description
How did the British come to conquer South Asia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? Answers to this question usually start in northern India, neglecting the dramatic events that marked Britain’s contemporaneous subjugation of the island of Sri Lanka. In Islanded, Sujit Sivasundaram reconsiders the arrival of British rule in South Asia as a dynamic and unfinished process of territorialization and state building, revealing that the British colonial project was framed by the island’s traditions and maritime placement and built in part on the model they provided. Using palm-leaf manuscripts from Sri Lanka to read the official colonial archive, Sivasundaram tells the story of two sets of islanders in combat and collaboration. He explores how the British organized the process of “islanding”: they aimed to create a separable unit of colonial governance and trade in keeping with conceptions of ethnology, culture, and geography. But rather than serving as a radical rupture, he reveals, islanding recycled traditions the British learned from Kandy, a kingdom in the Sri Lankan highlands whose customs—from strategies of war to views of nature—fascinated the British. Picking up a range of unusual themes, from migration, orientalism, and ethnography to botany, medicine, and education, Islanded is an engaging retelling of the advent of British rule.

Moral Theory in Santideva's Siksasamuccaya

Moral Theory in Santideva's Siksasamuccaya PDF Author: Barbra R. Clayton
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134278292
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
This book analyses the moral theory of the seventh century Indian Mahayana master, Santideva.

Buddhist Manuscript Cultures

Buddhist Manuscript Cultures PDF Author: Stephen C. Berkwitz
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134002416
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
Buddhist Manuscript Cultures explores how religious and cultural practices in premodern Asia were shaped by literary and artistic traditions as well as by Buddhist material culture. This study of Buddhist texts focuses on the significance of their material forms rather than their doctrinal contents, and examines how and why they were made. Collectively, the book offers cross-cultural and comparative insights into the transmission of Buddhist knowledge and the use of texts and images as ritual objects in the artistic and aesthetic traditions of Buddhist cultures. Drawing on case studies from India, Gandhara, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Mongolia, China and Nepal, the chapters included investigate the range of interests and values associated with producing and using written texts, and the roles manuscripts and images play in the transmission of Buddhist texts and in fostering devotion among Buddhist communities. Contributions are by reputed scholars in Buddhist Studies and represent diverse disciplinary approaches from religious studies, art history, anthropology, and history. This book will be of interest to scholars and students working in these fields.