Download or read book Archaeology and Buddhism in South Asia written by Himanshu Prabha Ray and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-08-31 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the archaeological trajectory of the expansion of Buddhism and its regional variations in South Asia. Focusing on the multireligious context of the subcontinent in the first millennium BCE, the volume breaks from conventional studies that pose Buddhism as a counter to the Vedic tradition to understanding the religion more integrally in terms of dhamma (teachings of the Buddha), dāna (practice of cultivating generosity) and the engagement with the written word. The work underlines that relic and image worship were important features in the spread of Buddhism in the region and were instrumental in bringing the monastics and the laity together. Further, the author examines the significance of the histories of monastic complexes (viharas, stupas, caityas) and also religious travel and pilgrimage that provided connections across the subcontinent and the seas. An interdisciplinary study, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars in South Asian studies, religion, especially Buddhist studies, history and archaeology.
Download or read book Archaeology of Religion in South Asia written by Birendra Nath Prasad and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-06-17 with total page 475 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the religious landscape of early medieval (c. AD 600-1200) Bihar and Bengal, poly-religiosity was generally the norm than an exception, which entailed the evolution of complex patterns of inter-religious equations. Buddhism, Brahmanism and Jainism not only coexisted but also competed for social patronage, forcing them to enter into complex interactions with social institutions and processes. Through an analysis of the published archaeological data, this work explores some aspects of the social history of Buddhist, Brahmanical and Jaina temples and shrines, and Buddhist stūpas and monasteries in early medieval Bihar and Bengal. This archaeological history of religions questions many ‘established’ textual reconstructions, and enriches our understanding of the complex issue of the decline of Buddhism in this area. Please note: Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the Hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.
Download or read book The Archaeology of South Asia written by Robin Coningham and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-08-31 with total page 557 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a critical synthesis of the archaeology of South Asia from the Neolithic period (c.6500 BCE), when domestication began, to the spread of Buddhism accompanying the Mauryan Emperor Asoka's reign (third century BCE). The authors examine the growth and character of the Indus civilisation, with its town planning, sophisticated drainage systems, vast cities and international trade. They also consider the strong cultural links between the Indus civilisation and the second, later period of South Asian urbanism which began in the first millennium BCE and developed through the early first millennium CE. In addition to examining the evidence for emerging urban complexity, this book gives equal weight to interactions between rural and urban communities across South Asia and considers the critical roles played by rural areas in social and economic development. The authors explore how narratives of continuity and transformation have been formulated in analyses of South Asia's Prehistoric and Early Historic archaeological record.
Download or read book Women and Monastic Buddhism in Early South Asia written by Garima Kaushik and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-02-12 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book uses gender as a framework to offer unique insights into the socio-cultural foundations of Buddhism. Moving away from dominant discourses that discuss women as a single monolithic, homogenous category—thus rendering them invisible within the broader religious discourse—this monograph examines their sustained role in the larger context of South Asian Buddhism and reaffirms their agency. It highlights the multiple roles played by women as patrons, practitioners, lay and monastic members, etc. within Buddhism. The volume also investigates the individual experiences of the members, and their equations and relationships at different levels—with the Samgha at large, with their own respective Bhikşu or Bhikşunī Sangha, with the laity, and with members of the same gender (both lay and monastic). It rereads, reconfigures and reassesses historical data in order to arrive at a new understanding of Buddhism and the social matrix within which it developed and flourished. Bringing together archaeological, epigraphic, art historical, literary as well as ethnographic data, this volume will be of interest to researchers and scholars of Buddhism, gender studies, ancient Indian history, religion, and South Asian studies.
Download or read book The Archaeology of Early Historic South Asia written by Frank Raymond Allchin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1995-09-07 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of the cities and states of South Asia between c.800BC and AD 250.
Download or read book Buddhist Learning in South Asia written by Pintu Kumar and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2018-05-07 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This interdisciplinary study is the first book to provide a complete survey of Śrī Nālandā Mahāvihāra from the perspective of its educational curricula as well as its religious influence. It provides detailed descriptions of the origin, growth, management, and academic and cultural life of Nālandā, with particular attention to its pedagogy, curriculum, teachers, and students. It also presents an alternative interpretation of nationalist and popular notions about Śrī Nālandā as an international university and proves that it was, at its core, a Buddhist monastery and an institution of Buddhist learning focused on the study and promotion of Buddhism.
Download or read book Buddhist Dynamics in Premodern and Early Modern Southeast Asia written by D Christian Lammerts and published by Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. This book was released on 2015-07-13 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study of historical Buddhism in premodern and early modern Southeast Asia stands at an exciting and transformative juncture. Interdisciplinary scholarship is marked by a commitment to the careful examination of local and vernacular expressions of Buddhist culture as well as to reconsiderations of long-standing questions concerning the diffusion of and relationships among varied texts, forms of representation, and religious identities, ideas, and practices. The twelve essays in this collection, written by leading scholars in Buddhist Studies and Southeast Asian history, epigraphy, and archaeology, comprise the latest research in the field to deal with the dynamics of mainland and (pen)insular Buddhism between the sixth and nineteenth centuries C.E. Drawing on new manuscript sources, inscriptions, and archaeological data, they investigate the intellectual, ritual, institutional, sociopolitical, aesthetic, and literary diversity of local Buddhisms, and explore their connected histories and contributions to the production of intraregional and transregional Buddhist geographies.
Download or read book Hindu Buddhist Architecture in Southeast Asia written by Daigorō Chihara and published by BRILL. This book was released on 1996 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book deals with the technical, artistic and architectural aspects of the Hindu and Buddhist monuments from the beginning until today in Southeast Asia.
Download or read book Archaeology of Early Buddhism written by Lars Fogelin and published by AltaMira Press. This book was released on 2006-02-09 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do archaeologists explore the various dimensions of religion? Lars Fogelin uses archaeological work at Thotlakonda in Southern India as his lens in a broader examination of Buddhist monastic life. He discovers the tension between the desired isolation of the monastery and the mutual engagement with neighbors in the Early Historic Period. He also sketches how religious architectural design and use of landscape helped to shaped these relationships. Drawing on historical accounts, religious documents, and inscriptions, as well as results of his systematic archaeological survey, Fogelin is able to shed new light on the ritual and material workings of Early Buddhism in this region, and shows how archaeology can contribute to our understanding of religious practice.
Download or read book Buddhist Stupas in South Asia written by Jason Hawkes and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing together the latest research on stupas in South Asia, this volume includes new conceptual paradigms as well as new approaches to monuments, sculpture, material culture, and textual interpretation. The collection utilizes archaeological, art historical and epigraphic evidence in broader cultural and historical frameworks to enrich our understanding, not only of stupa monuments but also ancient Buddhism and the wider history to which they pertain.
Download or read book Power Presence and Space written by Henry Albery and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2020-07-26 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Patterns of ritual power, presence, and space are fundamentally connected to, and mirror, the societal and political power structures in which they are enacted. This book explores these connections in South Asia from the early Common Era until the present day. The essays in the volume examine a wide range of themes, including a genealogy of ideas concerning Vedic rituals in European thought; Buddhist donative rituals of Gandhara and Andhra Pradesh in the early Common Era; land endowments, festivals, and temple establishments in medieval Tamil Nadu and Karnataka; Mughal court rituals of the Mughal Empire; and contemporary ritual complexes on the Nilgiri Plateau. This volume argues for the need to redress a historical neglect in identifying and theorising ritual and religion in material contexts within archaeology. Further, it challenges existing theoretical and methodological forms of documentation to propose new ways of understanding rituals in history. This volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of South Asian history, religion, archaeology, and historical geography.
Download or read book Materializing Southeast Asia s Past written by Veronique Degroot and published by NUS Press. This book was released on 2013-05-01 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The latest historical and anthropological archaeology, epigraphy, and art history on Southeast Asia, these articles offer new understandings of classical Hindu and Buddhist cultures of Southeast Asia and their relationship to the regionÍs medieval cultures. The articles are presented under four headings: Art, religion and politics (Buddhist monuments in Java and Cambodia); Southeast Asian transformations (cultural exchange with South Asia); Technology (workmanship in art and material culture); and Southeast Asia between past and present.
Download or read book Early Theravadin Cambodia written by Ashley Thompson and published by National University of Singapore Press. This book was released on 2022-02-28 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A crucial reference for historians of Southeast Asia and those with a serious interest in the Buddhism and Buddhist art of Southeast Asia. What explains the spread of Theravada Buddhism? And how is it entangled with the identity shifts that over the next four hundred years gave rise to the Buddhist state now called Cambodia? Early Theravadin Cambodia sheds light on one of the outstanding questions of Southeast Asian history: the nature and timing of major cultural and political shifts in the territory that was to become Cambodia, starting in the 13th century. This important collection challenges the conventional picture of Theravada as taking root in the void left by the collapse of Angkor and its Hindu-Buddhist power structure. Written by a diverse group of scholars from Cambodia, Thailand, the United States, France, Australia, and Japan, this volume is a sustained, collaborative discussion of evidence from art and archaeology, and how it relates to questions of Buddhist history, regional exchange networks, and ethnopolitical identities. Accessibly written and vividly illustrated, the book will be a crucial reference for historians of Southeast Asia and scholars of Buddhism.
Download or read book Buddhism and Gandhara written by Himanshu Prabha Ray and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-12-01 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gandhara is a name central to Buddhist heritage and iconography. It is the ancient name of a region in present-day Pakistan, bounded on the west by the Hindu Kush mountain range and to the north by the foothills of the Himalayas. ‘Gandhara’ is also the term given to this region’s sculptural and architectural features between the first and sixth centuries CE. This book re-examines the archaeological material excavated in the region in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and traces the link between archaeological work, histories of museum collections and related interpretations by art historians. The essays in the volume underscore the diverse cultural traditions of Gandhara – from a variety of sources and perspectives on language, ethnicity and material culture (including classical accounts, Chinese writings, coins and Sanskrit epics) – as well as interrogate the grand narrative of Hellenism of which Gandhara has been a part. The book explores the making of collections of what came to be described as Gandhara art and reviews the Buddhist artistic tradition through notions of mobility and dynamic networks of transmission. Wide ranging and rigorous, this volume will appeal to scholars and researchers of early South Asian history, archaeology, religion (especially Buddhist studies), art history and museums.
Download or read book Sacred Traces written by Janice Leoshko and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his novel Kim, in which a Tibetan pilgrim seeks to visit important Buddhist sites in India, Rudyard Kipling reveals the nineteenth-century fascination with the discovery of the importance of Buddhism in India's past. Janice Leoshko, a scholar of South Asian Buddhist art uses Kipling's account and those of other western writers to offer new insight into the priorities underlying nineteenth-century studies of Buddhist art in India. In the absence of written records, the first explorations of Buddhist sites were often guided by accounts of Chinese pilgrims. They had journeyed to India more than a thousand years earlier in search of sacred traces of the Buddha, the places where he lived, obtained enlightenment, taught and finally passed into nirvana. The British explorers, however, had other interests besides the religion itself. They were motivated by concerns tied to the growing British control of the subcontinent. Building on earlier interventions, Janice Leoshko examines this history of nineteenth-century exploration in order to illuminate how early concerns shaped the way Buddhist art has been studied in the West and presented in its museums.
Download or read book The Ascendancy of Therav da Buddhism in Southeast Asia written by Praphōt ʻAtsawawirunhakān and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This wide-ranging account of early Buddhism in Southeast Asia overthrows dominant theories among both Western and Asian Scholars. The author argues that Pali-based Buddhism was brought from India and Sri Lanka by merchants, monks, and pilgrims by the fourth century. Several schools flourished alongside Brahmanism, Mahayanism, and local spirit beliefs--in coexistence rather than conflict. There was no "conversion" to Theravada in the eleventh century as the school was already well established. Prapod draws on a broad range of source material including inscriptions, texts, archaeology, iconography, architecture, and anthropology from India, Sri Lanka, China, and the region itself. He highlights the lived tradition of religious practice rather than scriptural sources.
Download or read book Lost Kingdoms Hindu Buddhist Sculpture of Early Southeast Asia written by Guy, John and published by Metropolitan Museum of Art. This book was released on 2014-04-07 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fresh and exciting exploration of Southeast Asian history from the 5th to 9th century, seen through the lens of the region's sculpture