Download or read book The Buddha s Tooth written by John S. Strong and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-10-22 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Part One: The Portuguese and the Tooth Relic -- Chapter One: The Tale of the Portuguese Tooth and Its Sources -- Chapter Two: Where the Tooth Was Found: Traditions about the Location of the Relic in Sri -- Lanka -- Chapter Three: Whose Tooth Was It? Traditions about the Identity of the Relic -- Chapter Four: The Trial of the Tooth -- Chapter Five: The Destruction of the Tooth -- Conspectus of Part One: The Storical Evolution of the Tales of the Portuguese Tooth -- Part Two: The British and the Tooth Relic -- Chapter Six: The Cosmopolitan Tooth: The Relic in Kandy before the British Became Aware of -- It -- Chapter Seven: The British Takeover of 1815 and the Kandyan Convention -- Chapter Eight: The Relic Returns: The Tooth and Its Properties Restored to the Temple -- Chapter Nine: The Relic Lost and Recaptured: The Tooth and the Rebellion of 1817- -- Chapter Ten: The Relic Disestablished: Missionary Oppositions to the Tooth -- Chapter Eleven: Showings of the Tooth: The Story of the King of Siam's Visit (1897) -- Chapter Twelve: Showings of the Tooth: The Story of Queen Elizabeth's Shoes (1954).

Download or read book Relics of the Buddha written by John S. Strong and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-05 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Buddhism is popularly seen as a religion stressing the truth of impermanence. How, then, to account for the long-standing veneration, in Asian Buddhist communities, of bone fragments, hair, teeth, and other bodily bits said to come from the historic Buddha? Early European and American scholars of religion, influenced by a characteristic Protestant bias against relic worship, declared such practices to be superstitious and fraudulent, and far from the true essence of Buddhism. John Strong's book, by contrast, argues that relic veneration has played a serious and integral role in Buddhist traditions in South and Southeast Asia-and that it is in no way foreign to Buddhism. The book is structured around the life story of the Buddha, starting with traditions about relics of previous buddhas and relics from the past lives of the Buddha Sakyamuni. It then considers the death of the Buddha, the collection of his bodily relics after his cremation, and stories of their spread to different parts of Asia. The book ends with a consideration of the legend of the future parinirvana (extinction) of the relics prior to the advent of the next Buddha, Maitreya. Throughout, the author does not hesitate to explore the many versions of these legends and to relate them to their ritual, doctrinal, artistic, and social contexts.

Download or read book Sacred Island written by Shravasti Dhammika and published by Buddhist Publication Society. This book was released on 2008 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This travel and pilgrimage guidebook is meant primarily for Buddhists or those interested in Buddhism who wish to explore Sri Lanka’s rich cultural and spiritual heritage. Drawing on his extensive knowledge of the island, the author weaves together archaeological findings, art history and the stories and legends of the Buddhist tradition to bring to life thirty-three places of religious significance.

Download or read book The Buddha s Tooth written by John S. Strong and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-10-22 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John S. Strong unravels the storm of influences shaping the received narratives of two iconic sacred objects. Bodily relics such as hairs, teeth, fingernails, pieces of bone—supposedly from the Buddha himself—have long served as objects of veneration for many Buddhists. Unsurprisingly, when Western colonial powers subjugated populations in South Asia, they used, manipulated, redefined, and even destroyed these objects to exert control. In The Buddha’s Tooth, John S. Strong examines Western stories, from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, surrounding two significant Sri Lankan sacred objects to illuminate and concretize colonial attitudes toward Asian religions. First, he analyzes a tale about the Portuguese capture and public destruction, in the mid-sixteenth century, of a tooth later identified as a relic of the Buddha. Second, he switches gears to look at the nineteenth-century saga of British dealings with another tooth relic of the Buddha—the famous Daḷadā enshrined in a temple in Kandy—from 1815, when it was taken over by English forces, to 1954, when it was visited by Queen Elizabeth II. As Strong reveals, the stories of both the Portuguese tooth and the Kandyan tooth reflect nascent and developing Western understandings of Buddhism, realizations of the cosmopolitan nature of the tooth, and tensions between secular and religious interests.

Download or read book The Teeth and Claws of the Buddha written by Mikael S. Adolphson and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2007-02-28 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Japan’s monastic warriors have fared poorly in comparison to the samurai, both in terms of historical reputation and representations in popular culture. Often maligned and criticized for their involvement in politics and other secular matters, they have been seen as figures separate from the larger military class. However, as Mikael Adolphson reveals in his comprehensive and authoritative examination of the social origins of the monastic forces, political conditions, and warfare practices of the Heian (794–1185) and Kamakura (1185–1333) eras, these "monk-warriors"(sôhei) were in reality inseparable from the warrior class. Their negative image, Adolphson argues, is a construct that grew out of artistic sources critical of the established temples from the fourteenth century on. In deconstructing the sôhei image and looking for clues as to the characteristics, role, and meaning of the monastic forces, The Teeth and Claws of the Buddha highlights the importance of historical circumstances; it also points to the fallacies of allowing later, especially modern, notions of religion to exert undue influence on interpretations of the past. It further suggests that, rather than constituting a separate category of violence, religious violence needs to be understood in its political, social, military, and ideological contexts.

Download or read book The Dathavansa written by and published by Literary Licensing, LLC. This book was released on 2014-03-30 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Is A New Release Of The Original 1874 Edition.

Download or read book Buddha s Office written by Dan Zigmond and published by Running Press Adult. This book was released on 2019-12-03 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can enlightenment be found at the office? From the co-author of Buddha's Diet comes another book that shows how the wisdom of Buddha can apply to our modern lives -- this time exploring how Buddha's guidance can help us navigate the perils of work life. Without setting foot in an office, Buddha knew that helping people work right was essential to helping them find their path to awakening. Now more than ever, we need Buddha's guidance. Too many of us are working long hours, dealing with difficult bosses, high-maintenance coworkers, and non-stop stress. We need someone to help remind us that there is a better way. With Buddha's wisdom at the core of every chapter, Buddha's Office will help you learn how to stop taking shortcuts and pay more attention, care for yourself and others, deal with distractions, and incorporate Buddha's ageless instructions into our modern working life. It's time to wake up and start working in a more enlightened way. One that is right for you, right for our health, right for your sanity, and right for the world.

Download or read book Strange Tales of an Oriental Idol written by Donald S. Lopez Jr. and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-11-10 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We tend to think that the Buddha has always been seen as the compassionate sage admired around the world today, but until the nineteenth century, Europeans often regarded him as a nefarious figure, an idol worshipped by the pagans of the Orient. Donald S. Lopez Jr. offers here a rich sourcebook of European fantasies about the Buddha drawn from the works of dozens of authors over fifteen hundred years, including Clement of Alexandria, Marco Polo, St. Francis Xavier, Voltaire, and Sir William Jones. Featuring writings by soldiers, adventurers, merchants, missionaries, theologians, and colonial officers, this volume contains a wide range of portraits of the Buddha. The descriptions are rarely flattering, as all manner of reports—some accurate, some inaccurate, and some garbled—came to circulate among European savants and eccentrics, many of whom were famous in their day but are long forgotten in ours. Taken together, these accounts present a fascinating picture, not only of the Buddha as he was understood and misunderstood for centuries, but also of his portrayers.

Download or read book Architects of Buddhist Leisure written by Justin Thomas McDaniel and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2017-04-01 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Buddhism, often described as an austere religion that condemns desire, promotes denial, and idealizes the contemplative life, actually has a thriving leisure culture in Asia. Creative religious improvisations designed by Buddhists have been produced both within and outside of monasteries across the region—in Nepal, Japan, Korea, Macau, Hong Kong, Singapore, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam. Justin McDaniel looks at the growth of Asia’s culture of Buddhist leisure—what he calls “socially disengaged Buddhism”—through a study of architects responsible for monuments, museums, amusement parks, and other sites. In conversation with noted theorists of material and visual culture and anthropologists of art, McDaniel argues that such sites highlight the importance of public, leisure, and spectacle culture from a Buddhist perspective and illustrate how “secular” and “religious,” “public” and “private,” are in many ways false binaries. Moreover, places like Lek Wiriyaphan’s Sanctuary of Truth in Thailand, Suối Tiên Amusement Park in Saigon, and Shi Fa Zhao’s multilevel museum/ritual space/tea house in Singapore reflect a growing Buddhist ecumenism built through repetitive affective encounters instead of didactic sermons and sectarian developments. They present different Buddhist traditions, images, and aesthetic expressions as united but not uniform, collected but not concise: Together they form a gathering, not a movement. Despite the ingenuity of lay and ordained visionaries like Wiriyaphan and Zhao and their colleagues Kenzo Tange, Chan-soo Park, Tadao Ando, and others discussed in this book, creators of Buddhist leisure sites often face problems along the way. Parks and museums are complex adaptive systems that are changed and influenced by budgets, available materials, local and global economic conditions, and visitors. Architects must often compromise and settle at local optima, and no matter what they intend, their buildings will develop lives of their own. Provocative and theoretically innovative, Architects of Buddhist Leisure asks readers to question the very category of “religious” architecture. It challenges current methodological approaches in religious studies and speaks to a broad audience interested in modern art, architecture, religion, anthropology, and material culture. An electronic version of this book is freely available thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched, a collaborative initiative designed to make high-quality books open access for the public good. The open-access version of this book is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means that the work may be freely downloaded and shared for non-commercial purposes, provided credit is given to the author. Derivative works and commercial uses require permission from the publisher.

Download or read book Buddhisms written by John S. Strong and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2015-07-02 with total page 639 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Buddhism or Buddhisms? By the time they move on to Buddhism in Japan, many students who have studied its origins in India ask whether this is in fact the same religion, so different can they appear. In Buddhisms: An Introduction, Professor John S. Strong provides an overview of the Buddhist tradition in all its different forms around the world. Beginning at the modern day temples of Lumbini, where the Buddha was born, Strong takes us through the life of the Buddha and a study of Buddhist Doctrine, revealing how Buddhism has changed just as it has stayed the same. Finally, Strong examines the nature of Buddhist community life and its development today in the very different environments of Thailand, Japan, and Tibet. Enriched by the author’s own insights gathered over forty years, Buddhisms never loses sight of the personal experience amidst the wide-scope of its subject. Clear in its explanations, replete with tables and suggestions for further reading, this is an essential new work that makes original contributions to the study of this 2,500 year-old religion.

Download or read book Rescued from the Nation written by Steven Kemper and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-01-13 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anagarika Dharmapala is one of the most galvanizing figures in Sri Lanka’s recent turbulent history. He is widely regarded as the nationalist hero who saved the Sinhala people from cultural collapse and whose “protestant” reformation of Buddhism drove monks toward increased political involvement and ethnic confrontation. Yet as tied to Sri Lankan nationalism as Dharmapala is in popular memory, he spent the vast majority of his life abroad, engaging other concerns. In Rescued from the Nation, Steven Kemper reevaluates this important figure in the light of an unprecedented number of his writings, ones that paint a picture not of a nationalist zealot but of a spiritual seeker earnest in his pursuit of salvation. Drawing on huge stores of source materials—nearly one hundred diaries and notebooks—Kemper reconfigures Dharmapala as a world-renouncer first and a political activist second. Following Dharmapala on his travels between East Asia, South Asia, Europe, and the United States, he traces his lifelong project of creating a unified Buddhist world, recovering the place of the Buddha’s Enlightenment, and imitating the Buddha’s life course. The result is a needed corrective to Dharmapala’s embattled legacy, one that resituates Sri Lanka’s political awakening within the religious one that was Dharmapala’s life project.

Download or read book Buddha S Tooth written by U. C. Fate and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2015-05-06 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: U. C. Fate has only one little thing to do before he dies. That is, to kill God. The novel opens on the very day Fate has scheduled for this public execution. We are in Sri Lanka, at the Buddhist Temple of the Tooth during Esala Perahera (the sacred procession of the Tooth Relic.) But a not-so-simple twist of fate interrupts U. C. Fates plans. God easily escapes, while Fate himself is killed (and by a pious mob of monks, no less.) Yet, instead of experiencing death, our protoplasmic protagonist is rescued by an unasked-for Resurrection. U. C. Fate instantly Awakens; both with God Consciousness and a far better sense of humor. From here, all the way to the hereafter, U. C. Fate goes on a Magical Mythos Tour. He revisits thousands of years of religious history, each of his steps on this Inter and Intra-Religious journey are taken while wearing satiric slippers. Culture, chronology, and traditional time simply lose their fixed frames as Ancient Greeks, modern Rock n Rollers, Catholic Conquistas of Spain, and present day Mormons, argue with tribal American Indians over whose Truth is True. The Incarnated God Quetzalcatl is also here to fulfill Meso-American prophecy (i.e. The Second Coming only salsa style.) After this cosmic Love connection we come to the long awaited meeting with The Buddha. Buddhas Paradiso bridge is only open for Open-Ended-BeginningsThis means U. C. Fate must return Buddhas Tooth! He does so, thereby restoring every religion to their Rightful Rites.

Download or read book From Stone to Flesh written by Donald S. Lopez and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-04-12 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We have come to admire Buddhism for being profound but accessible, as much a lifestyle as a religion. The credit for creating Buddhism goes to the Buddha, a figure widely respected across the Western world for his philosophical insight, his teachings of nonviolence, and his practice of meditation. But who was this Buddha, and how did he become the Buddha we know and love today? Leading historian of Buddhism Donald S. Lopez Jr. tells the story of how various idols carved in stone—variously named Beddou, Codam, Xaca, and Fo—became the man of flesh and blood that we know simply as the Buddha. He reveals that the positive view of the Buddha in Europe and America is rather recent, originating a little more than a hundred and fifty years ago. For centuries, the Buddha was condemned by Western writers as the most dangerous idol of the Orient. He was a demon, the murderer of his mother, a purveyor of idolatry. Lopez provides an engaging history of depictions of the Buddha from classical accounts and medieval stories to the testimonies of European travelers, diplomats, soldiers, and missionaries. He shows that centuries of hostility toward the Buddha changed dramatically in the nineteenth century, when the teachings of the Buddha, having disappeared from India by the fourteenth century, were read by European scholars newly proficient in Asian languages. At the same time, the traditional view of the Buddha persisted in Asia, where he was revered as much for his supernatural powers as for his philosophical insights. From Stone to Flesh follows the twists and turns of these Eastern and Western notions of the Buddha, leading finally to his triumph as the founder of a world religion.

Download or read book The Gospel of Buddha written by Paul Carus and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2010-08-07 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Gospel of Buddha According to Old Records told by Paul Carus. Modeled on the New Testament and tells the story of Buddha through parables. It was an important tool in introducing Buddhism to the west and is used as a teaching tool by some Asian sects. Reproduction of 1894 Edition.

Download or read book Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha written by Daniel Ingram and published by Aeon Books. This book was released on 2020-01-20 with total page 715 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The very idea that the teachings can be mastered will arouse controversy within Buddhist circles. Even so, Ingram insists that enlightenment is an attainable goal, once our fanciful notions of it are stripped away, and we have learned to use meditation as a method for examining reality rather than an opportunity to wallow in self-absorbed mind-noise. Ingram sets out concisely the difference between concentration-based and insight (vipassana) meditation; he provides example practices; and most importantly he presents detailed maps of the states of mind we are likely to encounter, and the stages we must negotiate as we move through clearly-defined cycles of insight. Its easy to feel overawed, at first, by Ingram's assurance and ease in the higher levels of consciousness, but consistently he writes as a down-to-earth and compassionate guide, and to the practitioner willing to commit themselves this is a glittering gift of a book.In this new edition of the bestselling book, the author rearranges, revises and expands upon the original material, as well as adding new sections that bring further clarity to his ideas.

Download or read book Renunciation and Longing written by Annabella Pitkin and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2022-05-20 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through the eventful life of a Himalayan Buddhist teacher, Khunu Lama, this study reimagines cultural continuity beyond the binary of traditional and modern. In the early twentieth century, Khunu Lama journeyed across Tibet and India, meeting Buddhist masters while sometimes living, so his students say, on cold porridge and water. Yet this elusive wandering renunciant became a revered teacher of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. At Khunu Lama’s death in 1977, he was mourned by Himalayan nuns, Tibetan lamas, and American meditators alike. The many surviving stories about him reveal significant dimensions of Tibetan Buddhism, shedding new light on questions of religious affect and memory that reimagines cultural continuity beyond the binary of traditional and modern. In Renunciation and Longing, Annabella Pitkin explores devotion, renunciation, and the teacher-student lineage relationship as resources for understanding Tibetan Buddhist approaches to modernity. By examining narrative accounts of the life of a remarkable twentieth-century Himalayan Buddhist and focusing on his remembered identity as a renunciant bodhisattva, Pitkin illuminates Tibetan and Himalayan practices of memory, affective connection, and mourning. Refuting long-standing caricatures of Tibetan Buddhist communities as unable to be modern because of their religious commitments, Pitkin shows instead how twentieth- and twenty-first-century Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist narrators have used themes of renunciation, devotion, and lineage as touchstones for negotiating loss and vitalizing continuity.

Download or read book Buddha s Little Finger written by Victor Pelevin and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2001-12-01 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Russian novelist Victor Pelevin is rapidly establishing himself as one of the most brilliant young writers at work today. His comic inventiveness and mind-bending talent prompted Time magazine to proclaim him a "psychedelic Nabokov for the cyber-age." In his third novel, Buddha's Little Finger, Pelevin has created an intellectually dazzling tale about identity and Russian history, as well as a spectacular elaboration of Buddhist philosophy. Moving between events of the Russian Civil War of 1919 and the thoughts of a man incarcerated in a contemporary Moscow psychiatric hospital, Buddha's Little Finger is a work of demonic absurdism by a writer who continues to delight and astonish.