Download or read book Buddhist Inflected Sovereignties across the Indian Ocean written by Anne M. Blackburn and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2024-01-31 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Buddhist-Inflected Sovereignties across the Indian Ocean draws attention to the varied, historically contingent, and sometimes competing, arguments for and about sovereignty that operated in the Pali arena during the first half of the second millennium AD. It was a time of expanding interaction within the Indian Ocean just prior to Portuguese colonial presence in Southern Asia. Developing a linked series of case studies and examining territories now subsumed within the nation-states of Sri Lanka, Burma/Myanmar, and Thailand, Blackburn examines sovereign arguments expressed textually, as well as in the built environment, by persons with an interest in the teachings and institutions associated with Gotama Buddha. These cases show that no single model of Buddhist-inflected sovereignty dominated the Pali arena during this time, and that there was no stable vision of “Buddhist kingship.” Rather, over time, there was an accrual of possible models and pathways for argumentation about how sovereigns could and should relate to buddha-sāsana. Taking inspiration from diverse sources transmitted through multiple forms and media, arguments for and about sovereignty in the Pali arena were contested and rapidly changing. As the Indian Ocean increasingly shaped the flow of people, objects, and ideas, more peoples and territories participated in the Pali arena, attracted by its intellectual and aesthetic resources. Drawing on extensive scholarship and a wide range of multilingual source materials from premodern Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, and Cambodia, Anne M. Blackburn develops innovative conclusions about the relationships between textuality, sovereignty, maritime connectivity, and material culture in each of these areas. The book contributes simultaneously to several fields of study: the intellectual history of Southern Asia, literary and historical scholarship on Buddhism, and historical studies of the Indian Ocean. By offering accessible yet in-depth analysis, Buddhist-Inflected Sovereignties across the Indian Ocean connects research fields and introduces new interpretive possibilities for the study of sovereignty, politics, premodern textual cultures, and Buddhism.
Download or read book Buddhist Inflected Sovereignties Across the Indian Ocean written by Anne M. Blackburn and published by University of Hawaii. This book was released on 2024 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Buddhist-inflected Sovereignties across the Indian Ocean draws attention to the varied, historically contingent, and sometimes competing, arguments for and about sovereignty that operated in the Pali arena during the first half of the second millennium AD. It was a time of expanding interaction within the Indian Ocean just prior to Portuguese colonial presence in Southern Asia. Developing a linked series of case studies and examining territories now subsumed within the nation-states of Sri Lanka, Burma/Myanmar, and Thailand, Blackburn examines sovereign arguments expressed textually, as well as in the built environment, by persons with an interest in the teachings and institutions associated with Gotama Buddha. These cases show that no single model of Buddhist-inflected sovereignty dominated the Pali arena during this time, and that there was no stable vision of "Buddhist kingship." Rather, over time, there was an accrual of possible models and pathways for argumentation about how sovereigns could and should relate to buddha-såasana. Taking inspiration from diverse sources transmitted through multiple forms and media, arguments for and about sovereignty in the Pali arena were contested and rapidly changing. As the Indian Ocean increasingly shaped the flow of people, objects, and ideas, more peoples and territories participated in the Pali arena, attracted by its intellectual and aesthetic resources. Drawing on extensive scholarship and a wide range of multilingual source materials from premodern Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, and Cambodia, Anne M. Blackburn develops innovative conclusions about the relationships between textuality, sovereignty, maritime connectivity, and material culture in each of these areas. The book contributes simultaneously to several fields of study: the intellectual history of Southern Asia, literary and historical scholarship on Buddhism, and historical studies of the Indian Ocean. By offering accessible yet in-depth analysis, Buddhist-inflected Sovereignties across the Indian Ocean connects research fields and introduces new interpretive possibilities for the study of sovereignty, politics, premodern textual cultures, and Buddhism"--
Download or read book Locations of Buddhism written by Anne M. Blackburn and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-04-15 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modernizing and colonizing forces brought nineteenth-century Sri Lankan Buddhists both challenges and opportunities. How did Buddhists deal with social and economic change; new forms of political, religious, and educational discourse; and Christianity? And how did Sri Lankan Buddhists, collaborating with other Asian Buddhists, respond to colonial rule? To answer these questions, Anne M. Blackburn focuses on the life of leading monk and educator Hikkaduve Sumangala (1827–1911) to examine more broadly Buddhist life under foreign rule. In Locations of Buddhism, Blackburn reveals that during Sri Lanka’s crucial decades of deepening colonial control and modernization, there was a surprising stability in the central religious activities of Hikkaduve and the Buddhists among whom he worked. At the same time, they developed new institutions and forms of association, drawing on pre-colonial intellectual heritage as well as colonial-period technologies and discourse. Advocating a new way of studying the impact of colonialism on colonized societies, Blackburn is particularly attuned here to human experience, paying attention to the habits of thought and modes of affiliation that characterized individuals and smaller scale groups. Locations of Buddhism is a wholly original contribution to the study of Sri Lanka and the history of Buddhism more generally.
Download or read book Subversive Sovereigns Across the Seas written by Kenneth R. Hall and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Buddhist Tourism in Asia written by Courtney Bruntz and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2020-03-31 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This innovative collaborative work—the first to focus on Buddhist tourism—explores how Buddhists, government organizations, business corporations, and individuals in Asia participate in re-imaginings of Buddhism through tourism. Contributors from religious studies, anthropology, and art history examine sacred places and religious monuments as they have been shaped and reshaped by socioeconomic and cultural trends in the region. Following an introduction that offers the first theoretical understanding of tourism from a Buddhist studies’ perspective, early chapters discuss the ways Buddhists and non-Buddhists imagine concepts and places related to the religion. Case studies highlight Buddhist peace in India, Buddhist heavens and hells in Singapore, Thai temple space, and the future Buddha Maitreya in China. Buddhist tourism’s connections to the state, market, and new technologies are explored in chapters on Indian package tours for pilgrims, thematic Buddhist tourism in Cambodia, the technological innovations of Buddhist temples in China, and the promotion of pilgrimage sites in Japan. Contributors then situate the financial concerns of Chinese temples, speed dating in temples in Japan, and the diffuse and pervasive nature of Buddhism for tourism promotion in Ladakh, India. How have tourist routes, groups, sites, and practices associated with Buddhism come to be possible and what are the effects? In what ways do travelers derive meaning from Buddhist places? How do Buddhist sites fortify national, cultural, or religious identities? The comparative research in South, Southeast, and East Asia presented here draws attention to the intertwining of the sacred and the financial and how local and national sites are situated within global networks. Together these findings generate a compelling comparative investigation of Buddhist spaces, identities, and practices.
Download or read book Oceanic Histories written by David Armitage and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Freshly presents world history through its oceans and seas in uniquely wide-ranging, original chapters by leading experts in their fields.
Download or read book Public Zen Personal Zen written by Peter D. Hershock and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2014-03-14 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Among Buddhist traditions, Zen has been remarkably successful in garnering and sustaining interest outside the Buddhist homelands of Asia, and “zen” is now part of the global cultural lexicon. This deeply informed book explores the history of this enduring Japanese tradition—from its beginnings as a form of Buddhist thought and practice imported from China to its reinvention in medieval Japan as a force for religious, political, and cultural change to its role in Japan’s embrace of modernity. Going deeper, it also explores Zen through the experiences and teachings of key individuals who shaped Zen as a tradition committed to the embodiment of enlightenment by all. By bringing together Zen’s institutional and personal dimensions, Peter D. Hershock offers readers a nuanced yet accessible introduction to Zen as well as distinctive insights into issues that remain relevant today, including the creative tensions between globalization and localization, the interplay of politics and religion, and the possibilities for integrating social transformation with personal liberation. Including an introduction to the basic teachings and practices of Buddhism and an account of their spread across Asia, Public Zen, Personal Zen deftly blends historical detail with the felt experiences of Zen practitioners grappling with the meaning of human suffering, personal freedom, and the integration of social and spiritual progress.
Download or read book Key Concepts in Modern Indian Studies written by Rachel Dwyer and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2016-03-18 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern Indian studies have recently become a site for new, creative, and thought-provoking debates extending over a broad canvas of crucial issues. As a result of socio-political transformations, certain concepts—such as ahimsa, caste, darshan, and race—have taken on different meanings. Bringing together ideas, issues, and debates salient to modern Indian studies, this volume charts the social, cultural, political, and economic processes at work in the Indian subcontinent. Authored by internationally recognized experts, this volume comprises over one hundred individual entries on concepts central to their respective fields of specialization, highlighting crucial issues and debates in a lucid and concise manner. Each concept is accompanied by a critical analysis of its trajectory and a succinct discussion of its significance in the academic arena as well as in the public sphere. Enhancing the shared framework of understanding about the Indian subcontinent, Key Concepts in Modern Indian Studies will provide the reader with insights into vital debates about the region, underscoring the compelling issues emanating from colonialism and postcolonialism.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Buddhist Ethics written by Daniel Cozort and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 705 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive overview of the study of Buddhist ethics in the twenty-first century.
Download or read book Sacred Mandates written by Timothy Brook and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-05-21 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemporary discussions of international relations in Asia tend to be tethered in the present, unmoored from the historical contexts that give them meaning. Sacred Mandates, edited by Timothy Brook, Michael van Walt van Praag, and Miek Boltjes, redresses this oversight by examining the complex history of inter-polity relations in Inner and East Asia from the thirteenth century to the twentieth, in order to help us understand and develop policies to address challenges in the region today. This book argues that understanding the diversity of past legal orders helps explain the forms of contemporary conflict, as well as the conflicting historical narratives that animate tensions. Rather than proceed sequentially by way of dynasties, the editors identify three “worlds”—Chingssid Mongol, Tibetan Buddhist, and Confucian Sinic—that represent different forms of civilization authority and legal order. This novel framework enables us to escape the modern tendency to view the international system solely as the interaction of independent states, and instead detect the effects of the complicated history at play between and within regions. Contributors from a wide range of disciplines cover a host of topics: the development of international law, sovereignty, state formation, ruler legitimacy, and imperial expansion, as well as the role of spiritual authority on state behavior, the impact of modernization, and the challenges for peace processes. The culmination of five years of collaborative research, Sacred Mandates will be the definitive historical guide to international and intrastate relations in Asia, of interest to policymakers and scholars alike, for years to come.
Download or read book The Art of Not Being Governed written by James C. Scott and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the acclaimed author and scholar James C. Scott, the compelling tale of Asian peoples who until recently have stemmed the vast tide of state-making to live at arm’s length from any organized state society For two thousand years the disparate groups that now reside in Zomia (a mountainous region the size of Europe that consists of portions of seven Asian countries) have fled the projects of the organized state societies that surround them—slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labor, epidemics, and warfare. This book, essentially an “anarchist history,” is the first-ever examination of the huge literature on state-making whose author evaluates why people would deliberately and reactively remain stateless. Among the strategies employed by the people of Zomia to remain stateless are physical dispersion in rugged terrain; agricultural practices that enhance mobility; pliable ethnic identities; devotion to prophetic, millenarian leaders; and maintenance of a largely oral culture that allows them to reinvent their histories and genealogies as they move between and around states. In accessible language, James Scott, recognized worldwide as an eminent authority in Southeast Asian, peasant, and agrarian studies, tells the story of the peoples of Zomia and their unlikely odyssey in search of self-determination. He redefines our views on Asian politics, history, demographics, and even our fundamental ideas about what constitutes civilization, and challenges us with a radically different approach to history that presents events from the perspective of stateless peoples and redefines state-making as a form of “internal colonialism.” This new perspective requires a radical reevaluation of the civilizational narratives of the lowland states. Scott’s work on Zomia represents a new way to think of area studies that will be applicable to other runaway, fugitive, and marooned communities, be they Gypsies, Cossacks, tribes fleeing slave raiders, Marsh Arabs, or San-Bushmen.
Download or read book Sri Lanka at the Crossroads of History written by Zoltán Biedermann and published by UCL Press. This book was released on 2017-06-07 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The peoples of Sri Lanka have participated in far-flung trading networks, religious formations, and Asian and European empires for millennia. This interdisciplinary volume sets out to draw Sri Lanka into the field of Asian and Global History by showing how the latest wave of scholarship has explored the island as a ‘crossroads’, a place defined by its openness to movement across the Indian Ocean.Experts in the history, archaeology, literature and art of the island from c.500 BCE to c.1850 CE use Lankan material to explore a number of pressing scholarly debates. They address these matters from their varied disciplinary perspectives and diverse array of sources, critically assessing concepts such as ethnicity, cosmopolitanism and localisation, and elucidating the subtle ways in which the foreign may be resisted and embraced at the same time. The individual chapters, and the volume as a whole, are a welcome addition to the history and historiography of Sri Lanka, as well as studies of the Indian Ocean region, kingship, colonialism, imperialism, and early modernity.
Download or read book Towards a New Theory of Religion and Social Change written by Paul-François Tremlett and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-12-29 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that neither theories of secularisation nor theories of lived religion offer satisfactory accounts of religion and social change. Drawing from Deleuze and Gauttari's idea of the assemblage, Paul-Francois Tremlett outlines an alternative. Informed by classical and contemporary theories of religion as well as empirical case studies and ethnography conducted in Manila and London, this book re-frames religion as spatially organised flows. Foregrounding the agency of hon-human actors, it offers a compelling and original account of religion and social change.
Download or read book Monsoon Islam written by Sebastian R. Prange and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-03 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, a distinct form of Islamic thought and practice developed among Muslim trading communities of the Indian Ocean. Sebastian R. Prange argues that this 'Monsoon Islam' was shaped by merchants not sultans, forged by commercial imperatives rather than in battle, and defined by the reality of Muslims living within non-Muslim societies. Focusing on India's Malabar Coast, the much-fabled 'land of pepper', Prange provides a case study of how Monsoon Islam developed in response to concrete economic, socio-religious, and political challenges. Because communities of Muslim merchants across the Indian Ocean were part of shared commercial, scholarly, and political networks, developments on the Malabar Coast illustrate a broader, trans-oceanic history of the evolution of Islam across monsoon Asia. This history is told through four spaces that are examined in their physical manifestations as well as symbolic meanings: the Port, the Mosque, the Palace, and the Sea.
Download or read book Look East Cross Black Waters written by Jonah Blank and published by Rand Corporation. This book was released on 2015-10-13 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: India’s core goals for Southeast Asia are in basic harmony with those of the United States, including regional stability, peaceful settlement of territorial disputes, and containment of radicalism Still, America should not expect India to enter any sort of alliance, nor join any coalition to balance against China, but should demonstrate strategic patience and willingness to cultivate a long-term relationship.
Download or read book The Politics and Poetics of Authenticity written by Harshana Rambukwella and published by UCL Press. This book was released on 2018-07-02 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the role of cultural authenticity in the making of nations? Much scholarly and popular commentary on nationalism dismisses authenticity as a romantic fantasy or, worse, a deliberately constructed mythology used for political manipulation. The Politics and Poetics of Authenticity places authenticity at the heart of Sinhala nationalism in late nineteenth and twentieth-century Sri Lanka. It argues that the passion for the ‘real’ or the ‘authentic’ has played a significant role in shaping nationalist thinking and argues for an empathetic yet critical engagement with the idea of authenticity. Through a series of fine-grained and historically grounded analyses of the writings of individual figures central to the making of Sinhala nationalist ideology the book demonstrates authenticity’s rich and varied presence in Sri Lankan public life and its key role in understanding postcolonial nationalism in Sri Lanka and elsewhere in South Asia and the world. It also explores how notions of authenticity shape certain strands of postcolonial criticism and offers a way of questioning the taken-for-granted nature of the nation as a unit of analysis but at the same time critically explore the deep imprint of nations and nationalisms on people's lives.
Download or read book Buddhist Ethics written by Maria Heim and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-02 with total page 75 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Ethics' was not developed as a separate branch of philosophy in Buddhist traditions until the modern period, though Buddhist philosophers have always been concerned with the moral significance of thoughts, emotions, intentions, actions, virtues, and precepts. Their most penetrating forms of moral reflection have been developed within disciplines of practice aimed at achieving freedom and peace. This Element first offers a brief overview of Buddhist thought and modern scholarly approaches to its diverse forms of moral reflection. It then explores two of the most prominent philosophers from the main strands of the Indian Buddhist tradition - Buddhaghosa and Śāntideva - in a comparative fashion.
