Download or read book Gathering Leaves and Lifting Words written by Justin Thomas McDaniel and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2010-12-01 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Henry J. Benda Prize sponsored by the Association for Asian Studies Gathering Leaves and Lifting Words examines modern and premodern Buddhist monastic education traditions in Laos and Thailand. Through five centuries of adaptation and reinterpretation of sacred texts and commentaries, Justin McDaniel traces curricular variations in Buddhist oral and written education that reflect a wide array of community goals and values. He depicts Buddhism as a series of overlapping processes, bringing fresh attention to the continuities of Theravada monastic communities that have endured despite regional and linguistic variations. Incorporating both primary and secondary sources from Thailand and Laos, he examines premodern inscriptional, codicological, anthropological, art historical, ecclesiastical, royal, and French colonial records. By looking at modern sermons, and even television programs and websites, he traces how pedagogical techniques found in premodern palm-leaf manuscripts are pervasive in modern education. As the first comprehensive study of monastic education in Thailand and Laos, Gathering Leaves and Lifting Words will appeal to a wide audience of scholars and students interested in religious studies, anthropology, social and intellectual history, and pedagogy.
Download or read book Gathering Leaves Lifting Words written by Justin Thomas McDaniel and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Asia through Art and Anthropology written by Fuyubi Nakamura and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-05-25 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: * AWARDED BEST ANTHOLOGY BY THE ART ASSOCIATION OF AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND *How has Asia been imagined, represented and transferred both literally and visually across linguistic, geopolitical and cultural boundaries? This book explores the shifting roles of those who produce, critique and translate creative forms and practices, for which distinctions of geography, ethnicity, tradition and modernity have become fluid. Drawing on accounts of modern and contemporary art, film, literature, fashion and performance, it challenges established assumptions of the cultural products of Asia.Special attention is given to the role of cultural translators or 'long-distance cultural specialists' whose works bridge or traverse different worlds, with the inclusion of essays by three important artists who share personal accounts of their experiences creating and showing artworks that negotiate diverse cultural contexts.With contributions from key scholars of Asian art and culture, including art historian John Clark and anthropologist Clare Harris, alongside fresh voices in the field, Asia Through Art and Anthropology will be essential reading for students and scholars of anthropology, art history, Asian studies, visual and cultural studies.----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------The publication of the color plates of works by Phaptawan Suwannakudt and Savanhdary Vongpoothorn is funded by the Australian Government.
Download or read book Thailand s Theory of Monarchy written by Patrick Jory and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2016-05-09 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2016 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Since the 2006 coup d'état, Thailand has been riven by two opposing political visions: one which aspires to a modern democracy and the rule of law, and another which holds to the traditional conception of a kingdom ruled by an exemplary Buddhist monarch. Thailand has one of the world's largest populations of observant Buddhists and one of its last politically active monarchies. This book examines the Theravada Buddhist foundations of Thailand's longstanding institution of monarchy. Patrick Jory states that the storehouse of monarchical ideology is to be found in the popular literary genre known as the Jātakas, tales of the Buddha's past lives. The best-known of these, the Vessantara Jātaka, disseminated an ideal of an infinitely generous prince as a bodhisatta or future Buddha—an ideal which remains influential in Thailand today. Using primary and secondary source materials largely unknown in Western scholarship, Jory traces the history of the Vessantara Jātaka and its political-cultural importance from the ancient to the modern period. Although pressures from European colonial powers and Buddhist reformers led eventually to a revised political conception of the monarchy, the older Buddhist ideal of kingship has yet endured.
Download or read book The Buddha in Lanna written by Angela S. Chiu and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2017-03-31 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For centuries, wherever Thai Buddhists have made their homes, statues of the Buddha have provided striking testament to the role of Buddhism in the lives of the people. The Buddha in Lanna offers the first in-depth historical study of the Thai tradition of donation of Buddha statues. Drawing on palm-leaf manuscripts and inscriptions, many never previously translated into English, the book reveals the key roles that Thai Buddha images have played in the social and economic worlds of their makers and devotees from the fifteenth to twentieth centuries. Author Angela Chiu introduces stories from chronicles, histories, and legends written by monks in Lanna, a region centered in today’s northern Thailand. By examining the stories’ themes, structures, and motifs, she illuminates the complex conceptual and material aspects of Buddha images that influenced their functions in Lanna society. Buddha images were depicted as social agents and mediators, the focal points of pan-regional political-religious lineages and rivalries, indeed, as the very generators of history itself. In the chronicles, Buddha images also unified the Buddha with the northern Thai landscape, thereby integrating Buddhist and local conceptions of place. By comparing Thai Buddha statues with other representations of the Buddha, the author underscores the contribution of the Thai evidence to a broader understanding of how different types of Buddha representations were understood to mediate the “presence” of the Buddha. The Buddha in Lanna focuses on the Thai Buddha image as a part of the wider society and history of its creators and worshippers beyond monastery walls, shedding much needed light on the Buddha image in history. With its impressive range of primary sources, this book will appeal to students and scholars of Buddhism and Buddhist art history, Thai studies, and Southeast Asian religious studies.
Download or read book Ethnobotany of Tuberculosis in Laos written by Bethany Gwen Elkington and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-11-11 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book highlights the common ground between biomedicine and traditional healing. Because of the destruction of forests, the degradation of old palm leaf manuscripts, and decreasing interest in traditional medicine by younger generations, it is becoming more and more important to record medicinal plant knowledge before it is lost. This research provides written and photographic documentation of some of the medicinal plant knowledge held by the people of Laos. Translating and validating some of the power of traditional medicine used in Laos into biomedical terms through laboratory analyses may serve to demonstrate its importance in a global language. In this text, the translational research was performed through in vitro laboratory analyses of select plant species with a history to treat symptoms of TB. The processes of plant collection, extraction, biological assays, and isolation/elucidation are also described and detailed in the Biochemical Validation section. The biomedical discoveries explored in, Ethnobotany of Tuberculosis in Laos, stresses the importance of conserving and sustaining our natural ecosystems for medicinal preservation and utilization.
Download or read book Little Buddhas written by Vanessa R. Sasson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 543 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Edited by Vanessa R. Sasson, Little Buddhas brings together a wide range of scholarship and expertise to address the question of what role children have played in Buddhist literature, in particular historical contexts, and their role in specific Buddhist contexts today.
Download or read book Buddhist Manuscript Cultures written by Stephen C. Berkwitz and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-01-13 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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. Contributions are by reputed scholars in Buddhist Studies and represent diverse disciplinary approaches from religious studies, art history, anthropology, and history.
Download or read book Wisdom Knowledge and the Postcolonial University in Thailand written by Zane Ma Rhea and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-12-08 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines Thai knowledge and wisdom from the perspective of postmodern, postcolonial globalization. Ma Rhea explores the ways in which the Thai university system attempts to balance old knowledge traditions, Buddhist and rural, with new Thai and imported knowledge. It traces the development of Thai university partnerships with outsiders, focusing on the seventy year relationship between Thailand and Australia. In comparison, it analyses the old Thai Buddhist wisdom tradition and in the final chapters proposes its worthiness as a pedagogical pathway for universities globally.
Download or read book Ritualized Writing written by Bryan D. Lowe and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2017-03-31 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ritualized Writing takes readers into the fascinating world of Japanese Buddhist manuscript cultures. Using archival sources that have received scant attention in English, primarily documents from an eighth-century Japanese scriptorium and colophons from sutra manuscripts, Bryan D. Lowe uncovers the ways in which the transcription of Buddhist scripture was a highly ritualized endeavor. He takes a ground-level approach by emphasizing the activities and beliefs of a wide range of individuals, including scribes, provincial patrons, and royals, to reassess the meaning of scripture and reevaluate scholarly narratives of Japanese Buddhist history. Copying scripture is a central Buddhist practice and one that thrived in East Asia. Despite this, there are no other books dedicated to the topic. This work demonstrates that patrons and scribes treated sutras differently from other modes of writing. Scribes purified their bodies prior to transcription. Patrons held dedicatory ceremonies on days of abstinence, when prayers were pronounced and sutras were recited. Transcribing sutras helped scribes and patrons alike realize this- and other-worldly ambitions and cultivate themselves in accord with Buddhist norms. Sutra copying thus functioned as a form of ritualized writing, a strategic practice that set apart scripture as uniquely efficacious and venerable. Lowe employs this notion of ritualized writing to challenge historical narratives about ancient Japan (late seventh through early ninth centuries), a period when sutra copying flourished. He contends that Buddhist practice fulfilled a variety of social, political, and spiritual roles beyond ideological justification. Moreover, he demonstrates the inadequacy of state-folk dichotomies for understanding the social groups, institutions, and individual beliefs and practices of ancient Japanese Buddhism, highlighting instead common organizations across social class and using models that reveal shared concerns among believers from diverse social backgrounds. Ritualized Writing makes broader contributions to the study of ritual and scripture by introducing the notion of scriptural cultures, an analytic tool that denotes a series of dynamic relationships and practices involving texts that have been strategically set apart or ritualized. Scripture, Lowe concludes, is at once a category created by humans and a body of texts that transforms individuals and social organizations who come into contact with it.
Download or read book Routledge Handbook of Therav da Buddhism written by Stephen C. Berkwitz and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-03-16 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Among one of the older subfields in Buddhist Studies, the study of Theravāda Buddhism is undergoing a revival by contemporary scholars who are revising long-held conventional views of the tradition while undertaking new approaches and engaging new subject matter. The term Theravāda has been refined, and research has expanded beyond the analysis of canonical texts to examine contemporary cultural forms, social movements linked with meditation practices, material culture, and vernacular language texts. The Routledge Handbook of Theravāda Buddhism illustrates the growth and new directions of scholarship in the study of Theravāda Buddhism and is structured in four parts: Ideas/Ideals Practices/Persons Texts/Teachings Images/Imaginations Owing largely to the continued vitality of Theravāda Buddhist communities in countries like Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos, as well as in diaspora communities across the globe, traditions associated with what is commonly (and fairly recently) called Theravāda attract considerable attention from scholars and practitioners around the world. An in-depth guide to the distinctive features of Theravāda, the Handbook will be an invaluable resource for providing structure and guidance for scholars and students of Asian Religion, Buddhism and, in particular, Theravāda Buddhism. The introduction and chapter 20 of this book are available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
Download or read book Isan Writers Thai Literature written by Martin B. Platt and published by NUS Press. This book was released on 2013-08-20 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Regional characteristics and regional language feature prominently in discussions of Thai identity, but there is little mention of regional literatures. In northeastern Thailand's Isan region, authors write primarily in Thai, but it is possible nonetheless to identify an Isan literature, which played a significant and at times pivotal role in the development of Thai literature in the second half of the twentieth century, as authors grappled with how their origins and experiences related to the Thai centre. Martin Platt's account of Isan literature is an important first step toward a broader study of regional literatures in Thailand, and shapes a model that has relevance for examining literary works in other Asian countries.
Download or read book The Palace Law of Ayutthaya and the Thammasat written by and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2016-06-01 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book contains the first academic translations of key legal texts from the Ayutthaya era (1351–1767), along with an essay on the role of law in Thai history. The legal history of Southeast Asia has languished because few texts are accessible in translation. The Three Seals Code is a collection of Thai legal manuscripts surviving from the Ayutthaya era. The Palace Law, probably dating to the late fifteenth century, was the principal law on kingship and government. The Thammasat, a descendant of India's dharmasastra, stood at the head of the Code and gave it authority. Here these two key laws are presented in English translation for the first time along with detailed annotations and analyses of their content. The coverage of family arrangements, court protocol, warfare, royal women, and ceremonial conduct in the Palace Law presents a detailed portrayal of Siamese kingship, reaching beyond terms such as devaraja, thammaraja, and cakravartin. Close analysis of the Thammasat questions the assumption that this text has a long-standing and fundamental role in Thai legal practice. Royal lawmaking had a large and hitherto unappreciated role in the premodern Thai state. This book is an important contribution to Thai history, Southeast Asian history, and comparative legal studies.
Download or read book Monastic Education in Korea written by Uri Kaplan and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2020-06-30 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What do Buddhist monks learn about Buddhism? Which part of their enormous canonical and non-canonical literature do they choose to focus on as the required curriculum in their training, and what do they elect to leave out? The cultural depository of Buddhism includes some four thousand canonical texts, hundreds of other historical works, modern textbooks, oral traditions, and more recently, an increasingly growing body of online material. The sheer diversity of this mass of information makes the pedagogical choices of monastics worthy of close study. Monastic Education in Korea is essentially a biography of the Korean Buddhist monastic curriculum over the past five centuries. Based on extensive ethnographic work and archival research in Korean monasteries, it illustrates how a particular premodern syllabus was reimagined in the twentieth century to become the sole national Korean monastic pedagogical program—only to be criticized and completely restructured in recent years. Through a detailed analysis of these modifications, the work demonstrates how Korean Buddhist reformers today tend to imitate the educational practices and canonize the textual totems of the contemporary international discipline of Buddhist studies, and how, by doing so, they ultimately transform the local Korean tradition from a particular brand of Chinese-centered scholastic Chan into the inclusive, pluralistic, Indian-focused Buddhism common in English-language introductions to the religion. The book further examines the proliferation of diverse graduate schools for the sangha, as well as the creation of a novel examination system for all monastics. It reveals some of the realities of operating large monastic organizations in contemporary Asia and portrays a living, vibrant Buddhist community that is constantly negotiating with modern values and reformulating its core orthodoxies.
Download or read book Rereading Schleiermacher Translation Cognition and Culture written by Teresa Seruya and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-11-30 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book celebrates the bicentenary of Schleiermacher’s famous Berlin conference "On the Different Methods of Translating" (1813). It is the product of an international Call for Papers that welcomed scholars from many international universities, inviting them to discuss and illuminate the theoretical and practical reception of a text that is not only arguably canonical for the history and theory of translation, but which has moreover never ceased to be present both in theoretical and applied Translation Studies and remains a mandatory part of translator training. A further reason for initiating this project was the fact that the German philosopher and theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, though often cited in Translation Studies up to the present day, was never studied in terms of his real impact on different domains of translation, literature and culture.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies written by Robert A. Orsi and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 443 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Informative and provocative, this book introduces readers to debates in the contemporary study of religion and suggests future research possibilities.
Download or read book Sacred Languages of the World written by Brian P. Bennett and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2017-09-25 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating comparative account of sacred languages and their role in and beyond religion —written for a broad, interdisciplinary audience Sacred languages have been used for foundational texts, liturgy, and ritual for millennia, and many have remained virtually unchanged through the centuries. While the vital relationship between language and religion has been long acknowledged, new research and thinking across an array of disciplines including religious studies, sociolinguistics, sociology, linguistics, and even neurolinguistics has resulted in a renewed interest in the area. This fascinating and informative book draws on Christian, Islamic, Hindu, Judaic, and Buddhist traditions to provide a concise and accessible introduction to the phenomenon of sacred languages. The book takes a strongly comparative, wide-ranging approach to exploring ways in which ancient religious languages, such as Latin, Pali, Church Slavonic, and Hebrew continue to shape the beliefs and practices of religious communities around the world. Informed by both comparative religion and sociolinguistics, it traces the histories of sacred languages, the myths and doctrines that explain their origin and value, the various ways they are used, the sectarian debates that shadow them, and the technological innovations that propel them forward in the twenty-first century. A comprehensive but succinct account of the role and importance of language within religion Takes an interdisciplinary approach which will appeal to students and scholars across an array of disciplines, including religious studies, sociology of religion, sociolinguistics, and linguistics Provides a strongly comparative exploration, drawing on Christian, Islamic, Hindu, Judaic, and Buddhist traditions Uses numerous examples and ties historic debates with contemporary situations Satisfies the rapidly growing demand for books on the subject among both academics and general readers Sacred Languages of the World is a must-read for students of religion and language, scripture, religious literacy, education and language, the sociology of religion, sociolinguistics. It will also have strong appeal among general readers with an interest comparative religion, history, cultural criticism, communication studies, and more.
