Download or read book Buddhism and American Cinema written by John Whalen-Bridge and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2014-07-31 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discusses both depictions of Buddhism in film and Buddhist takes on a variety of films. In 1989, the same year the Dalai Lama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, a decade-long boom of films dedicated to Buddhist people, history, and culture began. Offering the first scholarly treatment of Buddhism and cinema, the editors advise that there are two kinds of Buddhist film: those that are about Buddhists and those that are not. Focusing on contemporary American offerings, the contributors extend a two-pronged approach, discussing how Buddhism has been captured by directors and presenting Buddhist-oriented critiques of the worlds represented in films that would seem to have no connection with Buddhism. Films discussed range from those set in Tibet, such as Kundun and Lost Horizon, to those set well outside of any Buddhist milieu, such as Groundhog Day and The Matrix. The contributors explain the Buddhist theoretical concepts that emerge in these works, including karma, the bardo, and reincarnation, and consider them in relation to interpretive strategies that include feminism, postcolonialism, and contemplative psychological approaches.
Download or read book Buddhism and American Cinema written by John Whalen-Bridge and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2014-07-31 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1989, the same year the Dalai Lama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, a decade-long boom of films dedicated to Buddhist people, history, and culture began. Offering the first scholarly treatment of Buddhism and cinema, the editors advise that there are two kinds of Buddhist film: those that are about Buddhists and those that are not. Focusing on contemporary American offerings, the contributors extend a two-pronged approach, discussing how Buddhism has been captured by directors and presenting Buddhist-oriented critiques of the worlds represented in films that would seem to have no connection with Buddhism. Films discussed range from those set in Tibet, such as Kundun and Lost Horizon, to those set well outside of any Buddhist milieu, such as Groundhog Day and The Matrix. The contributors explain the Buddhist theoretical concepts that emerge in these works, including karma, the bardo, and reincarnation, and consider them in relation to interpretive strategies that include feminism, postcolonialism, and contemplative psychological approaches.
Download or read book Silver Screen Buddha written by Sharon A. Suh and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-01-29 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do contemporary films depict Buddhists and Buddhism? What aspects of the Buddhist tradition are these films keeping from our view? By repeatedly romanticizing the meditating monk, what kinds of Buddhisms and Buddhists are missing in these films and why? Silver Screen Buddha is the first book to explore the intersecting representations of Buddhism, race, and gender in contemporary films. Sharon A. Suh examines the cinematic encounter with Buddhism that has flourished in Asia and in the West in the past century – from images of Shangri-La in Frank Capra's 1937 Lost Horizon to Kim Ki-Duk's 2003 international box office success Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...and Spring. The book helps readers see that representations of Buddhism in Asia and in the West are fraught with political, gendered, and racist undertones. Silver Screen Buddha draws significant attention to ordinary lay Buddhism, a form of the tradition given little play in popular film. By uncovering the differences between a fictionalized, commodified, and exoticized Buddhism, Silver Screen Buddha brings to light expressions of the tradition that highlight laity and women, on the one hand, and Asian and Asian Americans, on the other. Suh engages in a re-visioning of Buddhism that expands the popular understanding of the tradition, moving from the dominance of meditating monks to the everyday world of raced, gendered, and embodied lay Buddhists.
Download or read book Buddhism Goes to the Movies written by Ronald Green and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-12-04 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Buddhism Goes to the Movies: Introduction to Buddhist Thought and Practice explains the basics of Buddhist philosophy and practice through a number of dramatic films from around the world. This book introduces readers in a dynamic way to the major traditions of Buddhism: the Theravāda, and various interrelated Mahāyāna divisions including Zen, Pure Land and Tantric Buddhism. Students can use Ronald Green’s book to gain insights into classic Buddhist themes, including Buddhist awakening, the importance of the theory of dependent origination, the notion of no-self, and Buddhist ideas about life, death and why we are here. Contemporary developments are also explored, including the Socially Engaged Buddhism demonstrated by such figures as the Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh, Aung San Suu Kyi, and other Buddhist activists. Finally, comparisons between filmic expressions of Buddhism and more traditional artistic expressions of Buddhism—such as mandala drawings—are also drawn. An important addition to any introduction to Buddhist philosophy and practice, Buddhism Goes to the Movies is an excellent way to bring Buddhist thought, history, and activity to the uninitiated and interested reader.
Download or read book Seeing Like the Buddha written by Francisca Cho and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2017-02-07 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Considers film as a form of Buddhist ritual and contemplative practice. In this important new contribution to Buddhist studies and Buddhist film criticism, Francisca Cho argues that films can do more than simply convey information about Buddhism. Films themselves can become a form of Buddhist ritual and contemplative practice that enables the viewer not only to see the Buddha, but to see like the Buddha. Drawing upon her extensive knowledge of both Buddhism and film studies, Cho examines the aesthetic vision of several Asian and Western films that explicitly or implicitly embody Buddhist teachings about karma, emptiness, illusion, and overcoming duality. Her wide-ranging analysis includes Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter and Spring (South Korea, 2003), Nang Nak (Thailand, 1999), Rashomon (Japan, 1950), Maborosi (Japan, 1995), and the films of American Terrence Malick.
Download or read book The Emergence of Buddhist American Literature written by John Whalen-Bridge and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2009-06-11 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The encounter between Buddhism and American literature has been a powerful one for both parties. While Buddhism fueled the Beat movement's resounding critique of the United States as a spiritually dead society, Beat writers and others have shaped how Buddhism has been presented to and perceived by a North American audience. Contributors to this volume explore how Asian influences have been adapted to American desires in literary works and Buddhist poetics, or how Buddhist practices emerge in literary works. Starting with early aesthetic theories of Ernest Fenollosa, made famous but also distorted by Ezra Pound, the book moves on to the countercultural voices associated with the Beat movement and its friends and heirs such as Ginsberg, Kerouac, Snyder, Giorno, Waldman, and Whalen. The volume also considers the work of contemporary American writers of color influenced by Buddhism, such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Charles Johnson, and Lan Cao. An interview with Kingston is included.
Download or read book Buddhism beyond Borders written by Scott A. Mitchell and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2015-06-26 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores facets of North American Buddhism while taking into account the impact of globalization and increasing interconnectivity. Buddhism beyond Borders provides a fresh consideration of Buddhism in the American context. It includes both theoretical discussions and case studies to highlight the tension between studies that locate Buddhist communities in regionally specific areas and those that highlight the translocal nature of an increasingly interconnected world. Whereas previous examinations of Buddhism in North America have assumed a more or less essentialized and homogeneous American culture, the essays in this volume offer a corrective, situating American Buddhist groups within the framework of globalized cultural flows, while exploring the effects of local forces. Contributors examine regionalism within American Buddhisms, Buddhist identity and ethnicity as academic typologies, Buddhist modernities, the secularization and hybridization of Buddhism, Buddhist fiction, and Buddhist controversies involving the Internet, among other issues.
Download or read book Buddhism in America written by Scott A. Mitchell and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-10-20 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Buddhism in America provides the most comprehensive and up to date survey of the diverse landscape of US Buddhist traditions, their history and development, and current methodological trends in the study of Buddhism in the West, located within the translocal flow of global Buddhist culture. Divided into three parts (Histories; Traditions; Frames), this introduction traces Buddhism's history and encounter with North American culture, charts the landscape of US Buddhist communities, and engages current methodological and theoretical developments in the field. The volume includes: - A short introduction to Buddhism - A historical survey from the 19th century to the present - Coverage of contemporary US Buddhist communities, including Theravada, Mahayana, and Vajrayana Theoretical and methodological issues and debates covered include: - Social, political and environmental engagement - Race, feminist, and queer theories of Buddhism - Secular Buddhism, digital Buddhism, and modernity - Popular culture, media, and the arts Pedagogical tools include chapter summaries, discussion questions, images and maps, a glossary, and case studies. The book's website provides recommended further resources including websites, books and films, organized by chapter. With individual chapters which can stand on their own and be assigned out of sequence, Buddhism in America is the ideal resource for courses on Buddhism in America, American Religious History, and Introduction to Buddhism.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of American Buddhism written by Ann Gleig and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of American Buddhism offers the most comprehensive and up-to-date scholarship available on Buddhism in America. It charts the history and diversity of Buddhist communities, including traditions and communities that have been previously neglected, and looks at the ways in which Buddhist practices such as mindfulness meditation have been adopted in non-Buddhist settings.
Download or read book The Making of American Buddhism written by Scott A. Mitchell and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As of 2010, there were approximately 3-4 million Buddhists in the United States, and that figure is expected to grow significantly. Beyond the numbers, the influence of Buddhism can be felt throughout the culture, with many more people practicing meditation, for example, than claiming Buddhist identity. A century ago, this would have been unthinkable. So how did Buddhism come to claim such a significant place in the American cultural landscape? The Making of American Buddhism offers an answer, showing how in the years on either side of World War II second-generation Japanese American Buddhists laid claim to an American identity inclusive of their religious identity. In the process they-and their allies-created a place for Buddhism in America. These sons and daughters of Japanese immigrants-known as "Nisei," Japanese for "second-generation"-clustered around the Berkeley Bussei, a magazine published from 1939 to 1960. In the pages of the Bussei and elsewhere, these Nisei Buddhists argued that Buddhism was both what made them good Americans and what they had to contribute to America-a rational and scientific religion of peace. The Making of American Buddhism also details the behind-the-scenes labor that made Buddhist modernism possible. The Bussei was one among many projects that were embedded within Japanese American Buddhist communities and connected to national and transnational networks that shaped and allowed for the spread of modernist Buddhist ideas. In creating communities, publishing magazines, and hosting scholarly conventions and translation projects, Nisei Buddhists built the religious infrastructure that allowed the later Buddhist modernists, Beat poets, and white converts who are often credited with popularizing Buddhism to flourish. Nisei activists didn't invent American Buddhism, but they made it possible.
Download or read book Ghostly Desires written by Arnika Fuhrmann and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-19 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through an examination of post-1997 Thai cinema and video art Arnika Fuhrmann shows how vernacular Buddhist tenets, stories, and images combine with sexual politics in figuring current struggles over notions of personhood, sexuality, and collective life. The drama, horror, heritage, and experimental art films she analyzes draw on Buddhist-informed conceptions of impermanence and prominently feature the motif of the female ghost. In these films the characters' eroticization in the spheres of loss and death represents an improvisation on the Buddhist disavowal of attachment and highlights under-recognized female and queer desire and persistence. Her feminist and queer readings reveal the entangled relationships between film, sexuality, Buddhist ideas, and the Thai state's regulation of heteronormative sexuality. Fuhrmann thereby provides insights into the configuration of contemporary Thailand while opening up new possibilities for thinking about queer personhood and femininity.
Download or read book The Challenge of the Silver Screen written by Freek L. Bakker and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2009 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1897 only two years after the invention of film the first feature film about Jesus appeared. This and other films about Jesus became examples for and an inspiration for films on other important religious figures like Rama, Buddha and Muhammad. Although religious leaders did not always approve of these films, they did find a ready audience among believers. This book explores these films and looks at how these films dealt with the fundamental question of portraying an individual thought to have either divine status or a very special and unique status among human beings. This book will thus benefit not only students of religious film but also those studying the portrayal of central religious figures in the contemporary world.
Download or read book How the Swans Came to the Lake written by Rick Fields and published by Shambhala Publications. This book was released on 2022-02-08 with total page 587 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new updated edition of How the Swans Came to the Lake includes much new information about recent events in Buddhist groups in America and discusses such issues as spiritual authority, the role of women, and social action.
Download or read book The Dharma of The Princess Bride written by Ethan Nichtern and published by North Point Press. This book was released on 2017-09-12 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An engagingly contemporary approach to Buddhism—through the lens of an iconic film and its memorable characters Humorous yet spiritually rigorous in the tradition of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and The Tao of Pooh, drawing from pop culture and from personal experience, The Dharma of “The Princess Bride” teaches us how to understand and navigate our most important personal relationships from a twenty-first-century Buddhist perspective. Friendship. Romance. Family. These are the three areas Ethan Nichtern delves into, taking as departure points the indelible characters from Rob Reiner’s perennially popular film—Westley, Fezzik, Vizzini, Count Rugen, Princess Buttercup, and others—as he also draws lessons from his own life and his work as a meditation teacher. Nichtern devotes the first section of the book to exploring the dynamics of friendship. Why do people become friends? What can we learn from the sufferings of Inigo Montoya and Fezzik? Next, he leads us through all the phases of illusion and disillusion we encounter in our romantic pursuits, providing a healthy dose of lightheartedness along the way by sharing his own Princess Buttercup List and the vicissitudes of his dating life as he ponders how we idealize and objectify romantic love. Finally, Nichtern draws upon the demands of his own family history and the film’s character the Grandson to explore the dynamics of “the last frontier of awakening,” a reference to his teacher Chogyam Trungpa’s claim that it’s possible to be enlightened everywhere except around your family. With The Dharma of “The Princess Bride” in hand, we can set out on the path to contemporary Buddhist enlightenment with the most important relationships in our lives.
Download or read book American Buddhism as a Way of Life written by Gary Storhoff and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2010-04-05 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores a range of Buddhist perspectives in a distinctly American context.
Download or read book Veiled Desires written by Maureen Sabine and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2013-08 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ingrid Bergman's engaging screen performance as Sister Mary Benedict in The Bells of St. Mary's made the film nun a star and her character a shining standard of comparison. She represented the religious life as the happy and rewarding choice of a modern woman who had a "complete understanding" of both erotic and spiritual desire. How did this vibrant and mature nun figure come to be viewed as girlish and naive? Why have she and her cinematic sisters in postwar popular film so often been stereotyped or selectively analyzed, so seldom been seen as women and religious? In Veiled Desires--a unique full-length, in-depth study of nuns in film--Maureen Sabine explores these questions in a groundbreaking interdisciplinary study covering more than sixty years of cinema. She looks at an impressive breadth of films in which the nun features as an ardent lead character, including The Bells of St. Mary's (1945), Black Narcissus (1947), Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957), Sea Wife (1957), The Nun's Story (1959), The Sound of Music (1965), Change of Habit (1969), In This House of Brede (1975), Agnes of God (1985), Dead Man Walking (1995), and Doubt (2008). Veiled Desires considers how the beautiful and charismatic stars who play chaste nuns, from Ingrid Bergman and Audrey Hepburn to Susan Sarandon and Meryl Streep, call attention to desires that the veil concealed and the habit was thought to stifle. In a theologically and psychoanalytically informed argument, Sabine responds to the critics who have pigeonholed the film nun as the obedient daughter and religious handmaiden of a patriarchal church, and the respectful audience who revered her as an icon of spiritual perfection. She provides a framework for a more complex and holistic picture of nuns on screen by showing how the films dramatize these women's Christian call to serve, sacrifice, and dedicate themselves to God, and their erotic desire for intimacy, agency, achievement, and fulfillment.
Download or read book Religious Journeys in India written by Andrea Marion Pinkney and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2018-08-20 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores how religious travel in India is transforming religious identities and self-constructions. In an increasingly global world where convenient modes of travel have opened the door to international and intraregional tourism and brought together people from different religious and ethnic communities, religious journeying in India has become the site of evolving and often paradoxical forms of self-construction. Through ethnographic reflections, the contributors to this volume explore religious and nonreligious motivations for religious travel in India and show how pilgrimages, missionary travel, the exportation of cultural art forms, and leisure travel among coreligionists are transforming not only religious but also regional, national, transnational, and personal identities. The volume engages with central themes in South Asian studies such as gender, exile, and spirituality; a variety of religions, including Sikhism, Islam, Buddhism, and Christianity; and understudied regions and emerging places of pilgrimage such as Manipur and Maharashtra. Its rare to find such diverse accounts of religious travel collected in a single volume, where scholars engagements with individual places of pilgrimage in India and with the journeys surrounding them are truly in conversation with one another. For readers, it makes for a deeply enlightening journey. It also raises an interesting question: Is the reality of India powerful enough that it absorbs divergent expressions of religious tourism, making of them a common fabric? Here, so unusually, readers have the materials to decide. John Stratton Hawley, author of A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement
