From Sangha to Laity
Author: Maung Maung (U)
Publisher:
Published: 1980
Total Pages: 338
ISBN-13:
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Nationalist Movements in Burma, 1920-1940
Author: Maung Maung (U)
Publisher:
Published: 1976
Total Pages:
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKMonks, Money, and Morality
Author: Christoph Brumann
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2021-04-22
Total Pages: 265
ISBN-13: 1350213780
DOWNLOAD EBOOKVibrantly engaging contemporary Buddhist lives, this book focuses on the material and financial relations of contemporary monks, temples, and laypeople. It shows that rather than being peripheral, economic exchanges are key to religious debate in Buddhist societies. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in countries ranging from India to Japan, including all three major Buddhist traditions, the book addresses the flows of goods and services between clergy and laity, the management of resources, the treatment of money, and the role of the state in temple economies. Along with documenting ritual and economic practices, these accounts deal with the moral challenges that Buddhist adherents are facing today, thereby bringing lived experience to the study of an often-romanticized religion.
Burma’s Mass Lay Meditation Movement
Author: Ingrid Jordt
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Published: 2014-07-31
Total Pages: 302
ISBN-13: 0896804577
DOWNLOAD EBOOKBurma’s Mass Lay Meditation Movement: Buddhism and the Cultural Construction of Power describes a transformation in Buddhist practice in contemporary Burma. This revitalization movement has had real consequences for how the oppressive military junta, in power since the early 1960s, governs the country. Drawing on more than ten years of extensive fieldwork in Burma, Ingrid Jordt explains how vipassanā meditation has brought about a change of worldview for millions of individuals, enabling them to think and act independently of the totalitarian regime. She addresses human rights as well as the relationship between politics and religion in a country in which neither the government nor the people clearly separates the two. Jordt explains how the movement has been successful in its challenge to the Burmese military dictatorship where democratically inspired resistance movements have failed. Jordt’s unsurpassed access to the centers of political and religious power in Burma becomes the reader’s opportunity to witness the political workings of one of the world’s most secretive and tyrannically ruled countries. Burma’s Mass Lay Meditation Movement is a valuable contribution to Buddhist studies as well as anthropology, religious studies, and political science.
Identity, Ritual and State in Tibetan Buddhism
Author: Martin A. Mills
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-11-05
Total Pages: 448
ISBN-13: 1136854746
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis is a major anthropological study of contemporary Tibetan Buddhist monasticism and tantric ritual in the Ladakh region of North-West India and of the role of tantric ritual in the formation and maintenance of traditional forms of state structure and political consciousness in Tibet. Containing detailed descriptions and analyses of monastic ritual, the work builds up a picture of Tibetan tantric traditions as they interact with more localised understandings of bodily identity and territorial cosmology, to produce a substantial re-interpretation of the place of monks as ritual performers and peripheral householders in Ladakh. The work also examines the central and indispensable role of incarnate lamas, such as the Dalai Lama, in the religious life of Tibetan Buddhists.
The Return of the Galon King
Author: Maitrii Aung-Thwin
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Published: 2011
Total Pages: 269
ISBN-13: 0896802760
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn late 1930, on a secluded mountain overlooking the rural paddy fields of British Burma, a peasant leader named Saya San crowned himself King and inaugurated a series of uprisings that would later erupt into one of the largest anti-colonial rebellions in Southeast Asian history. Considered an imposter by the British, a hero by nationalists, and a prophet-king by area-studies specialists, Saya San came to embody traditional Southeast Asia’s encounter with European colonialism in his attempt to resurrect the lost throne of Burma. The Return of the Galon King analyzes the legal origins of the Saya San story and reconsiders the facts upon which the basic narrative and interpretations of the rebellion are based. Aung-Thwin reveals how counter-insurgency law produced and criminalized Burmese culture, contributing to the way peasant resistance was recorded in the archives and understood by Southeast Asian scholars. This interdisciplinary study reveals how colonial anthropologists, lawyers, and scholar-administrators produced interpretations of Burmese culture that influenced contemporary notions of Southeast Asian resistance and protest. It provides a fascinating case study of how history is treated by the law, how history emerges in legal decisions, and how the authority of the past is used to validate legal findings.
Moving Against the Stream
Author: Sangharakshita
Publisher: Windhorse Publications
Published: 2014-08-22
Total Pages: 440
ISBN-13: 1909314528
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn 1964 Sangharakshita left India for a visit to the UK. After twenty years in the subcontinent - travelling and lecturing, writing, working among the most deprived, and extending and deepening his knowledge of the Dharma - he had been invited by leading British Buddhists to help resolve tensions in the British Buddhist scene. We witness the turning point at which he decided to dedicate his life to working 'for the good of Buddhism' in his native land, culminating in the birth of a new Buddhist movement.
An Archaeological History of Indian Buddhism
Author: Lars Fogelin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2015-04-01
Total Pages: 264
ISBN-13: 0190266929
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAn Archaeological History of Indian Buddhism is a comprehensive survey of Indian Buddhism from its origins in the 6th century BCE, through its ascendance in the 1st millennium CE, and its eventual decline in mainland South Asia by the mid-2nd millennium CE. Weaving together studies of archaeological remains, architecture, iconography, inscriptions, and Buddhist historical sources, this book uncovers the quotidian concerns and practices of Buddhist monks and nuns (the sangha), and their lay adherents--concerns and practices often obscured in studies of Buddhism premised largely, if not exclusively, on Buddhist texts. At the heart of Indian Buddhism lies a persistent social contradiction between the desire for individual asceticism versus the need to maintain a coherent community of Buddhists. Before the early 1st millennium CE, the sangha relied heavily on the patronage of kings, guilds, and ordinary Buddhists to support themselves. During this period, the sangha emphasized the communal elements of Buddhism as they sought to establish themselves as the leaders of a coherent religious order. By the mid-1st millennium CE, Buddhist monasteries had become powerful political and economic institutions with extensive landholdings and wealth. This new economic self-sufficiency allowed the sangha to limit their day-to-day interaction with the laity and begin to more fully satisfy their ascetic desires for the first time. This withdrawal from regular interaction with the laity led to the collapse of Buddhism in India in the early-to-mid 2nd millennium CE. In contrast to the ever-changing religious practices of the Buddhist sangha, the Buddhist laity were more conservative--maintaining their religious practices for almost two millennia, even as they nominally shifted their allegiances to rival religious orders. This book also serves as an exemplar for the archaeological study of long-term religious change through the perspectives of practice theory, materiality, and semiotics.
Law, laity and solidarities
Author: Pauline Stafford
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2020-01-03
Total Pages: 285
ISBN-13: 1526148285
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe primary focus of this collection by leading medieval historians is the laity, in particular the ideas and ideals of lay people. The contributors explore lay attitudes as expressed in legal cases, charters, chronicles and collective activities. Highlights the centrality of kinship, whilst stressing its limitations as an all purpose social bond. Ranges chronologically and geographically from the seventh century to the eve of the Reformation, from Western Britain to papal and urban Italy, from Carolingian dynastic politics to the decline of medieval pilgrimage in the sixteenth century, and from the courts of twelfth-century France to the fifteenth-century wards of London.
Meditation in Modern Buddhism
Author: Joanna Cook
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2010-08-05
Total Pages:
ISBN-13: 1139487841
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn contemporary Thai Buddhism, the burgeoning popularity of vipassanā meditation is dramatically impacting the lives of those most closely involved with its practice: monks and mae chee (lay nuns) living in monastic communities. For them, meditation becomes a central focus of life and a way to transform the self. This ethnographic account of a thriving Northern Thai monastery examines meditation in detail, and explores the subjective signification of monastic duties and ascetic practices. Drawing on fieldwork done both as an analytical observer and as a full participant in the life of the monastery, Joanna Cook analyzes the motivation and experience of renouncers, and shows what effect meditative practices have on individuals and community organization. The particular focus on the status of mae chee - part lay, part monastic - provides a fresh insight into social relationships and gender hierarchy within the context of the monastery.
