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Buddhism, usually described as an austere religion which condemns desire, promotes denial, and idealizes the monastic and contemplative life, actually has a thriving leisure culture. Creative religious improvisations designed by Buddhists across Asia have worked to build a leisure culture both within and outside of monasteries. The author looks at the growth of Buddhist leisure culture through a study of architects who helped design tourist sites, memorial gardens, monuments, museums, and even amusement parks in Nepal, Singapore, Japan, Korea, Macau, Hong Kong, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam. In conversation with theorists of material and visual culture and anthropologists of art, this book argues that these sites show the importance of public, leisure and spectacle culture from a Buddhist cultural perspective. They show that the “secular” and “religious” and the “public” and “private” are in many ways false binaries. Moreover, many of these sites reflect a growing Buddhist ecumenism being built through repetitive affective encounters instead of didactic sermons, institutional campaigns, and sectarian developments. These sites present different Buddhist traditions, images, and aesthetic expressions as united but not uniform, collected but not concise—a gathering not a movement. Finally, despite the creativity of lay and ordained visionaries, the building of these sites often faces problems along the way. Parks, monuments, temples, and museums are complex adaptive systems changed and influenced by visitors, budgets, materials, local and global economic conditions. No matter what the architect intends, buildings develop lives of their own.

An idealized view of the lifestyle of a Buddhist monk might be described according to the doctrinal demand for emotional detachment and, ultimately, the cessation of all desire. Yet monks are also enjoined to practice compassion, and live with every other human feeling while relating to other monks and the lay community. This book looks at how emotion determines and influences the commitments that laypeople and monastics make to each other and to the Buddhist religion in general. By focusing on “multimoment” histories, it highlights specific junctures in which ideas about recruitment, vocation, patronage, and institution-building are negotiated and refined. The book illustrates how aesthetic responses trigger certain emotions, and how personal and shared emotions, at the local level, shape notions of beauty. It reveals the negotiated character of lay-monastic relations and temple management. In the fields of religion and Buddhist studies there has been a growing recognition of the need to examine affective dimensions of religion. The book breaks new ground in that it answers questions about Buddhist emotions and the constitutive roles they play in social life and religious practice through a close, poignant look at small-scale temple and social networks. The book conveys the manner in which Buddhists describe their own histories, experiences, and encounters as they relate to the formation and continuation of Buddhist monastic culture in contemporary Sri Lanka.

This book delves into the socioreligious milieu of the authors, editors, and propagators of the Rāṣṭrapālapaṛiprcchā-sūtra (Questions of Rāṣṭrapāla), a Buddhist text circulating in India during the first half of the first millennium C.E. The book first reflects upon the problems that plague historians of Mahāyāna Buddhism, whose previous efforts to comprehend the tradition have often ignored the social dynamics that motivated some of the innovations of this new literature. Following that is an analysis of several motifs found in the Indian text and an examination of the value of the earliest Chinese translation for charting the sūtra's evolution. The first part looks at the relationship between the bodily glorification of the Buddha and the ascetic career that produced it within the socioeconomic world of early medieval Buddhist monasticism. Part 2 focuses on the third-century Chinese translation of the sūtra attributed to Dharmarakṣa and traces the changes in the translation to the late tenth century. The significance of this translation, the book explains, is to be found in the ways it differs from all other witnesses. One of the signal contributions of this book is its skill at identifying the traces left by the process and ability to uncover clues about the nature of the source text as well as the world of the principal recipients. The book concludes with an annotated translation of the Rāṣṭrapālapaṛiprcchā-sūtra based on a new reading of its earliest extant Sanskrit manuscript.

Since the 1990s the Japanese pet industry has grown to a trillion-yen business and estimates place the number of pets above the number of children under the age of fifteen. There are between 6,000 to 8,000 businesses in the Japanese pet funeral industry, including more than 900 pet cemeteries. Of these about 120 are operated by Buddhist temples, and Buddhist mortuary rites for pets have become an institutionalized practice. This book investigates what religious and intellectual traditions constructed animals as subjects of religious rituals and how pets have been included or excluded in the necral landscapes of contemporary Japan. Pet mortuary rites are emblems of the ongoing changes in contemporary Japanese religions. The book sheds light on important questions such as: Who (or what) counts as a family member? What kinds of practices should the state recognize as religious and thus protect financially and legally? Is it frivolous or selfish to keep, pamper, or love an animal? Should humans and pets be buried together? How do people reconcile the deeply personal grief that follows the loss of a pet and how do they imagine the afterlife of pets? And ultimately, what is the status of animals in Japan?

Known as Asia's “evangelical superpower,” South Korea today has some of the largest and most dynamic churches in the world and is second only to the United States in the number of missionaries it dispatches abroad. Understanding its evangelicalism is crucial to grasping the course of its modernization, the rise of nationalism and anticommunism, and the relationship between Christians and other religionists within the country. This book considers the introduction, development, and character of evangelicalism in Korea. It argues that the phenomenal rise of this particular species of Christianity can be attributed to several factors. As a religion of salvation, evangelicalism appealed powerfully to multitudes of Koreans, arriving at a time when the country was engulfed in unprecedented crises that discredited established social structures and traditional attitudes. Evangelicalism attracted and empowered Koreans by offering them a more compelling worldview and a more meaningful basis for association. Another factor is evangelicalisms positive connection to Korean nationalism and South Korean anticommunism. It shared in the aspirations and hardships of Koreans during the Japanese occupation and was legitimated again during and after the Korean conflict as South Koreans experienced the trauma of the war. Equally important was evangelicals' relentless proselytization efforts throughout the twentieth century. The book explores the beliefs and practices that have become the hallmarks of Korean evangelicalism. It concludes that Korean evangelicalism is distinguishable from other forms of evangelicalism by its intensely practical and devotional bent.

Healing lies at the heart of Zen. This book reveals a vital stream of religious practice that flourishes outside the bounds of formal institutions through sacred rites that women develop and transmit to one another. Everyday objects and common materials are used in inventive ways. The book brings a fresh perspective to Zen scholarship by uncovering a previously unrecognized but nonetheless vibrant strand of lay practice. The creativity of domestic Zen is evident in the ritual activities that women fashion, weaving tradition and innovation, to gain a sense of wholeness and balance in the midst of illness, loss, and anguish. Their rituals include chanting, ingesting elixirs and consecrated substances, and contemplative approaches that elevate cleaning, cooking, child-rearing, and caring for the sick and dying into spiritual disciplines. Creating beauty is central to domestic Zen and figures prominently in the book’s analyses. This book, the first study of the ritual lives of Zen laywomen, applies a cutting-edge ethnographic method to reveal a thriving domain of religious practice.

This work is the first in-depth historical study of the Thai tradition of donation of that most iconic of Thai art objects, the Buddha image. The book introduces stories from tamnan(chronicles), monastic histories and legends from the Lanna region centered in today’s northern Thailand. Examination of themes, structures and motifs illuminates the conceptual and material aspects of Buddha images that influenced their functions in Lanna society. As agents and mediators of social agency, Buddha images were focal points of pan-regional political-religious lineages and rivalries, indeed, the very generators of history itself. Statues also unified the Buddha with the northern Thai landscape, integrating Buddhist and local significances of place. The book also compares Thai statues with Sri Lankan and Burmese-Mon Buddha relics and images, contributing to broader understanding of how materially different types of Buddhist representations mediated the Buddha’s ‘presence.’ Moreover, the book considers fundamental yet rarely critically deliberated questions such as how particular statues were selected as models to be copied. This involves the image’s aspect as an exchange of financial outlay for merit, ‘commoditized’ even as it is ‘singularized’ through enshrinement. Throughout its ‘life,’ the Thai Buddha image is always a part of wider society beyond monastery walls.

The most common description of the supernatural landscape in Vietnam makes a distinction between Buddhist and non-Buddhist “sides.” The “Buddha side” (ben phat) is the focus of this investigation into the intersection of gender, power, and religious praxis. Employing an anthropological approach to Buddhist practice that takes into account modes of action that are not only socially constructed and contextual, but also negotiated by the actors, the book explores how gender and age affect understandings of what it means to be a Buddhist. The book examines everything from the skeptical statements of young men and devotional performances of young women to the pilgrimages of older women and performances of orthodoxy used by older men to assert their position within the pagoda space. From an in-depth view, the book describes the critical role of religion in shaping social contexts and inserting selves into them. Religion can thus be described as a form of theatre—one in which social identities (youth, old age, masculinity, femininity, authority) are constructed and displayed via religious practice.

This book reveals previously unexplored dimensions of the interaction between Buddhism and Taoism in medieval China. While scholars of Chinese religions have long recognized the mutual influences linking the two traditions, the book brings to light their intense contest for hegemony in the domains of scripture and ritual. It demonstrates the competition and complementarity of the two great Chinese religions in their quest to address personal and collective fears of diverse ills, including sorcery, famine, and untimely death. In this context, Buddhist apocrypha and Taoist scriptures were composed through a process of mutual borrowing, yielding parallel texts, the book argues, that closely mirrored one another. Life-extending techniques, astrological observances, talismans, spells, and the use of effigies and icons to resolve the fundamental preoccupations of medieval society were similarly incorporated in both religions. In many cases, as a result, one and the same body of material can be found in both Buddhist and Taoist guises. Through case-studies, the patterns whereby medieval Buddhists and Taoists each appropriated and transformed for their own use the rites and scriptures oftheir rivals are revealed with precision.

This book examines the shifting sets of meanings ascribed to the aged body in early and medieval Japan and the symbolic uses to which the aged body was put in the service of religious and religio-political ideologies. In the Nara through mid-Heian periods, old age was used as a symbol of weakness, ugliness or pollution to contrast with the glories of the sovereign and his or her efflorescent court. Concurrently, governmental and Buddhist retirement practices called for elders to remove themselves from social, political and cultural centers. From the late-Heian period forward, however, various marginalized individuals and groups took up the aged male body as a symbol of their collective identity and crafted narratives depicting its empowerment. Although in early Japan the terms okina and ōna had been reserved for strange or foolish underclass old men and women, in the medieval period, Buddhist authors presented a great number of gods (kami), Buddhist divinities, saints and immortals (sennin) as okina, or in rare cases, as ōna. In these years literati came to enthusiastically employ the persona of the aged Buddhist recluse and early Noh theorists and playwrights sought to enhance the prestige of their art by linking it to performance traditions featuring mysterious but powerful okina. Although many of the divinized okina of medieval myth are today seen to inhabit a “Shintō” pantheon, they were, in fact, the product of Buddhist texts and arose within a Buddhist cultural milieu.