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This book explores the rise of insight meditation (vipassanā) as a widespread lay movement in Burma during British colonial rule. It does this through a study of one of its key architects, the Burmese monk Ledi Sayadaw (1846-1923). His life and work shows that mass meditation emerged out of the relationship between two spheres of action, the study of Buddhist doctrine and the effort to protect the Buddhist religion. In terms of doctrinal study, Ledi empowered a wide range of people to participate in the longstanding elite practice of in-depth study, focusing particularly on the Buddhist philosophical texts, the Abhidhamma. He tied this study to the second sphere, protective efforts, by arguing that such study empowered a person to safeguard Buddhism. He then presented meditation as another way to insure Buddhism’s safety— not to mention as a means to spiritual attainments— and he standardized and simplified meditation methods for lay people using the Abhidhamma. By allying insight practice in this way to study and protection, he set in train the collectivization of practice and the acceptability of lay control of its teaching, now hallmarks of modern Buddhism across the world. This analysis challenges the common assumption that colonialism forced the Burmese to entirely reconceive their traditions, for it shows that Ledi and other Burmese responded to the pressures of colonialism on pre-colonial terms. Thus, in explaining why mass meditation started in Burma, the book also extends into the pre-colonial past our understanding of sources for a form of Buddhist modernity.

Despite popular images of priests seeking enlightenment in snow-covered mountain temples, the central concern of Japanese Buddhism is death. For that reason, Japanese Buddhism's social and economic base has long been in mortuary services—a base now threatened by public debate over the status, treatment, and location of the dead. This book explores the crisis brought on by this debate and investigates what changing burial forms reveal about the ways temple Buddhism is perceived and propagated in contemporary Japan. It offers an account of how religious, political, social, and economic forces in the twentieth century led to the emergence of new funerary practices in Japan and how, as a result, the care of the dead has become the most fundamental challenge to the continued existence of Japanese temple Buddhism. Far from marking the death of Buddhism in Japan, the book argues, funerary Buddhism reveals the tradition at its most vibrant.

Theravada is one of the three main branches of Buddhism. In Asia it is practiced widely in Thailand, Laos, Burma, Sri Lanka, and Cambodia. This ethnography opens a window onto two communities of Theravada Buddhists in contemporary America: one outside Philadelphia that is composed largely of Thai immigrants and one outside Boston that consists mainly of white converts. The book first provides a historical overview of Theravada Buddhism and considers its specific origins here in the United States. It then brings the findings to bear on issues of personal identity, immigration, cultural assimilation, and the nature of religion in everyday life. The work is a systematic comparison of the ways in which immigrant and convert Buddhists understand, practice, and adapt the Buddhist tradition in America. The men and women in this story speak directly to us in this work, both in their personal testimonials and as they meditate, pray, and practice Buddhism.

The Dalai Lama has said that Tibetans consider themselves “the child of Indian civilization,” and that India is the “holy land” from whose sources the Tibetans have built their own civilization. What explains this powerful allegiance to India? This book investigates how Tibetans have maintained a ritual relationship to India, particularly by way of pilgrimage, and what it means for them to consider India as their holy land. Focusing on the Tibetan creation and recreation of India as a destination, a landscape, and a kind of other, in both real and idealized terms, the book explores how Tibetans have used the idea of India as a religious territory and a sacred geography in the development of their own religion and society. It also takes up the meaning of India for the Tibetans who live in exile in their Buddhist holy land. The book describes changes in Tibetan constructs of India over the centuries, ultimately challenging largely static views of the sacred geography of Buddhism in India.

In 724, a young Korean monk named Hyecho boarded a ship in China and set off on a pilgrimage to the Buddhist holy land of India. Over the next three years, he would travel farther by land and sea than any monk in the history of Buddhism. Sailing south to Indonesia, he traveled to India and the sacred sites of the life of the Buddha. He then continued west, traveling as far as Arabia before turning east and returning to China. This book tells the story of his journey. Hyecho wrote an account of his travels, but it only survives in fragments, discovered in the famous Library Cave at the desert temple complex of Dunhuang in 1908. Unlike other monks who made the long trip to India, Hyecho did not stay long enough to learn Indian languages. His encounter with the Buddha thus took a different form, not verbal but visual, not reading sacred texts but seeing works of art and architecture. Unlike other books about Buddhism, this one does not present the tradition over the long sweep of its history. Instead, it imagines a world as it was experienced in the course of a single journey, a Buddhist world as seen through the eyes of a single monk. It is illustrated with twenty-four full color plates, recounting the lives and afterlives of the kinds of Buddhist masterworks that Hyecho would have encountered on his pilgrimage.

Gendun Chopel is considered the most important Tibetan intellectual of the twentieth century. His life spanned the two defining moments in modern Tibetan history: the entry into Lhasa by British troops in 1904 and by Chinese troops in 1951. Recognized as an incarnate lama while he was a child, Gendun Chopel excelled in the traditional monastic curriculum and went on to become expert in fields as diverse as philosophy, history, linguistics, geography, and tantric Buddhism. Near the end of his life, before he was persecuted and imprisoned by the government of the young Dalai Lama, he would dictate the Adornment for Nagarjuna's Thought, a work on Madhyamaka, or “Middle Way,” philosophy. It sparked controversy immediately upon its publication and continues to do so today. This book presents the first English translation of this major Tibetan Buddhist work, accompanied by a chapter on Gendun Chopel's life liberally interspersed with passages from his writings. The book also provides a commentary that sheds light on the doctrinal context of the Adornment and summarizes its key arguments. Ultimately, it examines the long-standing debate over whether Gendun Chopel in fact is the author of the Adornment; the heated critical response to the work by Tibetan monks of the Dalai Lama's sect; and what the Adornment tells us about Tibetan Buddhism's encounter with modernity.

This book describes the life of a Mongolian Buddhist monastery—the Mergen Monastery in Inner Mongolia—from inside its walls. From the Qing occupation of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through the Cultural Revolution, the book tells a story of religious formation, suppression, and survival over a history that spans three centuries. Often overlooked in Buddhist studies, Mongolian Buddhism is an impressively self-sustaining tradition whose founding lama, the Third Mergen Gegen, transformed Tibetan Buddhism into an authentic counterpart using the Mongolian language. Drawing on fifteen years of fieldwork, the book shows how lamas have struggled to keep Mergen Gegen's vision alive through tremendous political upheaval, and how such upheaval has inextricably fastened politics to religion for many of today's practicing monks. Exploring the various ways Mongolian Buddhists have attempted to link the past, present, and future, this book offers a study of the interplay between the individual and the state, tradition and history.

This book explores religious transformation among a Siberian people known as Buryats across changing political economies. It argues that under conditions of rapid social transformation such as those that accompanied the Russian Revolution, the Cold War, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, certain persons, and especially their bodies became key sites through which Buryats have articulated their relationship with the Russian state and the larger Tibeto-Mongol and Eurasian worlds. Despite the Russian government’s continuing reluctance to see their Buddhist subjects cross borders, Buryats have employed characteristically Buddhist “body politics” to maintain their long-standing mobility, which can both conform to and diplomatically challenge Russian logics of political rule. Through presenting particular case studies of such emblematic bodies— dead bodies of famous monks, temporary bodies of reincarnated lamas, ascetic and celibate bodies of Buddhist monastics, and dismembered bodies of lay disciples given as imaginary gifts to spirits— the book looks at the specific ways in which religion and politics have intersected in this context. This study is intended as a contribution to the growing literature on postsocialism and cross-disciplinary studies of sovereignty that focus on the body as a site of sovereign power, as well as new developments in Buddhist studies where issues related to embodiment have become a central focus of inquiry.

This book locates Anagarika Dharmapala in the context of a historical moment where nationalisms pulled people in one direction and universalisms in another. Most accounts of his life emphasize the nationalist side, where he is portrayed as the man who revived Buddhism in the island, saved the Sinhala people from deracination, and invented a Buddhist modernity. The great majority of his adult life spent abroad and his feelings about home and exile are overlooked. The entrée to those self-understandings is the diaries and notebooks he maintained while traveling around the world several times and sojourning in Kolkata, London, and Colombo. Looking at Dharmapala’s life abroad does more than add a huge amount of material to what we know of his life. Drawing on 36 diaries and 50 odd notebooks provides a way to rethink Dharmapala’s life work, making older interpretations problematic. Instead of rationalizing behavior and making religion modern, Dharmapala sought to restore traditional institutions such as the Buddhist monkhood. He was much more interested in civilizing villagers than making Protestant Buddhists of them. The Buddhism that he himself practiced and explicated in his diaries and the Maha Bodhi was anything but Protestant, and influenced by both Theosophy and its appropriation of South Asian mysticism. On Kemper’s interpretation Dharmapala becomes less a social reformer and more a world renouncer, with implications for his role as the man said to have laicized the religion by elevating the role of the Buddhist laity and leading the monkhood into the public sphere.

This book offers a diachronic analysis of narratives recounting the life of the Buddha and their transformations—typically in written texts, but including material culture and ritual practice. It traces accounts of the Buddha from ancient Japan through the medieval and early modern eras, into the early 1910s. After a millennium of hagiography written in alignment with canonical accounts, stories of the life of the Buddha left the control of Buddhist organizations and entered the realm of commercial production. This shift produced a “vernacular Buddha” popular in the literary imagination of the early modern period, but unevenly responsive to the canon. Text-critical scholarship about the life of the Buddha emerged in the first decades of the nineteenth century. The book concludes by illuminating the activities of elite modern makers of culture—both lay intellectuals and lay artists—who embraced aspects of historicism to recast the Buddha as a human being and historical figure. These men inducted the Buddha into the distinctly modern, universal cult of great men of the past. This book thus argues that for Japan’s Buddhist heritage, modernity meant not only “secularization,” but also new acts of narrative apotheosis