New Books in Buddhist Studies
351 episodes - English - Latest episode: 22 days ago - ★★★★ - 29 ratingsInterviews with Scholars of Buddhism about their New Books
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Episodes
Melissa Chakars, “The Socialist Way of Life in Siberia: Transformation in Buryatia” (Central European UP, 2014)
March 25, 2017 15:40 - 46 minutesIn The Socialist Way of Life in Siberia: Transformation in Buryatia (Central European University Press, 2014), Melissa Chakars reveals not only how Soviet policies disrupted traditional Buryat ways of life, but also how Buryats adapted to build a modern educated society in the post-war period. Ethnic Buryats were proportionally over-represented in cultural, educational and media positions in the region, giving a much greater influence than their numbers (20% of the population) would indicate....
Benjamin Schonthal, “Buddhism, Politics and the Limits of the Law: The Pyrrhic Constitutionalism of Sri Lanka” (Cambridge UP, 2016)
March 03, 2017 11:00 - 1 hourIn his recent monograph, Buddhism, Politics and the Limits of Law: The Pyrrhic Constitutionalism of Sri Lanka (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Benjamin Schonthal examines the relationship between constitutional law and religious conflict in Sri Lanka during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Situating his study alongside broader conversations in the field of constitutional law and specifically debates about law’s effects on religion, Schonthal challenges the widely-held idea that co...
Erik W. Davis, “Deathpower: Buddhism’s Ritual Imagination in Cambodia” (Columbia UP, 2015)
January 20, 2017 19:51 - 1 hourIn his recent monograph, Deathpower: Buddhism’s Ritual Imagination in Cambodia (Columbia University Press, 2015), Erik W. Davis explores funerary ritual in contemporary Cambodian Buddhism and the way in which Buddhist monks manage death such that its negative power is harnessed and used for the reproduction of morality and of a particular social reality. The book is organized around two themes, which serve as the warp over and under which Davis skillfully weaves the ethnographic detail result...
Jan Kiely and J. Brooks Jessup, eds., “Recovering Buddhism in Modern China” (Columbia UP, 2016)
December 23, 2016 11:49 - 1 hourThe essays in Jan Kiely and J. Brooks Jessup’s new edited volume, Recovering Buddhism in Modern China (Columbia University Press, 2016), collectively make a compelling argument that Buddhism and Buddhists played important roles in the modern transformations of China from the twentieth century through today. Though history scholarship has, relatively speaking, neglected to pay attention to the roles of Buddhism in these transformations part of a more general tendency to marginalize the signifi...
Patrick Jory, “Thailand’s Theory of Monarchy: The Vessantara Jataka and the Idea of the Perfect Man” (SUNY Press, 2016)
November 20, 2016 11:00 - 57 minutesIn Thailand’s Theory of Monarchy: The Vessantara Jataka and the Idea of the Perfect Man (SUNY Press, 2016; in paperback from 2017), Patrick Jory offers a compelling reinterpretation of religious text as political theory. The Vessantara Jataka is one of the most historically significant stories of Gautama Buddha’s previous births. Rather than reading the jataka as religious narrative or folktale, Jory convincingly resituates it at the centre of statecraft and ruling ideology in pre-modern Thai...
Dale S. Wright, “What is Buddhist Enlightenment?” (Oxford UP, 2016)
October 04, 2016 17:45 - 1 hourThe words “Buddhism” and “enlightenment” are, at least in the West, tightly connected. “Everyone” knows that the goal–or at least one of the goals–of Buddhist practice is “enlightenment.” But what the heck is “enlightenment,” exactly? It’s a tough question, but Dale S. Wright takes it on in his aptly named book What is Buddhist Enlightenment? (Oxford University Press, 2016). Using a kind of Zen approach (my characterization, not his), Wright doesn’t slice and dice the concept in order to come...
Brooke Schedneck, “Thailand’s International Meditation Centers” (Routledge, 2015)
May 16, 2016 14:55 - 1 hourIn her recent monograph, Thailand’s International Meditation Centers: Tourism and the Global Commodification of Religious Practices (Routledge, 2015), Brooke Schedneck examines Buddhist meditation centers in Thailand and draws our attention to the way in which these institutions have creatively (though not always intentionally) altered Buddhist meditation and the meditation retreat format so as to make them accessible to the large number of non-Thai meditators who come to these centers. While...
Erik Hammerstrom, “The Science of Chinese Buddhism: Early Twentieth-Century Engagements” (Columbia UP, 2015)
March 30, 2016 09:53 - 1 hourErik J. Hammerstrom‘s new book looks carefully at “what Chinese Buddhists thought about science in the first part of the twentieth century” by exploring what they wrote in articles and monographs devoted to the topic in the 1920s and early 1930s. The Science of Chinese Buddhism: Early Twentieth-Century Engagements (Columbia University Press, 2015) grounds its analysis in writings that appeared in the Buddhist periodical press between 1923-1932, tracing the development of ideas about the relat...
Pamela D. Winfield, “Icons and Iconoclasm in Japanese Buddhism: Kukai and Dogen on the Art of Enlightenment” (Oxford UP, 2013)
March 29, 2016 23:59 - 42 minutesWhat role do images play in the enlightenment experience? Can Buddha images, calligraphy, mandalas, and portraits function as nodes of access for a practitioner’s experience of enlightenment? Or are these visual representations a distraction from what ultimately matters? Pamela D. Winfield‘s recent award-winning monograph, Icons and Iconoclasm in Japanese Buddhism: Kukai and Dogen on the Art of Enlightenment (Oxford University Press, 2013), explores these major Japanese Buddhist figures artis...
Paul Rouzer, “On Cold Mountain: A Buddhist Reading of the Hanshan Poems” (U. of Washington Press, 2015)
March 14, 2016 15:56 - 1 hourPaul Rouzer‘s new book offers a Buddhist reading of a famous collection of poems and the author associated with them, both of which were called Hanshan, or Cold Mountain. On Cold Mountain: A Buddhist Reading of the Hanshan Poems (University of Washington Press, 2015) presents and proposes what it calls a “Buddhist approach to poetry”: rather than focusing on the intentions of the author in reading poetry, it offers a way of thinking about the importance of the way a poem is read. Pt. 1 of the...
Heather Blair, “Real and Imagined: The Peak of Gold in Heian Japan” (Harvard U Asia Center, 2015)
January 20, 2016 07:17 - 1 hourIn her recent monograph, Real and Imagined: The Peak of Gold in Heian Japan (Harvard University Asia Center, 2015), Heather Blair explores the religious and institutional history of Kinpusen, a mountain in central Japan that served as both a pilgrimage destination for aristocrats from the capital and as a site for mountain asceticism. Focusing her attention on aristocratic, male lay patrons–women were barred from climbing the mountain–she shows how the urban elite saw the mountains (and, in ...
James A. Benn, “Tea in China: A Religious and Cultural History” (U of Hawaii Press, 2015)
January 04, 2016 11:26 - 1 hourJames A. Benn‘s new book is a history of tea as a religious and cultural commodity in China before it became a global commodity in the nineteenth century. Focusing on the Tang and Song dynasties (with brief extensions earlier and later), Tea in China: A Religious and Cultural History (University of Hawaii Press, 2015) demonstrates that a “shift to drinking tea” in China “brought with it a total reorientation of Chinese culture.” Benn pays careful attention to the challenges and opportunities ...
Janet Gyatso, Being Human in a Buddhist World: An Intellectual History of Medicine in Early Modern Tibet (Columbia University Press, 2015)
December 18, 2015 17:15 - 1 hourJanet Gyatso‘s new book is a masterfully researched, compellingly written, and gorgeously illustrated history of medicine in early modern Tibet that looks carefully at the relationships between medicine and religion in this context. Being Human in a Buddhist World: An Intellectual History of Medicine in Early Modern Tibet (Columbia University Press, 2015) looks carefully at the “double movements” of medicine and religion from the twelfth through seventeenth centuries: at the same time, medica...
Maria Heim, “The Forerunner of All Things: Buddhaghosa on Mind, Intention and Agency” (Oxford UP, 2013)
November 08, 2015 18:46 - 59 minutesBuddhaghosa, a fifth-century Pali Buddhist scholar or group of scholars, is the most influential commentator in Theravada Buddhist tradition, who has in many respects created the set of ideas we now associate with Theravada Buddhism today. Maria Heim‘s new The Forerunner of All Things (Oxford University Press, 2013) is one of the few books to explore Buddhaghosa’s extremely wide corpus of work on a whole. She focuses on the theme of intention (cetana) to explore how Buddhaghosa articulates a ...
Sarah H. Jacoby, “Love and Liberation: Autobiographical Writings of the Tibetan Buddhist Visionary Sera Khandro” (Columbia UP, 2014)
September 26, 2015 20:31 - 3 minutesSarah H. Jacoby‘s recent monograph, Love and Liberation: Autobiographical Writings of the Tibetan Buddhist Visionary Sera Khandro (Columbia University Press, 2014), focuses on the extraordinary life and times of the Tibetan laywoman Sera Khandro and uses her story to examine a number of important issues in the study of Tibetan Buddhism. Sera Khandro was born in 1892 to well-off parents in cosmopolitan Lhasa, but ran-away to eastern Tibet at the age of fifteen, hoping to fulfill her religious...
Steven E. Kemper, “Rescued from the Nation: Anagarika Dharmapala and the Buddhist World” (U of Chicago Press, 2015)
June 27, 2015 12:42 - 1 hourIn his recent book, Rescued from the Nation: Anagarika Dharmapala and the Buddhist World (University of Chicago Press, 2015), Steven E. Kemper examines the Sinhala layman Anagarika Dharmapala (1864-1933) and argues that this figure has been misunderstood by both Sinhala nationalists, who have appropriated him for their own political ends, and scholars, who have portrayed Dharmapala primarily as a social reformer and a Sinhala chauvinist. Making extensive use of theJournal of the Mahabodhi Soc...
Tenzin Chogyel (trans. Kurtis R. Schaeffer), “The Life of the Buddha” (Penguin Books, 2015)
June 08, 2015 13:14 - 1 hourKurtis R. Schaeffer‘s new translation of Tenzin Chogyel’s The Life of the Buddha(Penguin Books, 2015) is a boon for teachers, researchers, and eager readers alike. Composed in the middle of the eighteenth century, The Life of the Buddha (or more fully rendered, The Life of the Lord Victor Shakyamuni, Ornament of One Thousand Lamps for the Fortunate Eon) takes the form of twelve major life episodes that collectively provide a “blueprint for an ideal Buddhist life,” as readers follow the Bodhis...
Andrea Jain, “Selling Yoga: From Counterculture to Pop Culture” (Oxford UP, 2014)
May 13, 2015 17:20 - 1 hourIs yoga religious? This question has not only been asked recently by the broader public but also posed in the courts. Many argue that of course it is. The story of yoga in the popular imagination is often narrated as an ancient wisdom tradition that informs contemporary postural movements which are intricately connected and indivisible. Others contend that contemporary yoga is simply a set of health practices that have nothing to do with religion. In Selling Yoga: From Counterculture to Pop ...
John K. Nelson, “Experimental Buddhism: Innovation and Activism in Contemporary Japan” (U of Hawaii Press, 2013)
May 07, 2015 06:00 - 1 hourIn his recent book, Experimental Buddhism: Innovation and Activism in Contemporary Japan (University of Hawaii Press, 2013), John K. Nelson delves into the historical circumstances that have led to the declining fortunes of Japanese Buddhism and explores recent and ongoing attempts by Japanese Buddhist clerics to render Buddhism relevant to Japanese society once again. Based on extensive fieldwork, interviews, and the author’s own participation in some of the innovative programs featured in t...
Stuart Young, “Conceiving the Indian Buddhist Patriarchs in China” (U of Hawaii Press, 2014)
April 25, 2015 17:32 - 1 hourIn Conceiving the Indian Buddhist Patriarchs in China (University of Hawai’i Press, 2015), Stuart Young examines Chinese hagiographic representations of three Indian Buddhist patriarchs–Asvaghosa (Maming), Nagarjuna (Longshu), and Aryadeva (Sheng tipo)–from the early fifth to late tenth centuries, and explores the role that these representations played in the development of Chinese Buddhism’s self-awareness of its own position within Buddhist history and its growing confidence that Buddhism c...
Kurtis R. Schaeffer, et al. “The Tibetan History Reader/Sources of Tibetan Tradition” (Columbia UP, 2013)
April 11, 2015 20:32 - 1 hourTwo new books have recently been published that will change the way we can study and teach Tibetan studies, and Gray Tuttle and Kurtis Schaeffer were kind enough to talk with me recently about them. The Tibetan History Reader (Columbia University Press, 2013), edited by Tuttle and Schaeffer, is a chronologically-organized set of essays that collectively introduce key topics and themes in Tibetan history from prehistory all the way through the twentieth century. It collects and in some cases e...
Agnieszka Helman-Wazny, “The Archaeology of Tibetan Books” (Brill, 2014)
March 21, 2015 10:31 - 1 hourIn Archaeology of Tibetan Books (Brill, 2014), Agnieszka Helman-Wazny explores the varieties of artistic expression, materials, and tools that have shaped Tibetan books over the millennia. Digging into the history of the bookmaking craft, the author approaches these ancient texts primarily through the lens of their artistry, while simultaneously showing them as physical objects embedded in pragmatic, economic, and social frameworks. She provides analyses of several significant Tibetan books w...
Tanya Storch, “The History of Chinese Buddhist Bibliography: Censorship and Transformation of the Tripitaka (Cambria, 2014),
March 18, 2015 11:46 - 1 hourTanya Storch‘s recent book, The History of Chinese Buddhist Bibliography: Censorship and Transformation of the Tripitaka (Cambria, 2014), focuses on the development of Chinese Buddhist catalogs from their first appearance in the third century to the eighth century, when printed editions of the canon took over the catalog’s role of identifying and delimiting the Chinese Buddhist canon. Storch has written this work with two goals in mind, which correspond to two different audiences she is targe...
Alicia Turner, “Saving Buddhism: The Impermanence of Religion in Colonial Burma” (U Hawaii Press, 2014)
March 13, 2015 11:40 - 1 hourIn Saving Buddhism: The Impermanence of Religion in Colonial Burma (University of Hawaii Press, 2014), Alicia Turner tells the story of how Burmese Buddhists reimagined their lives, their religious practice and politics in the period of 1890 to 1920, following the fall of Mandalay to the British. Whereas many histories narrate the modern anti-colonial struggle in Burma from the 1920s onwards, Turner shows how in the preceding decades Buddhists were working to navigate, explain and respond to ...
Meir Shahar and John Kieschnick, “India in the Chinese Imagination” (U of Pennsylvania Press, 2014)
February 11, 2015 11:31 - 1 hourIn India in the Chinese Imagination: Myth, Religion, and Thought (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), eleven scholars (including editors John Kieschnick and Meir Shahar) examine the Chinese reception of Indian ideas and myth, and address Chinese attempts to recreate India within the central kingdom. Beginning with Victor Mair’s argument that it was Buddhist theories about reality that allowed fiction to flourish in China, and ending with Stephen R. Bokenkamp’s study of celestial scripts ...
Charlotte Eubanks, “Miracles of Book and Body: Buddhist Textual Culture and Medieval Japan (U of California Press, 2011)
February 06, 2015 16:10 - 1 hourIn Miracles of Book and Body: Buddhist Textual Culture and Medieval Japan (University of California Press, 2011), Charlotte Eubanks examines the relationship between MahÄyÄna Buddhist sÅ«tras and the human body, using Japanese tale literature (setsuwa) as a lens through which to understand this particular aspect of Buddhist textual culture and the way in which text and body are not as separate as we usually assume. Two of the questions she wants to answer are “What do sÅ«tras want?” and “W...
R. Keller Kimbrough, “Wondrous Brutal Fictions: Eight Buddhist Tales from the Early Japanese Puppet Theater” (Columbia UP, 2013)
January 23, 2015 11:25 - 1 hourIn his recent book, Wondrous Brutal Fictions: Eight Buddhist Tales from the Early Japanese Puppet Theater (Columbia University Press, 2013), R. Keller Kimbrough provides us with eight beautifully translated sekkyÅ and ko-jÅruri. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/buddhist-studies
Erik Braun, “The Birth of Insight: Meditation, Modern Buddhism, and the Burmese Monk Ledi Sayadaw” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)
January 08, 2015 06:00 - 1 hourErik Braun‘s recent book, The Birth of Insight: Meditation, Modern Buddhism, and the Burmese Monk Ledi Sayadaw (University of Chicago Press, 2013), examines the spread of Burmese Buddhist meditation practices during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the social, political, and intellectual historical contexts that gave rise to this development. Braun accomplishes this by focusing on the role that the Burmese monk Ledi Sayadaw (1846-1923) played in this movement, drawing primarily on L...
Jacob Dalton, “The Taming of the Demons: Violence and Liberation in Tibetan Buddhism” (Yale University Press, 2011)
December 25, 2014 20:11 - 1 hourJacob Dalton‘s recent book, The Taming of the Demons: Violence and Liberation in Tibetan Buddhism (Yale University Press, 2011), examines violence (both symbolic and otherwise) in Tibetan Buddhism. Dalton focuses in particular on the age of fragmentation (here 842-986 CE), and draws on previously unexamined Dunhuang manuscripts to show that this period was one of great creativity and innovation, and a time when violent myths and rituals were instrumental in adapting Buddhism to local interest...
Clark Chilson, “Secrecy’s Power: Covert Shin Buddhists in Japan and Contradictions of Concealment” (University of Hawaii Press, 2014)
November 11, 2014 15:04 - 1 hourClark Chilson‘s new book, Secrecy’s Power: Covert Shin Buddhists in Japan and Contradictions of Concealment (University of Hawai’i Press, 2014) examines secret groups of Shin (i.e., True Pure Land Buddhist) practitioners from the thirteenth century onward, but focuses primarily on the past 150 years. Although today at least thirty different lineages of secret Shin continue to operate, with a total estimated membership numbering in the tens of thousands, because they have been so successful at...
Paul Copp, “The Body Incantatory: Spells and the Ritual Imagination in Medieval Chinese Buddhism” (Columbia UP, 2014)
October 27, 2014 13:03 - 59 minutesPaul Copp‘s new book, The Body Incantatory: Spells and the Ritual Imagination in Medieval Chinese Buddhism (Columbia University Press, 2014), focuses on Chinese interpretations and uses of two written dharani during the last few centuries of the first millennium. Based on extensive research on the material forms that these dharani took, Copp departs from a tradition of scholarship that focuses on the sonic quality and spoken uses of these spells, drawing our attention instead to how written a...
Chun-fang Yu, “Passing the Light: The Incense Light Community and Buddhist Nuns in Contemporary Taiwan” (U of Hawaii Press, 2013)
October 14, 2014 12:06 - 1 hourChan-fang Yu‘s new book, Passing the Light: The Incense Light Community and Buddhist Nuns in Contemporary Taiwan (University of Hawaii Press, 2013), focuses on a community of nuns in Taiwan founded in the early 1980s, and discusses the appearance and development of this community within the context of rapidly changing social and economic circumstances in Taiwan during the last half of the twentieth century. Based on extensive fieldwork and numerous interviews conducted between the mid-1990s ...
Mark Epstein, “The Trauma of Everyday Life” (Penguin Press, 2013)
October 13, 2014 06:00 - 53 minutesBeing human, much of our energy goes into resisting the basic mess of life, but messy it is nonetheless. The trick (as psychoanalysts know) is to embrace it all anyway. “Trauma is an indivisible part of human existence. It takes many forms but spares no one,” so writes psychiatrist and practicing Buddhist Dr. Mark Epstein. Epstein illustrates this truth by offering a psychoanalytic reading of the life of the Buddha in his latest work, The Trauma of Everyday Life (Penguin Press, 2013). It’s a...
James Carter, “Heart of Buddha, Heart of China: The Life of Tanxu, a Twentieth-Century Monk” (Oxford UP, 2011)
June 11, 2014 13:52 - 1 hourJay Carter‘s new book follows the life of one man as a way of opening a window into the lived history of twentieth-century China. Heart of Buddha, Heart of China: The Life of Tanxu, a Twentieth-Century Monk (Oxford University Press, 2011; paperback edition 2014) is less a traditional biography than a life of an emergent modern nation as told through the experiences of a single individual whose relationships embodied the history of that nation in flesh, bones, and blood. Born in 1875 as Wang S...
Kathleen D. Singh, “The Grace in Dying: A Message of Hope, Comfort and Spiritual Transformation” (HarperOne, 2013)
April 03, 2014 18:07 - 48 minutesIn this brilliantly conceived and beautifully written book, Kathleen Dowling Singh illuminates the profound psychological and spiritual transformations experiences by the dying as the natural process of death reconnects them with the source of their being. Examining the end of life in the light of current psychological understanding, religious wisdom, and compassionate medical science, The Grace of Dying offers a fresh, deeply comforting message of hope and courage as we contemplate the mean...
Robert K. C. Forman, “Enlightenment Ain’t What It’s Cracked Up To Be” (Changemakers Books, 2011)
December 10, 2013 18:52 - 1 hourIn these times, when more and more people are looking for spiritual truth and engage in practices like meditation, it’s hard to know what to expect from attaining a lofty goal like Enlightenment. What does Enlightenment look like? What happens when we attain it? What does it mean in terms of our relationships? Our families? Our jobs? In his book Enlightenment Ain’t What It’s Cracked Up To Be (Changemakers Books, 2011), spiritual teacher and religious scholar Robert K. C. Forman explores the ...
Jane Iwamura, “Virtual Orientalism: Religion and Popular Culture in the U.S.” Oxford University Press, 2011
August 22, 2013 17:20 - 1 hourIn popular perception, a certain image arises when we imagine eastern religions. Perhaps, we envision a wise old Asian man in traditional clothing sitting in a meditative state (maybe not). But why does this image emerge? Jane Iwamura, Chair of The Department of Religious Studies at the University of the West, examines this “Oriental Monk” figure in Virtual Orientalism: Religion and Popular Culture in the U.S. (Oxford University Press, 2011). Iwamura outlines the history of popular representa...
Stephen T. Asma, “Against Fairness” (University of Chicago, 2013)
April 05, 2013 17:23 - 1 hourModern liberalism is built on the principle of equality and its corollary, the principle of fairness (treating equals equally). But have we taken the one and the other too far? Are we deceiving ourselves about our ability to treat each others equally, that is, to be “fair?” In his provocative new book Against Fairness (University of Chicago, 2013), Stephen T. Asma makes the case that we have indeed become kind of fairness-mad, and that this madness has led us all to be (at best) hypocrites ...
Kevin Gray Carr, “Plotting the Prince: Shotoku Cults and the Mapping of Medieval Japanese Buddhism” (University of Hawai’i Press, 2012)
February 06, 2013 15:53 - 1 hourKevin Gray Carr‘s beautiful new book explores the figure of Prince Shotoku (573? – 622?) the focus of one of the most widespread visual cults in Japanese history. Introducing us to a range of stories materialized in both verbal and visual narratives, Plotting the Prince: Shotoku Cults and the Mapping of Medieval Japanese Buddhism (University of Hawai’i Press, 2012) frames Shotoku as a symbolic vessel. Part I of the book looks at the changing identities of the prince as objects of devotion an...
Carl S. Yamamoto, “Vision and Violence: Lama Zhang and the Politics of Charisma in Twelfth-Century Tibet” (Brill, 2012)
October 24, 2012 19:39 - 1 hourLama Zhang, the controversial central figure in Carl S. Yamamoto‘s new book may or may not have participated in animal sacrifice, sneezed out a snake-like creature, and engaged in other acts of putative sorcery early in his life. What we can say about this fascinating character, however, is that he was a powerful military and political figure who sustained a community through the “multidimensional mastery” of time, space, and discourse. Vision and Violence: Lama Zhang and the Politics of Char...
Anne M. Blackburn, “Locations of Buddhism: Colonialism and Modernity in Sri Lanka,” (The University of Chicago Press, 2010)
August 23, 2012 18:35 - 1 hourIn this important contribution to both the study of South Asian Buddhism as well the burgeoning field of Buddhist modernity, Anne Blackburn‘s Locations of Buddhism: Colonialism and Modernity in Sri Lanka (The University of Chicago Press, 2010) discusses the life and times of the Sri Lankan Buddhist monk Hikkaduve. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/buddhist-studies
Jeff Wilson, “Dixie Dharma: Inside a Buddhist Temple in the American South” (UNC Press, 2012)
July 20, 2012 20:33 - 1 hourAmericanists have long employed a trope of regionalism to better understand American religions, beliefs, and practices. As many of us know, either by academic study or, more often, personal experience, the United States feels different in New England as compared to the Midwest, the West Coast, or the Deep South. Regional variations on culture play an important role in shaping our identities and informing our religious practices. Scholars of American Buddhism, however, have been slow to recog...
Hank Glassman, “The Face of JizÅ: Image and Cult in Medieval Japanese Buddhism” (University of Hawai’i Press, 2012)
May 10, 2012 14:11 - 56 minutesIn this episode, we talk with Prof. Hank Glassman who’s written a new book titled The Face of Jizo : Image and Cult in Medieval Japanese Buddhism (University of Hawaii Press, 2012). Jizo is a Buddhist Bodhisattva whose presence has become ubiquitous throughout Japan as the protector of travelers, women, and children and childbirth. Historically, though, he has also been closely associated with death and is known as the protector of the six realms of rebirth. In some accounts, this bodhisattva...
Justin Thomas McDaniel, “The Lovelorn Ghost and the Magical Monk: Practicing Buddhism in Modern Thailand” (Columbia University Press, 2011)
December 07, 2011 17:04 - 1 hourWhen most people think of Buddhism they begin to imagine a lone monk in the forest or a serene rock garden. The world of ghosts, amulets, and magic are usually from their mind. They may even feel some aversion to the notion that the meditative calm of monks from the East could have anything to do with these superstitious ideas and practices. Justin Thomas McDaniel, associate professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, challenges many of theses preconcei...
Patricia Campbell, “Knowing Body, Moving Mind: Ritualizing and Learning at Two Buddhist Centers” (Oxford UP, 2011)
November 03, 2011 16:29 - 50 minutesThere is a lot of ritual involved in Buddhist practice. As more and more North Americans are discovering Buddhism, they are engaging in more and more Buddhist ritual, despite a general aversion many North Americans have to ritualized behavior. Dr. Patricia Campbell‘s new book, Knowing Body, Moving Mind: Ritualizing and Learning at Two Buddhist Centers (Oxford University Press, 2011), presents an ethnographic survey of two Toronto-based meditation centers and explores the ways in which Buddhis...
Charles Prebish, “An American Buddhist Life: Memoirs of a Modern Dharma Pioneer” (Sumeru Press, 2011)
October 05, 2011 14:30 - 1 hourCharles Prebish is among the most prominent scholars of American Buddhism. He has been a pioneer in studying the forms that Buddhist tradition has taken in the United States. Now retired, he has written this unusual new book, An American Buddhist Life: Memoirs of a Modern Dharma Pioneer (Sumeru Press, 2011). The book tells the story of Prebish’s role in bringing the field of American Buddhism to prominence. The difficulties he faced in establishing American Buddhism as a legitimate field of s...
Bryan J. Cuevas, “Travels in the Netherworld: Buddhist Popular Narratives of Death and the Afterlife in Tibet” (Oxford UP, 2008)
September 23, 2011 16:45 - 59 minutesToday on “New Books in Buddhist Studies” we’ll be going to hell and back with Bryan Cuevas in a discussion of his new book Travels in the Netherworld: Buddhist Popular Narratives of Death and the Afterlife in Tibet(Oxford University Press, 2008). Common in Tibetan Buddhism is the story of the delok, a person who has died, traveled to the afterlife, and returned to the land of living with some message or moral to share. Delok come from all walks of life–laypersons, lamas, and monks–all figure...
David McMahan, “The Making of Buddhist Modernism” (Oxford UP, 2008)
September 02, 2011 18:30 - 58 minutesFor many Asian and Western Buddhists today, Buddhism means meditation and an embrace of the world’s interdependence. But that’s not what it meant to Buddhists in the past; most of them never meditated and often saw interdependence (or dependent origination) as something fearful to be escaped. Many scholars, especially recently, have told this story of the transition from pre-modern to modern Buddhism, but often with no other purpose than to dismiss modern Buddhism as inauthentic, a departure ...
Lori Meeks, “Hokkeji and the Reemergence of Female Monastic Orders in Premodern Japan” (University of Hawaii Press, 2010)
June 20, 2011 14:35 - 58 minutesScholars have long been fascinated by the Kamakura era (1185-1333) of Japanese history, a period that saw the emergence of many distinctively Japanese forms of Buddhism. And while a lot of this attention overshadows other equally important periods of Japanese Buddhist history, there is still much to be learned. Take the Buddhist convent known as Hokkeji, located in the old capitol of Nara. Founded in the eighth century, the complex fell into decline and was all but forgotten for centuries bef...
Jason Clower, “The Unlikely Buddhologist: Tiantai Buddhism in Mou Zongsan’s New Confucianism” (Brill, 2010)
June 10, 2011 15:42 - 1 hourThe 20th-century Chinese philosopher Mou Zongsan is relatively little known in the West, but has been greatly influential in Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China, as well as influencing Confucian studies in North America. His work helped revive Confucianism at a time when many thought it dead. Yet at the same time, Mou devoted significant scholarly time and effort to writing about Buddhism. Why? Jason Clower‘s The Unlikely Buddhologist: Tiantai Buddhism in Mou Zongsan’s New Confucianism (Bril...