Buddhist Dynamics in Premodern and Early Modern Southeast Asia

Buddhist Dynamics in Premodern and Early Modern Southeast Asia
Author: D. Christian Lammerts
Publisher: Flipside Digital Content Company Inc.
Total Pages: 648
Release: 2016-04-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9814762059

The study of historical Buddhism in premodern and early modern Southeast Asia stands at an exciting and transformative juncture. Interdisciplinary scholarship is marked by a commitment to the careful examination of local and vernacular expressions of Buddhist culture as well as to reconsiderations of long-standing questions concerning the diffusion of and relationships among varied texts, forms of representation, and religious identities, ideas, and practices. The twelve essays in this collection, written by leading scholars in Buddhist Studies and Southeast Asian history, epigraphy, and archaeology, comprise the latest research in the field to deal with the dynamics of mainland and (pen)insular Buddhism between the sixth and nineteenth centuries C.E. Drawing on new manuscript sources, inscriptions, and archaeological data, they investigate the intellectual, ritual, institutional, sociopolitical, aesthetic, and literary diversity of local Buddhisms, and explore their connected histories and contributions to the production of intraregional and transregional Buddhist geographies.

Buddhism in Asia

Buddhism in Asia
Author: Nayanjot Lahiri
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2016
Genre: Buddhism
ISBN: 9789350981160

Part I. Buddhism in India: the interface between the ancient and the modern -- part II. Texts, politics and the Sangha in Sri Lanka -- part III. The revival of Buddhism in China -- part IV. Afterword

Esoteric Buddhism in Mediaeval Maritime Asia

Esoteric Buddhism in Mediaeval Maritime Asia
Author: Andrea Acri
Publisher: ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute
Total Pages: 484
Release: 2016-09-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 9814695084

This volume advocates a trans-regional, and maritime-focused, approach to studying the genesis, development and circulation of Esoteric (or Tantric) Buddhism across Maritime Asia from the seventh to the thirteenth centuries ce. The book lays emphasis on the mobile networks of human agents (‘Masters’), textual sources (‘Texts’) and images (‘Icons’) through which Esoteric Buddhist traditions spread. Capitalising on recent research and making use of both disciplinary and area-focused perspectives, this book highlights the role played by Esoteric Buddhist maritime networks in shaping intra-Asian connectivity. In doing so, it reveals the limits of a historiography that is premised on land-based transmission of Buddhism from a South Asian ‘homeland’, and advances an alternative historical narrative that overturns the popular perception regarding Southeast Asia as a ‘periphery’ that passively received overseas influences. Thus, a strong point is made for the appreciation of the region as both a crossroads and rightful terminus of Buddhist cults, and for the re-evaluation of the creative and transformative force of Southeast Asian agents in the transmission of Esoteric Buddhism across mediaeval Asia.

Buddhism Across Asia

Buddhism Across Asia
Author: Tansen Sen
Publisher: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies
Total Pages: 517
Release: 2014-04-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9814519324

"Buddhism across Asia is a must-read for anyone interested in the history and spread of Buddhism in Asia. It comprises a rich collection of articles written by leading experts in their fields. Together, the contributions provide an in-depth analysis of Buddhist history and transmission in Asia over a period of more than 2000 years. Aspects examined include material culture, politics, economy, languages and texts, religious institutions, practices and rituals, conceptualisations, and philosophy, while the geographic scope of the studies extends from India to Southeast Asia and East Asia. Readers' knowledge of Buddhism is constantly challenged by the studies presented, incorporating new materials and interpretations. Rejecting the concept of a reified monolithic and timeless 'Buddhism', this publication reflects the entangled 'dynamic and multi-dimensional' history of Buddhism in Asia over extended periods of 'integration,' 'development of multiple centres,' and 'European expansion,' which shaped the religion's regional and trans-regional identities." -- Max Deeg, Cardiff University "Buddhism Across Asia presents new research on Buddhism in comprehensive spatial and temporal terms. From studies on transmission networks to exegesis on doctrinal matters, linguistics, rituals and practices, institutions, Buddhist libraries, and the religion's interactions with political and cultural spheres as well as the society at large, the volume presents an assemblage of essays of breathtaking breadth and depth. The goal is to demonstrate how the transmission of Buddhist ideas serves as a cultural force, a lynchpin that had connected the societies of Asia from past to present. The volume manifests the vitality and maturity of the field of Buddhist studies, and for that we thank the editor and the erudite authors. " -- Dorothy C. Wong, University of Virginia

Buddhist Trends in Southeast Asia

Buddhist Trends in Southeast Asia
Author: Trevor Ling
Publisher:
Total Pages: 208
Release: 1993
Genre: Religion
ISBN:

There is more than one sort of Buddhism, even within Southeast Asia. The word "Buddhism", in an unspecified sense, has very little heuristic value, and can be a source of confusion in comparative studies within the Southeast Asian region. Buddhisms are in most cases "country-specific". Where regularities in Buddhist polity and Buddhist social action are found in a given cultural region these may have to be accounted for, not simply by being ascribed to one Buddhist tradition but by similarities of social organization and culture within the region. Major differentiations occur at national levels, that is, at the level of the various countries of Southeast Asia. From the earliest period of Buddhism's history it appears that a certain tension existed between Buddhist practitioners and political rulers. It is with some of these major national or local variant forms of Buddhism in Southeast Asia that the present work is concerned. -- Front book flap.

Civilizations in Embrace

Civilizations in Embrace
Author: Amitav Acharya
Publisher: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies
Total Pages: 130
Release: 2013
Genre: History
ISBN: 9814379735

This study revisits one of the most extensive examples of the spread of ideas in the history of civilization: the diffusion of Indian religious and political ideas to Southeast Asia before the advent of Islam and European colonialism. Hindu and Buddhist concepts and symbols of kingship and statecraft helped to legitimize Southeast Asian rulers, and transform the political institutions and authority of Southeast Asia. But the process of this diffusion was not accompanied by imperialism, political hegemony, or "colonization" as conventionally understood. This book investigates different explanations of the spread of Indian ideas offered by scholars, including why and how it occurred and what were its key political and institutional outcomes. It challenges the view that strategic competition is a recurring phenomenon when civilizations encounter each other.

Different Voices

Different Voices
Author: Rosaly Puthucheary
Publisher: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies
Total Pages: 335
Release: 2009
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 981230911X

Focuses on the challenges that face a novelist in the literary representation of a multilingual environment. This book asserts that the methods of language appropriation have a direct connection to how the writer conveys the multilingual nature of the Singapore-Malayan society through the speaking person, developing the central theme of the novel.

The Buddha's Footprint

The Buddha's Footprint
Author: Johan Elverskog
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2020-01-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 0812296702

A corrective to the contemporary idea that Buddhism has always been an environmentally friendly religion In the current popular imagination, Buddhism is often understood to be a religion intrinsically concerned with the environment. The Dharma, the name given to Buddhist teachings by Buddhists, states that all things are interconnected. Therefore, Buddhists are perceived as extending compassion beyond people and animals to include plants and the earth itself out of a concern for the total living environment. In The Buddha's Footprint, Johan Elverskog contends that only by jettisoning this contemporary image of Buddhism as a purely ascetic and apolitical tradition of contemplation can we see the true nature of the Dharma. According to Elverskog, Buddhism is, in fact, an expansive religious and political system premised on generating wealth through the exploitation of natural resources. Elverskog surveys the expansion of Buddhism across Asia in the period between 500 BCE and 1500 CE, when Buddhist institutions were built from Iran and Azerbaijan in the west, to Kazakhstan and Siberia in the north, Japan in the east, and Sri Lanka and Indonesia in the south. He examines the prosperity theology at the heart of the Dharma that declared riches to be a sign of good karma and the means by which spritiual status could be elevated through donations bequeathed to Buddhist institutions. He demonstrates how this scriptural tradition propelled Buddhists to seek wealth and power across Asia and to exploit both the people and the environment. Elverskog shows the ways in which Buddhist expansion not only entailed the displacement of local gods and myths with those of the Dharma—as was the case with Christianity and Islam—but also involved fundamentally transforming earlier social and political structures and networks of economic exchange. The Buddha's Footprint argues that the institutionalization of the Dharma was intimately connected to agricultural expansion, resource extraction, deforestation, urbanization, and the monumentalization of Buddhism itself.

Spirits and Ships

Spirits and Ships
Author: Andrea Acri
Publisher: ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute
Total Pages: 587
Release: 2017-03-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 981476275X

This volume seeks to foreground a “borderless” history and geography of South, Southeast, and East Asian littoral zones that would be maritime-focused, and thereby explore the ancient connections and dynamics of interaction that favoured the encounters among the cultures found throughout the region stretching from the Indian Ocean littorals to the Western Pacific, from the early historical period to the present. Transcending the artificial boundaries of macro-regions and nation-states, and trying to bridge the arbitrary divide between (inherently cosmopolitan) “high” cultures (e.g. Sanskritic, Sinitic, or Islamicate) and “local” or “indigenous” cultures, this multidisciplinary volume explores the metaphor of Monsoon Asia as a vast geo-environmental area inhabited by speakers of numerous language phyla, which for millennia has formed an integrated system of littorals where crops, goods, ideas, cosmologies, and ritual practices circulated on the sea-routes governed by the seasonal monsoon winds. The collective body of work presented in the volume describes Monsoon Asia as an ideal theatre for circulatory dynamics of cultural transfer, interaction, acceptance, selection, and avoidance, and argues that, despite the rich ethnic, linguistic and sociocultural diversity, a shared pattern of values, norms, and cultural models is discernible throughout the region.

The Oxford Handbook of Early Southeast Asia

The Oxford Handbook of Early Southeast Asia
Author: C.F.W. Higham
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 921
Release: 2022-01-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0197564275

Southeast Asia ranks among the most significant regions in the world for tracing the prehistory of human endeavor over a period in excess of two million years. It lies in the direct path of successive migrations from the African homeland that saw settlement by hominin populations such as Homo erectus and Homo floresiensis. The first Anatomically Modern Humans, following a coastal route, reached the region at least 60,000 years ago to establish a hunter gatherer tradition that survives to this day in remote forests. From about 2000 BC, human settlement of Southeast Asia was deeply affected by successive innovations that took place to the north and west, such as rice and millet farming. A millennium later, knowledge of bronze casting penetrated along the same pathways. Copper mines were identified and exploited, and metals were exchanged over hundreds of kilometers. In the Mekong Delta and elsewhere, these developments led to early states of the region, which benefitted from an agricultural revolution involving permanent ploughed rice fields. These developments illuminate how the great early kingdoms of Angkor, Champa, and Funan came to be, a vital stage in understanding the roots of the present nation states of Southeast Asia. Assembling the most current research across a variety of disciplines--from anthropology and archaeology to history, art history, and linguistics--The Oxford Handbook of Early Southeast Asia will present an invaluable resource to experienced researchers and those approaching the topic for the first time.