Gathering Leaves and Lifting Words

Gathering Leaves and Lifting Words
Author: Justin Thomas McDaniel
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2010-12-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 029598922X

Winner of the Henry J. Benda Prize sponsored by the Association for Asian Studies Gathering Leaves and Lifting Words examines modern and premodern Buddhist monastic education traditions in Laos and Thailand. Through five centuries of adaptation and reinterpretation of sacred texts and commentaries, Justin McDaniel traces curricular variations in Buddhist oral and written education that reflect a wide array of community goals and values. He depicts Buddhism as a series of overlapping processes, bringing fresh attention to the continuities of Theravada monastic communities that have endured despite regional and linguistic variations. Incorporating both primary and secondary sources from Thailand and Laos, he examines premodern inscriptional, codicological, anthropological, art historical, ecclesiastical, royal, and French colonial records. By looking at modern sermons, and even television programs and websites, he traces how pedagogical techniques found in premodern palm-leaf manuscripts are pervasive in modern education. As the first comprehensive study of monastic education in Thailand and Laos, Gathering Leaves and Lifting Words will appeal to a wide audience of scholars and students interested in religious studies, anthropology, social and intellectual history, and pedagogy.

The Lovelorn Ghost and the Magical Monk

The Lovelorn Ghost and the Magical Monk
Author: Justin McDaniel
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 362
Release: 2011
Genre: History
ISBN: 0231153767

"Focusing on representations of the ghost and monk from the late eighteenth century to the present, Justin Thomas McDaniel builds a case for interpreting modern Thai Buddhist practice through the movements of these transformative figures ... Listening to popular Thai Buddhist ghost stories, visiting crowded shrines and temples, he finds concepts of attachment, love, wealth, beauty, entertainment, graciousness, security, and nationalism all spring from engagement with the ghost and the monk and are as vital to the making of Thai Buddhism as venerating the Buddha himself."--Jacket.

Cosmopolitan Learning for a Global Era

Cosmopolitan Learning for a Global Era
Author: Sarah Richardson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 182
Release: 2015-09-16
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1317974417

Ensuring that higher education students are fully prepared for lives as global citizens is a pressing concern in the contemporary world. This book draws on insights from cosmopolitan thought to identify how people from different backgrounds can find common ground. By applying cosmopolitan insights to higher education practice, Sarah Richardson charts how students can be given the opportunity to experience a truly international education, which emphasises deep cultural exchange rather than mere transactional contact. Written in an engaging and accessible style, the author uses empirical evidence to show that simply studying alongside those different to themselves or studying overseas are inadequate in preparing students to lead the diverse societies of tomorrow. Instead, the book calls for a coherent approach to higher education that properly prepares students to lead global lives. Chapters highlight a number of key aspects of higher education practice, from curriculum to pedagogy, to educator skills to assessment, and demonstrate how these can be reconsidered to give students the opportunity to gain cosmopolitan attributes during their higher education. Cosmopolitan Learning for a Global Era will be of great interest to researchers, scholars and postgraduate students, with a particular focus on cosmopolitan thought, international education and higher education more broadly, as well as university educators and leaders across a wide range of disciplinary areas.

Routledge Handbook of Southeast Asian History

Routledge Handbook of Southeast Asian History
Author: Norman G. Owen
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 373
Release: 2014-04-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 1135018782

The study of the history of Southeast Asia is still growing, evolving, deepening and changing as an academic field. Over the past few decades historians have added nuance to traditional topics such as Islam and nationalism, and created new ones, such as gender, globalization and the politics of memory. The Routledge Handbook of Southeast Asian History looks at the major themes that have developed in the study of modern Southeast Asian history since the mid-18th century. Contributions by experts in the field are clustered under three major headings - Political History, Economic History, and Social and Cultural History – and chapters challenge the boundaries between topics and regions. Alongside the rise and fall of colonialism, topics include conflict in Southeast Asia, tropical ecology, capitalism and its discontents, the major religions of the region, gender, and ethnicity. The Handbook provides a stimulating introduction to the most important themes within the subject area, and is an invaluable reference work for any student and researcher on Southeast Asia and Asian and World history.

Atheist Secularism and its Discontents

Atheist Secularism and its Discontents
Author: T. Ngo
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2015-07-14
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 113743838X

Atheist Secularism and Its Discontents takes a comparative approach to understanding religion under communism, arguing that communism was integral to the global experience of secularism. Bringing together leading researchers whose work spans the Eurasian continent, it shows that appropriating religion was central to Communist political practices.

Wisdom, Knowledge, and the Postcolonial University in Thailand

Wisdom, Knowledge, and the Postcolonial University in Thailand
Author: Zane Ma Rhea
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2016-12-08
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1137376945

This book examines Thai knowledge and wisdom from the perspective of postmodern, postcolonial globalization. Ma Rhea explores the ways in which the Thai university system attempts to balance old knowledge traditions, Buddhist and rural, with new Thai and imported knowledge. It traces the development of Thai university partnerships with outsiders, focusing on the seventy year relationship between Thailand and Australia. In comparison, it analyses the old Thai Buddhist wisdom tradition and in the final chapters proposes its worthiness as a pedagogical pathway for universities globally.

Theravada Buddhism in Colonial Contexts

Theravada Buddhism in Colonial Contexts
Author: Thomas Borchert
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 393
Release: 2018-04-17
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1351620363

Over the course of the nineteenth century, most of the Theravada world of Southeast Asia came under the colonial domination of European powers. While this has long been seen as a central event in the development of modern forms of Theravada Buddhism, most discussions have focused on specific Buddhist communities or nations, and particularly their resistance to colonialism. The chapters in this book examine the many different colonial contexts and regimes that Theravada Buddhists experienced, not just those of European powers such as the British, French, but also the internal colonialism of China and Thailand. They show that while many Buddhists resisted colonialism, other Buddhists shared agendas with colonial powers, such as for the reform of the monastic community. They also show that in some places, such as Singapore and Malaysia, colonialism enabled the creation of Theravada Buddhist communities. The book demonstrates the importance of thinking about colonialism both locally and regionally. Providing a new understanding of the breadth of experiences of Theravada and colonialism across Asia., this book will be of interest to scholars in the field of Buddhist Studies, Asian History, Comparative World History, Southeast Asian Studies and Religious Studies.

Monastery, Monument, Museum

Monastery, Monument, Museum
Author: Maurizio Peleggi
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2017-10-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 0824866096

Ranging across the longue durée of Thailand’s history, Monastery, Monument, Museum is an eminently readable and original contribution to the study of the kingdom’s art and culture. Eschewing issues of dating, style, and iconography, historian Maurizio Peleggi addresses distinct types of artifacts and artworks as both the products and vehicles of cultural memory. From the temples of Chiangmai to the Emerald Buddha, from the National Museum of Bangkok to the prehistoric culture of Northeast Thailand, and from the civic monuments of the 1930s to the political artworks of the late twentieth century, even well-known artworks and monuments reveal new meanings when approached from this perspective. Part I, “Sacred Geographies,” focuses on the premodern era, when religious credence informed the cultural alteration of landscape, and devotional sites and artifacts, including visual representation of the Buddhist cosmology, were created. Part II, “Antiquities, Museums, and National History,” covers the 1830s through the 1970s, when antiquarianism, and eventually archaeology, emerged and developed in the kingdom, partly the result of a shift in the elites’ worldview and partly a response to colonial and neocolonial projects of knowledge. Part III, “Discordant Mnemoscapes,” deals with civic monuments and artworks that anchor memory of twentieth-century political events and provide stages for both their commemoration and counter-commemoration by evoking the country’s embattled political present. Monastery, Monument, Museum shows us how cultural memory represents a kind of palimpsest, the result of multiple inscriptions, reworkings, and manipulations over time. The book will be a rewarding read for historians, art historians, anthropologists, and Buddhism scholars working on Thailand and Southeast Asia generally, as well as for academic and general readers with an interest in memory and material culture.

Thailand's Theory of Monarchy

Thailand's Theory of Monarchy
Author: Patrick Jory
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2016-05-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 1438460899

2016 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Since the 2006 coup d'état, Thailand has been riven by two opposing political visions: one which aspires to a modern democracy and the rule of law, and another which holds to the traditional conception of a kingdom ruled by an exemplary Buddhist monarch. Thailand has one of the world's largest populations of observant Buddhists and one of its last politically active monarchies. This book examines the Theravada Buddhist foundations of Thailand's longstanding institution of monarchy. Patrick Jory states that the storehouse of monarchical ideology is to be found in the popular literary genre known as the Jātakas, tales of the Buddha's past lives. The best-known of these, the Vessantara Jātaka, disseminated an ideal of an infinitely generous prince as a bodhisatta or future Buddha—an ideal which remains influential in Thailand today. Using primary and secondary source materials largely unknown in Western scholarship, Jory traces the history of the Vessantara Jātaka and its political-cultural importance from the ancient to the modern period. Although pressures from European colonial powers and Buddhist reformers led eventually to a revised political conception of the monarchy, the older Buddhist ideal of kingship has yet endured.

The Cambridge History of Nationhood and Nationalism: Volume 2, Nationalism's Fields of Interaction

The Cambridge History of Nationhood and Nationalism: Volume 2, Nationalism's Fields of Interaction
Author: Cathie Carmichael
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 951
Release: 2023-01-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108697887

This major new reference work with contributions from an international team of scholars provides a comprehensive account of ideas and practices of nationhood and nationalism from antiquity to the present. It considers both continuities and discontinuities, engaging critically and analytically with the scholarly literature in the field. In volume II, leading scholars in their fields explore the dynamics of nationhood and nationalism's interactions with a wide variety of cultural practices and social institutions – in addition to the phenomenon's crucial political dimensions. The relationships between imperialism and nationhood/nationalism and between major world religions and ethno-national identities are among the key themes explained and explored. The wide range of case studies from around the world brings a truly global, comparative perspective to a field whose study was long constrained by Eurocentric assumptions.