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Placing the Origins of the Buddha
Our understanding that the Buddha emerged from the Middle Gangetic region of the Indian subcontinent has been largely unchallenged for the past 200 years. However, can we truly trust our existing knowledge regarding the geographical locations associated with early Buddhism? Could the Buddha’s origins, in fact, lie elsewhere? Tracking the general theory explaining the Buddha’s emergence from the Middle Ganges, this book explores the lesser-known story of colonial Sri Lanka’s connections to the wider nineteenth-century orientalist quest of placing the Buddha across the northern expanses of the subcontinent. By doing so, this book highlights the many flaws and inconsistencies that continue to inform our current understanding of the Buddha’s geographical origins and urges us to rethink the very foundation on which our knowledge of early Buddhism is based.
Seeking Sakyamuni
Though fascinated with the land of their tradition’s birth, virtually no Japanese Buddhists visited the Indian subcontinent before the nineteenth century. In the richly illustrated Seeking Śākyamuni, Richard M. Jaffe reveals the experiences of the first Japanese Buddhists who traveled to South Asia in search of Buddhist knowledge beginning in 1873. Analyzing the impact of these voyages on Japanese conceptions of Buddhism, he argues that South Asia developed into a pivotal nexus for the development of twentieth-century Japanese Buddhism. Jaffe shows that Japan’s growing economic ties to the subcontinent following World War I fostered even more Japanese pilgrimage and study at Buddhism’s foundational sites. Tracking the Japanese travelers who returned home, as well as South Asians who visited Japan, Jaffe describes how the resulting flows of knowledge, personal connections, linguistic expertise, and material artifacts of South and Southeast Asian Buddhism instantiated the growing popular consciousness of Buddhism as a pan-Asian tradition—in the heart of Japan.
Livy's Exemplary History
The Roman historian Livy saw the past as a storehouse of lessons. This text examines how his historical figures manipulate the shifting meaning of the past and reveals Livy's acute sensitivity to contemporary problems.
Hate Speech in Japan
A comprehensive analysis into the background of legal responses to, and wider implications of, hate speech in Japan.
Buddhism Betrayed?
This volume seeks to answer the question of how the Buddhist monks in today's Sri Lanka—given Buddhism's traditionally nonviolent philosophy—are able to participate in the fierce political violence of the Sinhalese against the Tamils.
Tarpeia
Demonstrates how ancient thinkers used Tarpeia's myth to highlight matters of ethics, gender, ethnicity, political authority, language, conquest, and tradition.
Rescued from the Nation
Dharmapala is a galvanizing figure in Sri Lanka's recent history, widely regarded as the nationalist hero who saved the Sinhala people from cultural collapse and whose 'protestant' reformation of Buddhism drove monks toward increased political involvement and ethnic confrontation. Yet he spent the vast majority of his life abroad, dealing with other concerns. Steven Kemper re-evaluates this important figure in the light of an unprecedented number of his writings that paint a picture not of a nationalist zealot but of a spiritual seeker earnest in his pursuit of salvation.
Buddha in the Crown
Historical, anthropological, and philosophical in approach, Buddha in the Crown is a case study in religious and cultural change. It examines the various ways in which Avalokitesvara, the most well known and proliferated bodhisattva of Mahayana Buddhism throughout south, southeast, and east Asia, was assimilated into the transforming religious culture of Sri Lanka, one of the most pluralistic in Asia. Exploring the expressions of the bodhisattva's cult in Sanskrit and Sinhala literature, in iconography, epigraphy, ritual, symbol, and myth, the author develops a provocative thesis regarding the dynamics of religious change. Interdisciplinary in scope, addressing a wide variety of issues relating to Buddhist thought and practice, and providing new and original information on the rich cultural history of Sri Lanka, this book will interest students of Buddhism and South Asia.
