Buddhist Revival in India

Buddhist Revival in India
Author: Trevor Ling
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 156
Release: 1980-06-19
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1349163104

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A Buddhist Crossroads

A Buddhist Crossroads
Author: Brian Bocking
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2016-04-14
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1317655176

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In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Buddhism in Asia was transformed by the impact of colonial modernity and new technologies and began to spread in earnest to the West. Transnational networking among Asian Buddhists and early western converts engendered pioneering attempts to develop new kinds of Buddhism for a globalized world, in ways not controlled by any single sect or region. Drawing on new research by scholars worldwide, this book brings together some of the most extraordinary episodes and personalities of a period of almost a century from 1860-1960. Examples include Indian intellectuals who saw Buddhism as a homegrown path for a modern post-colonial future, poor whites ‘going native’ as Asian monks, a Brooklyn-born monk who sought to convert Mussolini, and the failed 1950s attempt to train British monks to establish a Thai sangha in Britain. Some of these stories represent creative failures, paths not taken, which may show us alternative possibilities for a more diverse Buddhism in a world dominated by religious nationalisms. Other pioneers paved the way for the mainstreaming of new forms of Buddhism in later decades, in time for the post-1960s takeoff of ‘global Buddhism’. This book was originally published as a special issue of Contemporary Buddhism.

The Buddha and the Sahibs

The Buddha and the Sahibs
Author: Charles Allen
Publisher: John Murray
Total Pages: 333
Release: 2015-09-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 1473617936

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Today there are many Buddhists in the West, but for 2000 years the Buddha's teachings were unknown outside Asia. It was not until the late 18th century, when Sir William Oriental Jones, a British judge in India, broke through the Brahmin's prohibition on learning their sacred language. Sanskrit, that clues about the origins of a religion quite distinct from Hinduism began to be deciphered from inscriptions on pillars and rocks. This study tells the story of the search that followed, as evidence mounted that countries as diverse as Ceylon, Japan and Tibet shared a religion which had its origins in India yet was unknown there. British rule brought to India, Burma and Ceylon a whole band of enthusiastic Orientalist amateurs - soldiers, administrators and adventurers - intent on investigating the subcontinent's lost past. Unwittingly, these men helped lay the foundations for the revival of Buddhism in Asia during the 19th century and its spread to the West in the 20th. Charles Allen's book is a mixture of detective work and story-telling, as this acknowledged master of British Indian history pieces together early Buddhist history to bring a handful of extraoridinary characters to life.

The Buddhist Revival in China

The Buddhist Revival in China
Author: Holmes Welch
Publisher: Cambridge : Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 426
Release: 1968
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780674085701

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Of all the world's major religions, Chinese Buddhism has probably experienced the most traumatic modernization. Less than forty years have separated the self-contained Manchu Empire from the establishment of a Communist state. The consequences are described in this book. Holmes Welch offers the first detailed account of the careers of recent Buddhist leaders and of the diverse organization they started. Eighteen Chinese Buddhist associations are identified as the author traces the struggle for national leadership. The role of T'ai-hsii, the leader best known to Western readers but not, it is shown, among Buddhists, is given a controversial reassessment. After examining the main features of the revival, Welch puts them into a larger political framework. In the process, he offers copious evidence that our picture of Chinese Buddhism has been distorted. What has been termed a "revival" was actually a secular reorientation. The author's conclusion is that this secularization, vigorous as it was, in reality foreshadowed the decline of Chinese Buddhism as a living religion.

Buddhism in Asia

Buddhism in Asia
Author: Nayanjot Lahiri
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2018-02-28
Genre: Buddhism
ISBN: 9789814762069

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The birth of Buddhism goes back to the sixth century BCE and, over the centuries, there has been considerable variety as well as considerable change in its doctrines, practices and propagation across the different parts of Asia. This volume showcases the expansion in the religion's contours and popularity in Asia in modern times. Focusing on India, Sri Lanka and China, the essays in the book highlight the cross-fertilization between Buddhism and contemporary discourses which makes the phenomenon of Buddhist revival in Asia unambiguously modern. They also show how this resurgence assumed a great variety of forms depending on the specificities of the historical and cultural context, including Buddhism's encounter with other religious traditions. Continuities with the past are not absent, and revivalist movements have been characterized and propelled by a strong sense of history and yet this, in effect, involved crafting new interpretations of a distant past, and the introduction of new ideas and practices. The term reinvention seems to capture this aspect of dynamic change better than revival. At the same time, as this volume reveals, the choice of terms is not as important as tracing the trajectories of the phenomenon and the awareness that its impact extended far beyond the religious domain into many spheres, including those of cultural practice, national identity and international relations. This is a historically rich and readable volume which will interest general readers as well as students and scholars of history and of Buddhism.

Theravada Buddhism and the British Encounter

Theravada Buddhism and the British Encounter
Author: Elizabeth Harris
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 546
Release: 2006-04-18
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1134196245

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This major new work explores the British encounter with Buddhism in nineteenth century Sri Lanka, examining the way Buddhism was represented and constructed in the eyes of the British scholars, officials, travellers and religious seekers who first encountered it. Tracing the three main historical phases of the encounter from 1796 to 1900, the book provides a sensitive and nuanced exegesis of the cultural and political influences that shaped the early British understanding of Buddhism and that would condition its subsequent transmission to the West. Expanding our understanding of inter-religious relations between Christians and Buddhists, the book fills a significant gap in the scholarship on Theravada Buddhism in Sri Lanka by concentrating on missionary writings and presenting a thorough exploration of original materials of several important pioneers in Buddhist studies and mission studies.