Jewels, Jewelry, and Other Shiny Things in the Buddhist Imaginary is an edited collection of essays that, as described by its editor Vanessa R. Sasson, explores the category of jewels, broadly conceived, in a tradition all too often characterized by austerity. This book includes twelve essays on topics from South Asian, Newar, Tibetan, and East Asian Buddhism, covering a period of more than two millennia and drawing on both literary texts and material culture.
Tag: review
REVIEW: Karma and Punishment: Prison Chaplaincy in Japan, by Adam Lyons
Adam Lyons begins one chapter of his volume, Karma and Punishment: Prison Chaplaincy in Japan, with a joke he says he heard regularly among kyōkaishi, a Japanese role he translates as “prison chaplain”: “Why did you become a prison chaplain? ‘Because I did something terrible in a past life to deserve it’” (p. 216). The wry joke encapsulates some of the heavy and complex stressors that the position entails. Adam Lyons’ volume skillfully navigates the complex tensions involved in the role at present and how it developed since the late 1800s. Karma and Punishment takes the reader on a historical journey to show the origins of kyōkaishi; he shows both how they changed and what stayed consistent through different periods of history. Along the way, Lyons ties these developments to a valuable discourse on the religion-state relations and the evolving laws that oversee those connections.
REVIEW: Faking Liberties: Religious Freedom in American-Occupied Japan, by Jolyon Baraka Thomas
Faking Liberties is divided into two main sections, each consisting of four chapters, with an introduction and conclusion outside of these sections. The sections, respectively, describe the attitudes toward religious freedom before and after the 1945 Occupation of Japan began.
REVIEW: Pure Land: History, Tradition, and Practice, by Charles B. Jones
Charles B. Jones’ Pure Land: History, Tradition, and Practice is an excellent reminder that viewing the whole forest is every bit as important as investigating its individual trees. Not a textbook yet functioning in a somewhat similar role, this synoptic book serves as a wonderful resource for undergraduate teaching with its informal engagement of the reader.
Review: Esoteric Theravada
Kate Crosby’s new work makes available the results of years of very important research into the tradition of esoteric meditation in Southeast Asia. Crosby recovers what had been the most widespread form of Buddhist meditation in Southeast Asia prior to the modern period. In her introduction, Crosby explains that she uses the phrase the “old meditation” (borān kammaṭṭhāna) because the kind of meditation practice that she is examining existed prior to those promoted during the “revival period” that began in the nineteenth century, such as vipassanā or insight.
Review: Why I Am Not a Buddhist
In his recent book, Why I Am Not a Buddhist, Evan Thompson ventures to examine Buddhist modernism, Buddhist exceptionalism, and neural Buddhism. Specifically, Thompson identifies as the goals of his book the desire to present a “philosophical critique of Buddhist modernism” (p. 19) and to argue “for cosmopolitanism, the idea that all human beings belong to a single human community” (p. 21). To Thompson, these two goals are intrinsically intertwined since Buddhist modernists seem to conflate science, especially neuroscience, with what is referred to as Buddhist mindfulness practices…
Review: Be the Refuge
“Where are all the young adult Asian American Buddhists, and what can we learn from them?” In answering these questions, Chenxing Han’s Be the Refuge: Raising the Voices of Asian American Buddhists combats the erasure of Asian American Buddhists in representations of American Buddhism. Despite making up two thirds of the American Buddhist population, Asian Americans are frequently left out of histories of American Buddhism. In “raising the voices of young adult Asian American Buddhists,” Han has created a new American sutra that is at once memoire, ethnography, history, and cultural critique.
Review: The Buddha’s Footprint
Johan Elverskog’s The Buddha’s Footprint is a scathing rebuttal to the popular reception of Buddhism as an eco-friendly, inherently green religious tradition. Through a close interpretive reading of particular points of the Buddhist textual canon and a detailed analysis of historical documents from Buddhist Asia, Elverskog refutes the Eco-Buddhist claim that the Buddhist tradition has historically been a positive force for environmental wellbeing. He summarizes his book’s argument quite well in the conclusion, stating: “Inspired by the Dharma’s prosperity theology, Buddhists were protocapitalists who exploited the natural world relentlessly as they pushed into the frontier” (p. 115). In arguing this position, Elverskog finds himself working against a long-established belief stemming from Max Weber that Buddhism (and Buddhist Asia) lacks “economic rationalism and rational life methodology,” which makes it “apolitical” and “otherworldly” (p. 39), a belief that underpins the contemporary Eco-Buddhist worldview. Nonetheless, he crafts a solid argument against this tradition of thought and highlights the main religious roots, socio-cultural developments, and ecological consequences of Buddhism’s protocapitalist prosperity theology.
Review: Tibetan Buddhism among Han Chinese
Despite the rapid growth of Tibetan Buddhism in the last thirty years among Chinese peoples in mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and throughout the international Chinese diaspora, Han practitioners and their Tibetan Buddhist teachers have remained a relatively understudied part of Chinese religious life. As the first monograph devoted to this subject in nearly a decade, Joshua Esler’s Tibetan Buddhism among Han Chinese marks an important step toward filling this gap in our understanding of the contemporary Chinese religious landscape. Rooted in extensive fieldwork, including more than eighty interviews con- ducted in Beijing, Dechen/Diqing, Lijiang, Hong Kong, and Taiwan in 2011, Esler provides an intimate and richly detailed account of some of the ways in which Tibetan Buddhist teachers and Han practitioners are adapting Tibetan Buddhism to contemporary Chinese societies.
Review: American JewBu
American JewBu: Jews, Buddhists, and Religious Change. By Emily Sigalow. Princeton University Press, 2019. 256 pages. $29.95 (hardcover). ISBN-13: 978- 0691174594. In her book American JewBu: Jews, Buddhists, and Religious Change, Emily Sigalow brings an ethnographic study of self-definition into the scholarly conversation about Jews in the United States, Buddhists in the United States, and how nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first…