Buddhism in america

Over the past half century in America, Buddhism has grown from a transplanted philosophy to a full-fledged religious movement, rich in its own practices, leaders, adherents, and institutions. Long favored as an essential guide to this history, Buddhism in America covers the three major groups tha...

Conjuring the buddha

Jacob P. Dalton offers a history of early tantric Buddhist ritual through the lens of the Tibetan manuscripts discovered near Dunhuang on the ancient Silk Road. He argues that the spread of ritual manuals offered Buddhists an extracanonical literary form through which to engage with their traditi...

Deathpower

Radically recasts attitudes toward the nature of Southeast Asian Buddhism’s interactions with local religious practice and reorients our understanding of Buddhism itself.

Food of sinful demons

Tibetan Buddhism teaches compassion toward all beings, a category that explicitly includes animals. Slaughtering animals is morally problematic at best and, at worst, completely incompatible with a religious lifestyle. Yet historically most Tibetans—both monastic and lay—have made meat a regular ...

Image and imagination in mongolian buddhism

This book is a groundbreaking interdisciplinary exploration of Mongolian Buddhism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, drawing on previously unexamined writings and artworks to shed new light on the intricate interrelationships that define this tradition.

Indian esoteric buddhism

Despite the rapid spread of Buddhism—especially the esoteric system of Tantra, one of its most popular yet most misunderstood forms—the historical origins of Buddhist thought and practice remain obscure. This groundbreaking work describes the genesis of the Tantric movement in early medieval Indi...

Living karma

Ouyi Zhixu (1599–1655) was an eminent Chinese Buddhist monk who, contrary to his contemporaries, believed karma could be changed. Drawing attention to Ouyi's unique reshaping of religious practice, Living Karma reasserts the significance of an overlooked individual in the modern development of Ch...

Mountain dharma

A groundbreaking exploration of individual long-term meditative retreat in Tibetan Buddhism, Mountain Dharma tracks developments in ascetic discourse and practice from the twelfth century to the twentieth.

Pessimism, quietism and nature as refuge

How do we, as individuals, accommodate a pessimistic and misanthropic view of the world? If the human condition is impossible to ameliorate, then how should we live? To bring about the wellbeing and happiness we seek, argues Cooper, requires a quietism that seeks refuge from the everyday human wo...

Readings of śāntideva's guide to bodhisattva practice

Śāntideva’s eighth-century work the Guide to Bodhisattva Practice (Bodhicaryāvatāra) is one of the crucial texts of the Buddhist ethical and philosophical tradition. This book serves as a companion to this Indian Buddhist classic, illuminating the Guide’s many philosophical, literary, ritual, and...

Readings of the vessantara jātaka

Anthropologists, textual scholars in religious and Buddhist studies, and art historians engage in sophisticated readings of the text and its ethics of giving, understanding of attachment and nonattachment, depiction of the trickster, and unique performative qualities

Religion, food, and eating in north america

The way in which religious people eat reflects not only their understanding of food and religious practice but also their conception of society and their place within it. This anthology considers theological foodways, identity foodways, negotiated foodways, and activist foodways in the United Sta...

Searching for the body

In the early fifteenth century, two Tibetan monks debated how to transform the body ritually into a celestial palace inhabited by buddhas. Searching for the Body demonstrates the significance of this debate for understandings of Tibetan Buddhism as well as conversations on representation and embo...

Secret oral teachings in tibetan buddhist sects

This is an account of the Madhyamika (Middle Way) school of Buddhism.

Spells, images, and mandalas

Koichi Shinohara traces the evolution of Esoteric Buddhist rituals from the simple recitation of spells in the fifth century to complex systems involving image worship, mandala initiation, and visualization practices in the ninth century. He presents an important new reading of a seventh-century ...

Spreading buddha's word in east asia

This volume follows the making of the Chinese Buddhist canon from the fourth century to the digital era. Approaching the subject from a historical perspective, it ties the religious, social, and textual practices of canon formation to the development of East Asian Buddhist culture.

The body incantatory

The Body Incantatory reveals the histories and logics of practice of deeply embodied forms of Buddhist ritual. Paul Copp vividly captures the diversity of Buddhist practice among medieval monks, ritual healers, and other individuals lost to history, offering a corrective to accounts that have ove...

The buddha's wizards

Belief in wizard-saints who protect their devotees and intervene in the world is widespread among Burmese Buddhists. The Buddha’s Wizards is a historically informed, ethnographic study that explores the supernatural landscape of Buddhism in Myanmar to explain the persistence of wizardry as a form...

The fruitful darkness

The gathering of intentions

The Gathering of Intentions reads a single Tibetan Buddhist ritual system through the movements of Tibetan history, revealing the social and material dimensions of an ostensibly timeless tradition. By subjecting tantric practice to historical analysis, the book offers new insight into the origins...

The lovelorn ghost and the magical monk

Stories centering on the lovelorn ghost (Mae Nak) and the magical monk (Somdet To) are central to Thai Buddhism. Historically important and emotionally resonant, these characters appeal to every class of follower. Metaphorically and rhetorically powerful, they invite constant reimagining across t...

The teachings of master wuzhu

The Record of the Dharma-Jewel Through the Generations (Lidai fabao ji) is a little-known Chan/Zen Buddhist text of the eighth century, rediscovered in 1900 at the Silk Road oasis of Dunhuang. The only remaining artifact of the Bao Tang Chan school of Sichuan, the text provides a fascinating sect...

Wisdom as a way of life

This wide-ranging and powerful book argues that Theravāda Buddhism provides ways of thinking about the self that can reinvigorate the humanities and offer broader insights into how to learn and how to act.