[Cross-posted from New Books in East Asian Studies] Kevin Gray Carr’s beautiful new book explores the figure of Prince Shōtoku (573? – 622?) the focus of one of the most widespread visual cults in Japanese history. Introducing us to a range of stories materialized in both verbal and visual narratives, Plotting the Prince: Shotoku Cults and the Mapping of Medieval Japanese Buddhism (University of Hawai’i Press, 2012) frames Shōtoku as a symbolic vessel.

Part I of the book looks at the changing identities of the prince as objects of devotion and veneration, tracing his visual cult through the fourteenth century. In this context, the figure of Shōtoku, across multiple lives and associations with other religious figures, grounded a new sacred topography whose center had shifted away from India and China and toward the spaces of Japan.

Part II of the book focuses on the visual culture that mapped the various identities of the prince onto the Japanese sacral landscape. It guides readers through the experience of the paintings in the Hōryū-ji Picture Hall and places them within a wider cultic landscape. Carr introduces the notion of “cognitive maps” that integrated the elements of time, space, and personhood into the many renderings of Shōtoku’s life that were simultaneously cartographic, narrative, and iconic. In addition to this fine-grained and innovative analysis of the time and space of visual materials, Carr also shows readers the centrality of stories and storytelling in helping us make sense of the world around us, and of our own place in it.

[Cross-posted from New Books in East Asian Studies] Lama Zhang, the controversial central figure in Carl S. Yamamoto’s new book may or may not have participated in animal sacrifice, sneezed out a snake-like creature, and engaged in other acts of putative sorcery early in his life. What we can say about this fascinating character, however, is that he was a powerful military and political figure who sustained a community through the “multidimensional mastery” of time, space, and discourse. Vision and Violence: Lama Zhang and the Politics of Charisma in Twelfth-Century Tibet (Brill, 2012) uses Lama Zhang to explore a key moment in Central Tibetan history, the medieval Buddhist revival sometimes known as the Tibetan Renaissance. Yamamoto’s wonderfully multidisciplinary approach considers the centrality, at many different lev els, of practices that transformed fragments into unified wholes in the context of social groups, political institutions, and religious practices in the history of medieval Tibet and its relationship with Buddhism. The book asks us to rethink our notions of lineage, family, and clan in this larger context, and reimagines literary genres in the context of Tibetan and Buddhist texts. Enjoy!

In this important contribution to both the study of South Asian Buddhism as well the burgeoning field of Buddhist modernity, Anne Blackburn‘s Locations of Buddhism: Colonialism and Modernity in Sri Lanka  (The University of Chicago Press, 2010) discusses the life and times of the Sri Lankan Buddhist monk Hikkaḍuvē Sumaṅgala (1827-1911). Coming of age during a time when the British had consolidated colonial rule over the island following centuries of colonial contacts with the Dutch and Portuguese, Hikkaḍuvē Sumaṅgala rose to a position of high authority within the monastic sangha while negotiating several spheres of influence. From engaging in Buddhist-Christian debates and supporting new lay-monastic organizations and corresponding with interested European and American scholars, Hikkaḍuvē Sumaṅgala was deeply engaged in the development of Sri Lankan Buddhism during British colonial rule.

Additionally, Prof. Blackburn’s book addresses some larger methodological and theoretical issues that have puzzled Buddhist scholars for some decades. Such terms as “Protestant Buddhism” and “Buddhist modernism” have been at times useful for researchers attempting to understand how Buddhism developed in the modern era and reacted to colonial contacts. However, these terms have also been used at times imprecisely, applied to a widely disparate set of Buddhisms and Buddhists thus obscuring more than they reveal. Locations of Buddhism raises important questions about how we, as scholars, study Buddhism during the colonial period and points toward new vistas and horizons for further research. It is a valuable contribution to the field.

Americanists have long employed a trope of regionalism to better understand American religions, beliefs, and practices. As many of us know, either by academic study or, more often, personal experience, the United States feels different in New England as compared to the Midwest, the West Coast, or the Deep South. Regional variations on culture play an important role in shaping our identities and informing our religious practices.

Scholars of American Buddhism, however, have been slow to recognize the importance of this trope in how they study Buddhism in the United States. In his new book, Dixie Dharma: Inside a Buddhist Temple in the American South  (University of North Carolina Press, 2012), Jeff Wilson approaches his subject with just this sort of regional gaze. How is Buddhism fundamentally different in the American South as opposed to the West Coast where the majority of ethnographic surveys to date have been done? How do Buddhist negotiate their minority religious status in an overwhelmingly Evangelical Christian culture? How does the physical environment affect their practices? How do they engage with the South’s specific racial history? The focus of his work is one particular community, the Ekoji Buddhist Sangha in Richmond, Virginia. Housed under one roof are five different Buddhist communities who must, first out of necessity and later out of friendship, share space and practice together.

Apart from his use of regionalism as a methodological tool, it is this ethnographic survey that makes Wilson’s book truly engaging. Dixie Dharma is the first book to focus on Buddhism as practiced in the American South, making it an important contribution to an emerging field of study.

In this episode, we talk with Prof. Hank Glassman who’s written a new book titled The Face of Jizō: Image and Cult in Medieval Japanese Buddhism (University of Hawaii Press, 2012). Jizō is a Buddhist Bodhisattva whose presence has become ubiquitous throughout Japan as the protector of travelers, women, and children and childbirth. Historically, though, he has also been closely associated with death and is known as the protector of the six realms of rebirth. In some accounts, this bodhisattva is also conflated with King Yama, the lord of the hell realms, and it according to his mythology, Jizō has vowed now to enter full awakening until all the hell realms have been emptied of suffering sentient beings.

Prof. Glassman’s book is the culmination of decades of interest and research on the cult of Jizō. He is interested in how Jizō came to take such a prominent place in Japanese Buddhism and religious life and practice. His book is extremely well written and accessible, conveying through numerous stories and narratives the life this particular bodhisattva has had in Japanese religious history.

There is a lot of ritual involved in Buddhist practice. As more and more North Americans are discovering Buddhism, they are engaging in more and more Buddhist ritual, despite a general aversion many North Americans have to ritualized behavior. Dr. Patricia Campbell‘s new book, Knowing Body, Moving Mind: Ritualizing and Learning at Two Buddhist Centers (Oxford University Press, 2011), presents an ethnographic survey of two Toronto-based meditation centers and explores the ways in which Buddhists and Buddhist sympathizers engage in Buddhist ritual. Obviously, ritual theory plays an important role in her book as a methodology for analyzing these Buddhist communities; but Dr. Campbell also takes note of the process of embodied learning and how engaging in ritualized behavior affectively changes practitioners. How we come to learn about Buddhism happens not only through the cognitive acquisition of knowledge, but through the process of ritualized practiced.

The book is a great contribution to the growing field of Buddhist studies in North America. A thorough ethnographic study of so-called convert communities combined with an astute analysis of Buddhist ritual makes Dr. Campbell’s book a valuable addition to the field.

Charles Prebish is among the most prominent scholars of American Buddhism. He has been a pioneer in studying the forms that Buddhist tradition has taken in the United States. Now retired, he has written this unusual new book, An American Buddhist Life: Memoirs of a Modern Dharma Pioneer (Sumeru Press, 2011). The book tells the story of Prebish’s role in bringing the field of American Buddhism to prominence. The difficulties he faced in establishing American Buddhism as a legitimate field of study, and in trying to be recognized as a “scholar-practitioner,” will resonate with up-and-coming scholars trying to carve out a new niche for their scholarship. The book is filled with anecdotes about recognized authorities in Buddhist studies, providing a uniquely personal window into the development of the field in the late 20th century and beyond.

Today on “New Books in Buddhist Studies” we’ll be going to hell and back with Bryan Cuevas in a discussion of his new book Travels in the Netherworld: Buddhist Popular Narratives of Death and the Afterlife in Tibet (Oxford University Press, 2008). Common in Tibetan Buddhism is the story of the délok, a person who has died, traveled to the afterlife, and returned to the land of living with some message or moral to share. Délok come from all walks of life–laypersons, lamas, and monks–all figure in these stories. And what they share is a detailed and personal account of their deaths, their journeys to various Buddhist hells and suffering beings they encounter there, and a meeting with the Lord of Death, Yama, who judges their karmic action. Invariably, Yama tells the délok that she or he should return to the living and be a more compassionate, generous, and devoted Buddhist. These morality tales tell us much about religious belief and practice in pre-modern Tibet. But Prof. Cuevas’ important work also has much to say about the limitations of the term “popular” itself. By cutting across both monastic and lay communities, this literature reveals much about common Buddhist understandings of the cosmos both inside and outside the monastery walls.

For many Asian and Western Buddhists today, Buddhism means meditation and an embrace of the world’s interdependence. But that’s not what it meant to Buddhists in the past; most of them never meditated and often saw interdependence (or dependent origination) as something fearful to be escaped. Many scholars, especially recently, have told this story of the transition from pre-modern to modern Buddhism,  but often with no other purpose than to dismiss modern Buddhism as inauthentic, a departure from the “real” Buddhism of ritual chanting and sacred relics. David McMahan‘s book The Making of Buddhist Modernism (Oxford University Press, 2008) tells the story of Buddhist modernism in a balanced way, one that acknowledges its novelty yet remains sympathetic to its concerns and interests. McMahan, who is a professor of religious studies at Franklin and Marshall College, theorizes not only Buddhism but also modernity. Using Charles Taylor’s account of modern life, he explores the forces that changed Buddhism in recent centuries. McMahan discusses typically cited factors (e.g., the emphasis on meditation, the belief in science), but also seldom mentioned (though important) elements of Buddhist modernism like affirmations of nature, interdependence, and everyday life.

Scholars have long been fascinated by the Kamakura era (1185-1333) of Japanese history, a period that saw the emergence of many distinctively Japanese forms of Buddhism. And while a lot of this attention overshadows other equally important periods of Japanese Buddhist history, there is still much to be learned. Take the Buddhist convent known as Hokkeji, located in the old capitol of Nara. Founded in the eighth century, the complex fell into decline and was all but forgotten for centuries before reemerging in the Kamakura period as an important pilgrimage site and as the location of a reestablished monastic order for women.

This is the subject of Lori Meeks’ wonderful new book, Hokkeji and the Reemergence of Female Monastic Orders in Premodern Japan (University of Hawaii Press, 2010). Prof. Meeks questions some of the assumptions and biases of previous scholarship on women in Japanese Buddhism and explores the multivalent ways that Buddhist women were able to assert their autonomy and agency in what is presumed to be an androcentric, patriarchal Japanese Buddhist establishment.

Mentioned in the interview (and in the epilogue of her book) is another Buddhist text called the Ketsubonkyō, or the Blood Bowl Sutra. You can learn more about this and Prof. Meeks’ future work on this subject from the Institute of Buddhist Studies podcast.

The 20th-century Chinese philosopher Mou Zongsan is relatively little known in the West, but has been greatly influential in Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China, as well as influencing Confucian studies in North America. His work helped revive Confucianism at a time when many thought it dead. Yet at the same time, Mou devoted significant scholarly time and effort to writing about Buddhism. Why? Jason Clower‘s The Unlikely Buddhologist: Tiantai Buddhism in Mou Zongsan’s New Confucianism (Brill, 2010) attempts to explain why Mou thought Confucians could benefit from the study of Buddhism. In this interview, he explains Mou’s interest in Buddhism, and demonstrates to us why the study of Chinese Buddhism and Confucianism are inseparable.

Jason Clower is an assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies at California State University, Chico.

New media technology changes culture. And when it comes to religion, new technology changes the way people think and practice their traditions. And while we usually think of technology as some new gadget or machine, there was a time when the written word itself was a new technology, and this had a profound impact how Buddhism was practiced in South and South East Asia. This is the subject of Daniel Veidlinger‘s new book, Spreading the Dhamma: Writing, Orality, and Textual Transmission in Buddhist Northern Thailand (University of Hawaii Press, 2006). In today’s interview, the inaugural show for the New Books in Buddhist Studies channel of the New Books Network, we talk with Prof. Veidlinger about his book and the way some other books changed Buddhism in Thailand. The “other books” we’ll be talking about, of course, are the books of the Buddhist canon, a collection of texts that when printed today runs some 15,000 pages. A millennia ago, however, these texts were carved into palm leaves and just as likely to be memorized as read or studied.

Daniel Veidlinger is an assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies at California State University, Chico. You can learn more about his work in this podcast from the Institute of Buddhist Studies.