This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1979.
Buddhist Literature as Philosophy, Buddhist Philosophy as Literature
Relations between China and India underwent a dramatic transformation from Buddhist-dominated to commerce-centered exchanges in the seventh to fifteenth centuries. The unfolding of this transformation, its causes, and wider ramifications are examined in this masterful analysis of the changing patterns of the interaction between the two most important cultural spheres in Asia. Tansen Sen offers a new perspective on Sino-Indian relations during the Tang dynasty (618-907), arguing that the period...
Buddhism in Mongolian History, Culture, and Society
Buddhism in Mongolia explores the unique historical and cultural elements of Mongolian Buddhism while challenging its stereotyped image as a mere replica of Tibetan Buddhism. Vesna A. Wallace brings together an interdisciplinary group of leading scholars to explore the interaction between the Mongolian indigenous culture and Buddhism, the features that Buddhism acquired through its adaptation to the Mongolian cultural sphere, and the ways Mongols have been constructing their Mongolian Buddhist i...
This volume contains the proceedings of two international meetings held by the Minerva Center for the Relations between Israel and Aram in Biblical Times (RIAB) in Ramat-Gan/Jerusalem (March 2017) and Leipzig (May 2018). Most of the papers relate to various aspects of the Aramaic epigraphy in different contexts with a second part of the volume dealing with Idumean ostraca. The papers will be of interest to ancient historians, archaeologists of the ancient Near East, scholars of Semitic and Bibli...
Sacred Landscape in Medieval Afghanistan (Oxford Oriental Monographs)
by Arezou Azad
This book is about a sacred place called Balkh, known to the ancient Greeks as Bactra. Located in the north of today's Afghanistan, along the silk road, Balkh was holy to many. The Prophet Zoroaster is rumoured to have died here, and during late antiquity, Balkh was the home of the Naw Bahar, a famed Buddhist temple and monastery. By the tenth century, Balkh had become a critical centre of Islamic learning and early poetry in the New Persian language that grew after the Islamic conquests and con...
A rich blend of history, legend, poetry, adventure, and romance, The Clear Mirror is a treasure-trove of traditional Tibetan narrative and folk wisdom. It presents in full the often-cited but elusive accounts of the origins of the Tibetan people, the coming of the Dharma to Tibet, and the appearance of Avalokiteshvara as the patron deity of Tibet. The text treats the era during which Buddhism came to Tibet, Lhasa became the capital, and the Jokhang and Ramoche temples were founded. Written to in...
The bodhisattva Kuan Yin remains one of the most popular figures in Buddhism, loved and worshiped throughout Asia for over a millennium. She arrived in Hawai'i with the first Chinese plantation workers, each of whom would have kept a ricepaper print of her over a small altar in his room. In this delightful book, Kathy Phillips and Joseph Singer celebrate Kuan Yin's many incarnations in words and images that exhibit humor, poignancy, and the open-endedness of a koan. An introduction examines Kuan...
This ambitious cross-disciplinary study of Buddhist modernism in colonial Cambodia breaks new ground in understanding the history and development of religion and colonialism in Southeast Asia.
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 Sakyamuni, 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 developme...
Attracting the Heart
An idealized view of the lifestyle of a Buddhist monk might be described according to the doctrinal demand for emotional detachment and, ultimately, the cessation of all desire. Yet monks are also enjoined to practice compassion, a powerful emotion and equally lofty ideal, and live with every other human feeling - love, hate, jealousy, ambition - as they relate to other monks and the lay community. In this important ethnography of Buddhism in Sri Lanka, Jeffrey Samuels takes an unprecedented loo...
Hokkeji and the Reemergence of Female Monastic Orders in Premodern Japan
Hokkeji, an ancient Nara temple that once stood at the apex of a state convent network established by Queen-Consort Komyo (701-760), possesses a history that in some ways is bigger than itself. Its development is emblematic of larger patterns in the history of female monasticism in Japan. In this volume, Lori Meeks explores the revival of Japan's most famous convent and the reestablishment of a nuns' ordination lineage in Japan. Meeks considers a broad range of issues surrounding women's engagem...
Buddhism and Violence (Routledge Studies in Religion)
It is generally accepted in the West that Buddhism is a 'peaceful' religion. The Western public tends to assume that the doctrinal rejection of violence in Buddhism would make Buddhist pacifists, and often expects Buddhist societies or individual Asian Buddhists to conform to the modern Western standards of 'peaceful' behavior. This stereotype - which may well be termed 'positive Orientalism,' since it is based on assumption that an 'Oriental' religion would be more faithful to its original non-...
Namgyal Lhamo Taklha recounts her remarkable life in Born in Lhasa. She describes her childhood in a Tibet that no longer exists and chronicles her life and work on four continents. It is an engaging history of the Tibetan diaspora—dramatic and filled with anecdotes. Taklha's autobiography differs from those of other prominent Tibetans because she discusses the unexpected challenges of living in America and Europe.
B.R. Ambedkar's Annihilation of Caste is one of the most important, yet neglected, works of political writing from India. Written in 1936, it is an audacious denunciation of Hinduism and its caste system. It offers a scholarly critique of Hindu scriptures, scriptures that sanction a rigidly hierarchical and iniquitous social system. Arundhati Roy introduces this extensively annotated edition in "The Doctor and the Saint," examining the persistence of caste in modern India, and how the conflict b...