Countless sands : medieval Buddhists and their environments /
edited by Jeffrey Moser and Jason Protass.
Bok · Engelsk · 2025 · Conference papers and proceedings.
| Omfang | vii, 320 pages : : chiefly color illustrations ;
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| Opplysninger | Essays from the "Buddhist Geoaesthetics" conference held at Brown University, May 3-4, 2019.. - Medieval Buddhists and Their Environments / Jason Protass and Jeffrey Moser -- Contextualizing the Relationship between Nature and Culture in East Asian Buddhism / James Robson -- Flesh Mountain: Human Bodies on a Nonhuman Scale / Reiko Ohnuma -- Movements and Patterns in Embodied Landscapes for Art / Eric Huntington -- Geomorphism at "The Peak That Flew in from Afar" / Jeffrey Moser -- The Japanese Image of the Buddhist Earth: Geography, Cosmology, and the Culture of Vision / Max Moerman -- Human Places and Cosmic Spaces: Ecological Engagements at Ellora / Tamara Sears -- Riverine Buddhism at Changlu Monastery / Jason Protass -- Masculine Mountains: Gendered Affordances at Dali's Stone Treasure Grottoes / Megan Bryson -- The Geoaesthetics of Ritual in the Chinese Buddhist Sanctuary of Shizhuanshan / Phillip E. Bloom -- "Occasions Both Worldly and Transcendent": Sacred Trees in Buddha's India / Maria Heim -- Vidyārājas and the Articulation of Ecological Interdependence at Cave Temples / Sonya S. Lee -- Mountains, Waters, and Dharmakāya: Kūkai's Irrigation Projects / Ryūichi Abé.. - "Countless Sands presents engaging analyses of the diverse relationships between Buddhism and the environment that existed in medieval Asia. Recent years have witnessed a surge in publications across the humanities that advance powerful ethical and political arguments to account for the human failure to respond effectively to global climate change. While the contributors to this volume are attuned to this challenge, rather than present explicit political arguments, they pursue a subtler effort to historicize the environment as a site and subject of Buddhist practice while providing research grounded in rigorous analysis of complex and fragmentary sources. The volume thereby mitigates against the Orientalist, East-West binaries that have long informed the invocation of Buddhism in Euro-American environmental discourses. As the chapters collectively demonstrate, there was no singular, consistently "Buddhist" understanding of the natural world, but innumerable, varied engagements preserved in discrete texts, images, and artifacts. We title the volume Countless Sands to echo the Buddhist metaphor of "sands of the Ganges" that implies an uncountable number. Through specific case studies, the authors consider such questions as: How did premodern Buddhists understand what we today call "the environment"? How did they think about their earth? How, when, and where did the various processes of the earth actually impinge on the practices of historical Buddhists? What kinds of "environmental imaginations" informed specific Buddhist practices? In so doing, the authors explore the connections between the ways in which historical Buddhist communities interacted with their environments and how they understood those environments. In the broader field of Buddhist studies, Countless Sands contributes to ongoing efforts to expand the locus of inquiry from textually based investigations of Buddhist doctrine to a broader examination of the complex and varied place of Buddhism in the lives of historical communities. The book furthers this broader process by casting it in environmental terms and will engage readers looking for models of thought-provoking historical analysis on environmental themes"--
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| Emner | |
| Sjanger | |
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| ISBN | 9780824895730
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| ISBN(galt) |