Posted on by

Cogan, “The Princess Nun: Bunchi, Buddhist Reform, and Gender in Early Edo Japan”

Next month, Harvard will publish The Princess Nun: Bunchi, Buddhist Reform, 9780674491977and Gender in Early Edo Japan, by Gina Cogan (Boston University). The publisher’s description follows.

The Princess Nun tells the story of Bunchi (1619–1697), daughter of Emperor Go-Mizunoo and founder of Enshōji. Bunchi advocated strict adherence to monastic precepts while devoting herself to the posthumous welfare of her family. As the first full-length biographical study of a premodern Japanese nun, this book incorporates issues of gender and social status into its discussion of Bunchi’s ascetic practice and religious reforms to rewrite the history of Buddhist reform and Tokugawa religion.

Gina Cogan’s approach moves beyond the dichotomy of oppression and liberation that dogs the study of non-Western and premodern women to show how Bunchi’s aristocratic status enabled her to carry out reforms despite her gender, while simultaneously acknowledging how that same status contributed to their conservative nature. Cogan’s analysis of how Bunchi used her prestigious position to further her goals places the book in conversation with other works on powerful religious women, like Hildegard of Bingen and Teresa of Avila. Through its illumination of the relationship between the court and the shogunate and its analysis of the practice of courtly Buddhism from a female perspective, this study brings historical depth and fresh theoretical insight into the role of gender and class in early Edo Buddhism.

Posted on by

Bernstein, “Religious Bodies Politic: Rituals of Sovereignty in Buryat Buddhism”

This month, the University of Chicago Press published Religious Bodies Politic: Rituals 9780226072722of Sovereignty in Buryat Buddhism, by Anya Bernstein (Harvard University). The publisher’s description follows.

Religious Bodies Politic examines the complex relationship between transnational religion and politics through the lens of one cosmopolitan community in Siberia: Buryats, who live in a semiautonomous republic within Russia with a large Buddhist population. Looking at religious transformation among Buryats across changing political economies, Anya Bernstein argues that under conditions of rapid social change—such as those that accompanied the Russian Revolution, the Cold War, and the fall of the Soviet Union—Buryats have used Buddhist “body politics” to articulate their relationship not only with the Russian state, but also with the larger Buddhist world.

During these periods, Bernstein shows, certain people and their bodies became key sites through which Buryats conformed to and challenged Russian political rule. She presents particular cases of these emblematic bodies—dead bodies of famous monks, temporary bodies of reincarnated lamas, ascetic and celibate bodies of Buddhist monastics, and dismembered bodies of lay disciples given as imaginary gifts to spirits—to investigate the specific ways in which religion and politics have intersected. Contributing to the growing literature on postsocialism and studies of sovereignty that focus on the body, Religious Bodies Politic is a fascinating illustration of how this community employed Buddhism to adapt to key moments of political change.
Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Panel: “Fault Lines of Faith” (Nov. 21)

On November 21, the Foreign Policy Association in New York City will host a panel, “Fault Lines of Faith: Reporting from Myanmar, Bosnia and Northern Ireland”:

For the past two years, the long-repressed country of Myanmar has been undergoing a fragile transition to more democratic practices. But with freer speech and assembly have come new tensions between the majority Buddhists in the country and minority Muslim populations. More than half the country’s provinces have seen violence, with hundreds of people dead; a Buddhist nationalist movement has been rising in popularity despite allegations that it is stirring anti-Muslim sentiment.

Kira Kay and Jason Maloney will screen and discuss their reporting from Myanmar, and also from two other locations profiled in the “Fault Lines of Faith” series, Northern Ireland and Bosnia. While they vary widely in geography and culture, the regions profiled in the “Fault Lines” series share multiple root causes to their sectarian tensions: questions of nationhood and self identity; marginalization from political power and resources; a climate of human rights abuse and lack of access to justice. The series title depicts these deep societal challenges as much as the more obvious tensions at the surface of these conflicts.

Details are here.

Posted on by

Wijeyeratne, “Nation, Constitutionalism and Buddhism in Sri Lanka”

This September, Routledge will publish Nation, Constitutionalism and Buddhism 9780415462662in Sri Lanka, by Roshan de Silva Wijeyeratne (Griffith University, Australia). The publisher’s description follows.

Nation, Constitutionalism and Buddhism in Sri Lanka offers a new perspective on contemporary debates about Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism in Sri Lanka. In this book de Silva Wijeyeratne argues forcefully that ‘Sinhalese Buddhism’ in the period prior to its engagement with the British colonial State signified a relatively unbounded (although at times boundary forming) set of practices that facilitated both the inclusion and exclusion of non-‘Buddhist’ concepts and people within a particular cosmological frame. Juxtaposing the premodern against the backdrop of colonial modernity, de Silva Wijeyeratne tells us that in contrast modern ‘Sinhalese Buddhism/nationalism’ is a much more reified and bounded concept, one imagined through a 19th century epistemology whose purpose was not so much inclusion, but a much more radical exclusion of non-‘Buddhist’ ideas and people.

In this insightful analysis modern Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism, then, emerges through the conjunction of discourse, power and knowledge at a distinct moment in the trajectory of the colonial State. An intrinsic feature of this modernist moment is that premodern categories (such as the cosmic order) were subject to a bureaucratic re-valuation that generated profound consequences for State-society relations and the wider constitutional/legal imaginary. This book goes onto explore how key constitutional and nation-building moments were framed within the cultural milieu of modern Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism – a nationalism that reveals the power of a re-valued Buddhist cosmic order to still inform the present.

Given the intensification of the Sinhalese Buddhist nationalist project following the defeat of the Tamil Tigers in 2009, this book is of interest to scholars of nationalism, South Asian studies, the anthropology of ritual, and comparative legal history.

Posted on by

Schaeffer, Kapstein, and Tuttle, Sources of Tibetan Tradition

Sources of Tibetan TraditionThis month Columbia University Press will publish Sources of Tibetan Tradition edited by Kurtis R. Schaeffer (University of Virginia), Matthew T. Kapstein (University of Chicago), and Gray Tuttle (Columbia University).  The publisher’s description follows.

 The most comprehensive collection of Tibetan works in a Western language, this volume illuminates the complex historical, intellectual, and social development of Tibetan civilization from its earliest beginnings to the modern period. Including more than 180 representative writings, Sources of Tibetan Tradition spans Tibet’s vast geography and long history, presenting for the first time a diversity of works by religious and political leaders; scholastic philosophers and contemplative hermits; monks and nuns; poets and artists; and aristocrats and commoners. The selected readings reflect the profound role of Buddhist sources in shaping Tibetan culture while illustrating other major areas of knowledge. Thematically varied, they address history and historiography; political and social theory; law; medicine; divination; rhetoric; aesthetic theory; narrative; travel and geography; folksong; and philosophical and religious learning, all in relation to the unique trajectories of Tibetan civil and scholarly discourse. The editors begin each chapter with a survey of broader social and cultural contexts and introduce each translated text with a concise explanation. Concluding with writings that extend into the early twentieth century, this volume offers an expansive encounter with Tibet’s exceptional intellectual heritage.

Posted on by

Eng, Ruskola & Shen on China and the Human

David L. Eng (U. of Penn.), Teemu Ruskola (Emory U. School of Law) Shuang Shen (Penn. State. U.) has posted China and the Human. The abstract follows.

China is everywhere in the news. Most stories seem to fall into one of two categories: accounts of China’s astounding economic development, and reports of equally astonishing human rights abuses in China. Paradoxically, as it turns into a global economic powerhouse, China’s relationship to political freedoms and rights appears to stand in an almost inverse relationship to its economic success. To make sense of the contemporary political moment, this essay examines the politics and histories of China and the human. At the same time, it constitutes a critical introduction to a special double issue of the journal Social Text on the same theme. The special issue, consisting of eleven essays and a visual dossier, considers the problematic conceptual, political, historical, and cultural relationship between Chineseness and humanity. By juxtaposing “China” and “the human” as two discrete categories, this introductory essay does not assume either concept as a pre-given object of knowledge. Rather — together with the other essays in the volume — it examines both China and the human as set of relational, differential, and contrapuntal events, in specific historical and geopolitical contexts.

The introductory essay provides a conceptual and historical map for this inquiry, in a comparative context that examines Euro-American, Chinese, and transnational itineraries of the human and their global crossings. It analyzes China’s potential to undo the universalizing claims of Western idealized norms of the human, while refusing to re-essentialize a Chinese otherness as an alternative perspective. More specifically, the essay interrogates the domination and limitations of the universal human while tracing alternative cosmologies and discourses of Chinese humanism and anti-humanism, informed by Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism, as well as other religious and political traditions. It also examines Marxist and Maoist conceptualizations of the human from transnational perspectives, and finally it considers the status of the human in contemporary China, defined increasingly as a bearer of a set of political and legal rights. What humanity means in China today — and in the world — and what it will mean in the future, is part of an ongoing struggle over the meaning of the past and the politics of the present. This essay offers “China” as a methodology in itself, rather than simply an object of inquiry.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Liveblogging Forum 2000: Religion and Human Rights

Forum 2000‘s  first law-and-religion panel, “Religious Law and Human Rights,” took place this afternoon, chaired by Prince El Hassan bin Talal of Jordan.  Prince Hassan opened the panel by speaking of the need for a real “bill of rights” for the “West Asian/North African” region, one that includes the right to be free from religious discrimination.  Michael Melchior, the Chief Rabbi of Norway, followed.  He noted the size of the audience that had gathered to hear the panel and said it reflected a new interest among intellectuals and policymakers in religion as a social phenomenon.  “God,” he said, “has returned to history.”  All religions, he continued – speaking of the Abrahamic faiths – have both totalitarian and dialectical impulses; we need to “minimalize the former and maximalize the latter,” and predicted that religious and political leaders have only a limited window of opportunity to accomplish this.  Journalist Shahira Amin from Egypt spoke about her doubts that the Arab Spring will usher in a secular society.  Although Egypt is historically a moderate society, she said, present-day Egyptian Islam is becoming radicalized as a result of Wahhabi influence.  Discrimination against Coptic Christians is a problem. She noted, though, that the Muslim Brotherhood has been speaking in more moderate terms since the revolution, perhaps in an attempt to appear politically responsible.  Tibetan Buddhist scholar Geshe Tenzin Dhargye spoke of the two key ethical principles in Buddhism, the laws of causation (karma) and non-harming behavior, and how they would inform a Buddhist approach to law and society.  In the final presentation, Bishop Václav Malý of the Catholic Archdiocese of Prague argued that Christianity provided the philosophical roots for human rights, “at least in Europe.”  Although people have now forgotten those roots, as a historical matter it was the Christian concept of Imago Dei that implied human dignity and freedom, including freedom of conscience and religion. He ended by saying that the Catholic Church in the Czech Republic does not favor a confessional state, but a pluralist state in which people with different religious and philosophical commitments, including non-religious commitments, can peacefully co-exist.  – MLM

For those not fortunate to be liveblogging from Prague, a live feed to Forum 2000 can be found here. – ARH