Power, Wealth and Women in Indian Mahayana Buddhism - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Power, Wealth and Women in Indian Mahayana Buddhism write by Douglas Osto. This book was released on 2008-11-19. Power, Wealth and Women in Indian Mahayana Buddhism available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. This book examines the concepts of power, wealth and women in the important Mahayana Buddhist scripture known as the Gandavyuha-sutra, and relates these to the text’s social context in ancient Indian during the Buddhist Middle Period (0–500 CE). Employing contemporary textual theory, worldview analysis and structural narrative theory, the author puts forward a new approach to the study of Mahayana Buddhist sources, the ‘systems approach’, by which literature is viewed as embedded in a social system. Consequently, he analyses the Gandavyuha in the contexts of reality, society and the individual, and applies these notions to the key themes of power, wealth and women. The study reveals that the spiritual hierarchy represented within the Gandavyuha replicates the political hierarchies in India during Buddhism’s Middle Period, that the role of wealth mirrors its significance as a sign of spiritual status in Indian Buddhist society, and that the substantial number of female spiritual guides in the narrative reflects the importance of royal women patrons of Indian Buddhism at the time. This book will appeal to higher-level undergraduates, postgraduates and scholars of religious studies, Buddhist studies, Asian studies, South Asian studies and Indology.
Power, Wealth and Women in Indian Mahāyāna Buddhism
Power, Wealth and Women in Indian Mahāyāna Buddhism - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Power, Wealth and Women in Indian Mahāyāna Buddhism write by Douglas Osto. This book was released on 2008. Power, Wealth and Women in Indian Mahāyāna Buddhism available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. This book examines the concepts of power, wealth and women in the important Mahayana Buddhist scripture known as the Gandavyuha-sutra, and relates these to the text’s social context in ancient Indian during the Buddhist Middle Period (0–500 CE). Employing contemporary textual theory, worldview analysis and structural narrative theory, the author puts forward a new approach to the study of Mahayana Buddhist sources, the ‘systems approach’, by which literature is viewed as embedded in a social system. Consequently, he analyses the Gandavyuha in the contexts of reality, society and the individual, and applies these notions to the key themes of power, wealth and women. The study reveals that the spiritual hierarchy represented within the Gandavyuha replicates the political hierarchies in India during Buddhism’s Middle Period, that the role of wealth mirrors its significance as a sign of spiritual status in Indian Buddhist society, and that the substantial number of female spiritual guides in the narrative reflects the importance of royal women patrons of Indian Buddhism at the time. This book will appeal to higher-level undergraduates, postgraduates and scholars of religious studies, Buddhist studies, Asian studies, South Asian studies and Indology.
The Gaṇḍavyūha-sūtra
The Gaṇḍavyūha-sūtra - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Gaṇḍavyūha-sūtra write by Douglas Edward Osto. This book was released on 2004. The Gaṇḍavyūha-sūtra available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle.
Buddhist Practice and Visual Culture
Buddhist Practice and Visual Culture - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Buddhist Practice and Visual Culture write by Julie Gifford. This book was released on 2011-03-16. Buddhist Practice and Visual Culture available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. This is the first study to provide an overall interpretation of the Buddhist monument Borobudur in Indonesia. Including both the narrative reliefs and the Buddha images, the book opens up a wealth of information on Mahayana Buddhist religious ideas and practices that could have informed Borobudur and it convincingly interprets Borobudur within that context. Presenting new material, the book contributes immensely to a new and better understanding of the significance of the Borobudur for the field of Buddhist and Religious Studies.
The Buddha's Footprint
The Buddha's Footprint - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Buddha's Footprint write by Johan Elverskog. This book was released on 2020-01-24. The Buddha's Footprint available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. A corrective to the contemporary idea that Buddhism has always been an environmentally friendly religion In the current popular imagination, Buddhism is often understood to be a religion intrinsically concerned with the environment. The Dharma, the name given to Buddhist teachings by Buddhists, states that all things are interconnected. Therefore, Buddhists are perceived as extending compassion beyond people and animals to include plants and the earth itself out of a concern for the total living environment. In The Buddha's Footprint, Johan Elverskog contends that only by jettisoning this contemporary image of Buddhism as a purely ascetic and apolitical tradition of contemplation can we see the true nature of the Dharma. According to Elverskog, Buddhism is, in fact, an expansive religious and political system premised on generating wealth through the exploitation of natural resources. Elverskog surveys the expansion of Buddhism across Asia in the period between 500 BCE and 1500 CE, when Buddhist institutions were built from Iran and Azerbaijan in the west, to Kazakhstan and Siberia in the north, Japan in the east, and Sri Lanka and Indonesia in the south. He examines the prosperity theology at the heart of the Dharma that declared riches to be a sign of good karma and the means by which spritiual status could be elevated through donations bequeathed to Buddhist institutions. He demonstrates how this scriptural tradition propelled Buddhists to seek wealth and power across Asia and to exploit both the people and the environment. Elverskog shows the ways in which Buddhist expansion not only entailed the displacement of local gods and myths with those of the Dharma—as was the case with Christianity and Islam—but also involved fundamentally transforming earlier social and political structures and networks of economic exchange. The Buddha's Footprint argues that the institutionalization of the Dharma was intimately connected to agricultural expansion, resource extraction, deforestation, urbanization, and the monumentalization of Buddhism itself.
