Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Publication Type
Articles 1 - 2 of 2
Full-Text Articles in Entire DC Network
Living In This World: A Social History Of Buddhist Monks And Nuns In Nineteenth-Century Western China, Gilbert Zhe Chen
Living In This World: A Social History Of Buddhist Monks And Nuns In Nineteenth-Century Western China, Gilbert Zhe Chen
Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This dissertation relies on about 600 legal cases from the Ba County Archive that survive from the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century to investigate the social life of ordinary Buddhist monks and nuns. Although they played a crucial in maintaining the survival and proper functioning of Buddhism at the local level, they have remained significantly understudied. This dissertation adopts a bottom-up approach to investigate ordinary monastics’ involvement in various socioeconomic activities. By shifting the analytical focus from elite monks to their more mundane counterparts, this study illuminates how deeply ordinary monastics were embedded in their communities. The shift also …
Islam And Buddhism: The Arabian Prequel?, Anna Akasoy
Islam And Buddhism: The Arabian Prequel?, Anna Akasoy
Publications and Research
Conventionally, the first Muslim-Buddhist encounters are thought to have taken place in the context of the Arab-Muslim expansions into eastern Iran in the mid-seventh century, the conquest of Sind in 711 and the rise of the Islamic empire. However, several theories promoted in academic and popular circles claim that Buddhists or other Indians were present in western Arabia at the eve of Islam and thus shaped the religious environment in which Muhammad’s movement emerged. This article offers a critical survey of the most prominent arguments adduced to support this view and discusses the underlying attitudes to the Islamic tradition, understood …