Ebook: The Buddhist Dead: Practices, Discourses, Representations (Studies in East Asian Buddhism)
- Series: Studies in East Asian Buddhism (Book 20)
- Year: 2007
- Publisher: Univ of Hawaii Pr
- Language: English
- pdf
The paradigmatic figure of the historical Buddha, his death, the symbolism of his funeral, and his relationship to the impurity of the dead are treated in the opening essays by John S. Strong and Gregory Schopen. The deaths of later remarkable adepts, following the Buddha's model, and their significance for Buddhist communities are investigated by Koichi Shinohara, Jacqueline I. Stone, Raoul Birnbaum, and Kurtis R. Schaeffer. A dramatic, often controversial category of exemplary death, that of "giving up the body" or Buddhist suicide, is examined by James Benn and D. Max Moerman. Moving from celebrated masters to ordinary practitioners and devotees, Bryan J. Cuevas, John Clifford Holt, and Matthew T. Kapstein take up the subject of the "ordinary dead" and the intimate relations that often persist between them and those still living, while Hank Glassman, Mark Rowe, and Jason A. Carbine shed light on Buddhist funerary practices and address the physical and social locations of the Buddhist dead.
This important collection moves beyond the largely text- and doctrine-centered approaches characterizing an earlier generation of Buddhist scholarship and expands its treatment of death to include ritual, devotional, and material culture. Its foundational insights are both culturally and historically grounded and at the same time offer a basis for further, comparative conversations on death between scholars of Buddhism and other religious traditions.