Brooke Schedneck - Böcker

Attention to lived religion has significantly shaped religious studies and has only recently impacted the field of Buddhism. Rather than asserting a separation between "real" religion happening within sacred scriptures and official organizations on the one hand, and "folk" traditions practiced by everyday adherents on the other, the lived religion model understands the religious experience as far more complex, implying an ongoing negotiation of practice and belief, which occurs within and outside of official, congregational settings. Given the religion's openness to incorporating and adapting various religious traditions, understanding belief systems, doctrinal interpretations, and ethical commitments on the ground are particularly salient within Buddhist traditions.Approaching Buddhism as a lived tradition has transformed the discipline over the past few decades, shifting attention to the relationship between doctrines, beliefs, and practices among ordinary adherents. The Oxford Handbook of Lived Buddhism fills a major gap in Buddhist studies scholarship. Topical emphasis for each chapter derives from the reading Buddhist texts, and utilizing ethnographic methods, but all center Buddhist individuals and communities, along with scholarly analysis. Authors' observations reflect on how these dynamics intermingle with modernity, education, media, and sacred spaces. The lived religion approach offers insight into Buddhism's variety of cultural practices that inform traditions, relationships between the laity and monastics, significances of sacred spaces and experiences, changing demographics of the religion, and Buddhism's influence on material culture, artistic expression, and social interaction. Analyzing Buddhism from the ground up, rather than the top down, complicates our conception of the religion and how it intersects with other areas of culture, including race, class, and gender. As such, the Handbook will be a timely contribution, opening new possibilities for study alongside texts and institutions.

Cross-cultural dialogues in sacred space cultivate awareness of self and othersTemples are everywhere in Chiang Mai, filled with tourists as well as saffron-robed monks of all ages. The monks participate in daily urban life here as elsewhere in Thailand, where Buddhism is promoted, protected, and valued as a tourist attraction. Yet this mountain city offers more than a fleeting, commodified tourist experience, as the encounters between foreign visitors and Buddhist monks can have long-lasting effects on both parties.These religious contacts take place where economic motives, missionary zeal, and opportunities for cultural exchange coincide. Brooke Schedneck incorporates fieldwork and interviews with student monks and tourists to examine the innovative ways that Thai Buddhist temples offer foreign visitors spaces for religious instruction and popular in-person Monk Chat sessions in which tourists ask questions about Buddhism. Religious Tourism in Northern Thailand also considers how Thai monks perceive other religions and cultures and how they represent their own religion when interacting with tourists, resulting in a revealing study of how religious traditions adapt to an era of globalization.

Cross-cultural dialogues in sacred space cultivate awareness of self and othersTemples are everywhere in Chiang Mai, filled with tourists as well as saffron-robed monks of all ages. The monks participate in daily urban life here as elsewhere in Thailand, where Buddhism is promoted, protected, and valued as a tourist attraction. Yet this mountain city offers more than a fleeting, commodified tourist experience, as the encounters between foreign visitors and Buddhist monks can have long-lasting effects on both parties.These religious contacts take place where economic motives, missionary zeal, and opportunities for cultural exchange coincide. Brooke Schedneck incorporates fieldwork and interviews with student monks and tourists to examine the innovative ways that Thai Buddhist temples offer foreign visitors spaces for religious instruction and popular in-person Monk Chat sessions in which tourists ask questions about Buddhism. Religious Tourism in Northern Thailand also considers how Thai monks perceive other religions and cultures and how they represent their own religion when interacting with tourists, resulting in a revealing study of how religious traditions adapt to an era of globalization.

This book explores contemporary practices within the new institution of international meditation centers in Thailand. It discusses the development of the lay vipassana meditation movement in Thailand and relates Thai Buddhism to contemporary processes of commodification and globalisation. Through an examination of how meditation centers are promoted internationally, the author considers how Thai Buddhism is translated for and embodied within international tourists who participate in meditation retreats in Thailand. Shedding new light on the decontextualization of religious practices, and raising new questions concerning tourism and religion, this book focuses on the nature of cultural exchange, spiritual tourism, and religious choice in modernity. With an aim of reframing questions of religious modernity, each chapter offers a new perspective on the phenomenon of spiritual seeking in Thailand. Offering an analysis of why meditation practices appeal to non-Buddhists, this book contends that religions do not travel as whole entities but instead that partial elements resonate with different cultures, and are appropriated over time.

This innovative collaborative work-the first to focus on Buddhist tourism-explores how Buddhists, government organizations, business corporations, and individuals in Asia participate in re-imaginings of Buddhism through tourism. Contributors from religious studies, anthropology, and art history examine sacred places and religious monuments as they have been shaped and reshaped by socioeconomic and cultural trends in the region. Following an introduction that offers the first theoretical understanding of tourism from a Buddhist studies' perspective, early chapters discuss the ways Buddhists and non-Buddhists imagine concepts and places related to the religion. Case studies highlight Buddhist peace in India, Buddhist heavens and hells in Singapore, Thai temple space, and the future Buddha Maitreya in China. Buddhist tourism's connections to the state, market, and new technologies are explored in chapters on Indian package tours for pilgrims, thematic Buddhist tourism in Cambodia, the technological innovations of Buddhist temples in China, and the promotion of pilgrimage sites in Japan. Contributors then situate the financial concerns of Chinese temples, speed dating in temples in Japan, and the diffuse and pervasive nature of Buddhism for tourism promotion in Ladakh, India.How have tourist routes, groups, sites, and practices associated with Buddhism come to be possible and what are the effects? In what ways do travelers derive meaning from Buddhist places? How do Buddhist sites fortify national, cultural, or religious identities? The comparative research in South, Southeast, and East Asia presented here draws attention to the intertwining of the sacred and the financial and how local and national sites are situated within global networks. Together these findings generate a compelling comparative investigation of Buddhist spaces, identities, and practices.