Asian Religions and Society – serie

UBC Press is pleased to announce a new series in Asian religions. Pilgrims, Patrons, and Place, a Buddha Dharma Kyokai Foundation Book on Buddhism and Comparative Literature, is the first book in this series. Click here to see other titles in this series.This book brings together essays by anthropologists, scholars of religion, and art historians on the subject of sacred place and sacred biography in Asia. The chapters span a broad geographical area that includes India, Nepal, Thailand, Indonesia, and China, and explore issues from the classical and medieval period to the present. They show how sacred places have a plurality of meanings for all religious communities and how in their construction, secular politics, private religious experience, and sectarian rivalry can all intersect.The contributors explore some of the most fundamental challenges that religious groups face as they expand from their homeland or confront the demands of modernity. In every case the biography of a saint or founding figure proves to be central to the formation of religious identity. Sacred place becomes a means of concretizing the ever-expanding sphere of the saint's influence. While some chapters deal with well- known religious movements and sites, others discuss little known groups and help to enrich our understanding of the diversity of religious belief in Asia.The book will be of interest not only to scholars of Asian religion and hagiography, but to others who seek to understand the ways in which religious groups accommodate to the challenges of new environments and new times.

British Columbia is Canada’s most ethnically diverse province. Although the presence of Asian religions is felt and discussed in many regions, we know little about the religions that accompanied immigrants from Asia or how they are practised today.Asian Religions in British Columbia brings together fourteen religious studies scholars who offer intimate portraits of local religious groups, including Hindus and Sikhs from South Asia; Buddhist organizations from Southeast Asia; and Tibetan, Japanese, and Chinese religions from East and Central Asia. Although the geographical focus is particular, the conceptual focus is broad – the authors explore each religious tradition in the larger context of Canadian multiculturalism.As the first comprehensive and comparative examination of Asian religions in British Columbia, this book is mandatory reading for teachers, policy makers, scholars of British Columbia history and Asian Canadian studies, or anyone who wants to be well informed about this province and nation.

In 1902 the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU)petitioned the Japanese government to abolish the custom of rewardinggood deeds and patriotic service with the bestowal of sake cups.Alcohol production and consumption, its members argued, harmedindividuals, endangered public welfare, and wasted vital resources.The petition was only one initiative in a wide-ranging program toreform public and private behaviour. Between 1886 and 1912, the WCTUlaunched campaigns to eliminate prostitution, eradicate drinking,spread Christianity, and improve the lives of women. As Elizabeth DornLublin shows, members did not passively accept and propagate governmentpolicy but felt a duty to shape it by defining social problems andinfluencing opinion. Certain their beliefs and reforms were essentialto Japan's advancement, members couched their calls for change inthe rhetorical language of national progress. Ultimately, theWCTU's activism belies received notions of women's publicinvolvement and political engagement in Meiji Japan.

The lives of early Japanese and Chinese settlers in British Columbia have come to define the Asian experience in Canada. Yet many Chinese men did not seek their destiny in British Columbia, but followed the railway east and settled in small Prairie towns and cities.The Way of the Bachelor documents the religious beliefs, political networks, and cultural practices that sustained and leant meaning to bachelors in Manitoba. In the absence of women and family, these men opened the region's first laundries and developed a new kind of restaurant – the Chinese cafe. They maintained ties to the Old World and negotiated a place for themselves in the new by fostering a vibrant homosocial culture based on friendship, everyday religious practices, the example of Sun Yat-sen, and the sharing of food.This fascinating exploration of the intersection of gender, migration, and religion in rural Canada broadens our understanding of the Chinese quest for identity in North America.