From: "Bocking,
Brian" <B.Bocking@ucc.ie>
Subject: A Buddhist Crossroads - book version launched
Book announcement:
Brian Bocking, Phibul Choompolpaisal, Laurence Cox, Alicia M Turner (eds.),
A Buddhist Crossroads: Pioneer Western Buddhists and Asian Networks 1860 –
1960.
ISBN 978-1-13-878958-6 (hardback)
192pp, 5 images £90 / $150 (paperback may follow)
In the late 19th and early 20thcenturies, Buddhism in Asia was
transformed by the impact of colonial modernity and new technologies
and began to spread in earnest to the West. Transnational networking
among Asian Buddhists and early western converts engendered pioneering
attempts to develop new kinds of Buddhism for a globalized world, in
ways not controlled by any single sect or region. Drawing on new
research by scholars worldwide, this book brings together some of the
most extraordinary episodes and personalities of a period of almost a
century from 1860-1960. Examples include Indian intellectuals who saw
Buddhism as a homegrown path for a modern post-colonial future, poor
whites ‘going native’ as Asian monks, a Brooklyn-born monk who sought
to convert Mussolini, and the failed 1950s attempt to train British
monks to establish a Thai sangha in Britain. Some of these stories
represent creative failures, paths not taken, which may show us
alternative possibilities for a more diverse Buddhism in a world
dominated by religious nationalisms. Other pioneers paved the way for
the mainstreaming of new forms of Buddhism in later decades, in time
for the post-1960s takeoff of ‘global Buddhism’.
The contents of this book were previously published as a special issue
of the journal Contemporary Buddhism. This book format publication
makes these stories available to those who do not subscribe to the
journal. Please consider asking your library to purchase a copy of the
hardback: if there is sufficient interest the publishers may make the
book available in a cheaper paperback format.
Contents
1. Introduction: A Buddhist crossroads: pioneer European Buddhists and
globalizing Asian networks 1860-1960 Alicia Turner, Laurence Cox and
Brian Bocking
2. Flagging up Buddhism: Charles Pfoundes (Omoie Tetzunostzuke) among
the international congresses and expositions, 1893-1905 Brian Bocking
3. Buddhist councils in a time of transition: globalism, modernity and
the preservation of textual traditions Tilman Frasch
4. Three boys on a great vehicle: ‘Mahayana Buddhism’ and a
trans-national network Shin’ichi Yoshinaga
5. The Bible, the bottle and the knife: religion as a mode of
resisting colonialism for U Dhammaloka Alicia Turner
6. Ananda Metteyya: controversial networker, passionate
criticElizabeth J. Harris
7. Tai-Burmese-Lao Buddhisms in the ‘modernizing’ of Ban Thawai
(Bangkok): the dynamic interaction between ethnic minority religion
and British - Siamese centralization in the late nineteenth/early
twentieth centuries Phibul Choompolpaisal
8. Rethinking early western Buddhists: beachcombers, ‘going native’
and dissident OrientalismLaurence Cox
9. ‘Like embers hidden in ashes, or jewels encrusted in stone’: Rāhul
Sāṅkṛtyāyan, Dharmānand Kosambī and Buddhist activity in colonial
India Douglas Ober
10. Elective affinities: the reconstruction of a forgotten episode in
the shared history of Thai and British Buddhism – Kapilavaḍḍho and Wat
PaknamAndrew Skilton
11. Brooklyn Bhikkhu: how Salvatore Cioffi became the Venerable
Lokanatha Philip Deslippe
Editors:
Brian Bocking is Professor of the Study of Religions at University
College Cork, Ireland, and formerly Chair of the Study of Religions
Dept. at SOAS, University of London. He has published mainly in the
field of Japanese religions and is currently researching early Irish
Buddhists.
Phibul Choompolpaisal is Research Associate in Thai Meditation Texts
at King’s College London, UK. He is author of several articles on Thai
Buddhism in the early modern period.
Laurence Cox is Lecturer in Sociology at the National University of
Ireland Maynooth, Ireland. He is author of Buddhism and Ireland (2013)
and has published widely on social movements. He is currently working
with Brian Bocking and Alicia Turner on the strange lives of U
Dhammaloka and Capt. Charles Pfoundes.
Alicia Turner is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies in the
Humanities department of York University in Toronto. She is the author
of Saving Buddhism: Moral Community and the Impermanence of Colonial
Religion (forthcoming) and editor of The Journal of Burma Studies.
