The Oxford Handbook of American Buddhism offers the most comprehensive and up-to-date scholarship available on Buddhism in America. It charts the history and diversity of Buddhist communities, including traditions and communities that have been previously neglected, and looks at the ways in which Buddhist practices such as mindfulness meditation have been adopted in non-Buddhist settings.

This is an interdisciplinary and holistic survey of Pali Buddhism, covering philological, indigenous and philosophical approaches in a single volume. The work is divided into three main sections: Philological Foundations; Insiders' Understandings; and Philosophical Implications.

Among one of the older subfields in Buddhist Studies, the study of Theravāda Buddhism is undergoing a revival by contemporary scholars who are revising long-held conventional views of the tradition while undertaking new approaches and engaging new subject matter. The term Theravāda has been refined, and research has expanded beyond the analysis of canonical texts to examine contemporary cultural forms, social movements linked with meditation practices, material culture, and vernacular language texts. The Routledge Handbook of Theravāda Buddhism illustrates the growth and new directions of scholarship in the study of Theravāda Buddhism and is structured in four parts: Ideas/Ideals Practices/Persons Texts/Teachings Images/Imaginations Owing largely to the continued vitality of Theravāda Buddhist communities in countries like Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos, as well as in diaspora communities across the globe, traditions associated with what is commonly (and fairly recently) called Theravāda attract considerable attention from scholars and practitioners around the world. An in-depth guide to the distinctive features of Theravāda, the Handbook will be an invaluable resource for providing structure and guidance for scholars and students of Asian Religion, Buddhism and, in particular, Theravāda Buddhism. The introduction and chapter 20 of this book are available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

This book suggests that previous critiques of the rules of Buddhist monks (Vinaya) may now be reconsidered in order to deal with some of the assumptions concerning the legal nature of these rules and to provide a focus on how Vinaya texts may have actually operated in practice. Malcolm Voyce utilizes the work of Foucault and his notions of 'power' and 'subjectivity' in three ways. First, he examines The Buddha's role as a lawmaker to show how Buddhist texts were a form of lawmaking that had a diffused and lateral conception of authority. While lawmakers in some religious groups may be seen as authoritative, in the sense that leaders or founders were coercive or charismatic, the Buddhist concept of authority allows for a degree of freedom for the individual to shape or form themselves. Second, he shows that the confession ritual acted as a disciplinary measure to develop a unique sense of collective governance based on self regulation, self-governance and self-discipline. Third, he argues that while the Vinaya has been seen by some as a code or form of regulation that required obedience, the Vinaya had a double nature in that its rules could be transgressed and that offenders could be dealt with appropriately in particular situations. Voyce shows that the Vinaya was not an independent legal system, but that it was dependent on the Dharmaśāstra for some of its jurisprudential needs, and that it was not a form of customary law in the strict sense, but a wider system of jurisprudence linked to Dharmaśāstra principles and precepts.