The fundamental premise of this study is that the Buddhist sangha and Buddhist teachings play a key symbolic role in legitimating the exercise of secular power in Thailand. The author argues that a clear appreciation of the political legitimatory function of Buddhism provides the key to understanding the major theoretical and administrative changes that have taken place within Thai Buddhism in this century.

This third volume of the Fundamentalism Project provides a systematic overview of the advances made by antisecular religious movements over the past twenty-five years. The distinguished contributors to this volume - economists, political scientists, religious historians, social anthropologists, and sociologists - focus on the impact these movements have had on national economies, political parties, constitutional issues, and international relations on five continents and within the religious traditions of Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Sikhism. Do fundamentalisms tend toward political activism, and how successful have they been in remaking political structures? To answer this question and others, the contributors discuss the anti-abortion movement in the U.S., the Islamic war of resistance in Afghanistan, and Shiite jurisprudence in Iran. Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby conclude the volume with a synthetic statement of fundamentalist impact on polities, economies, and state security. The Fundamentalism Project is a monumental undertaking by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences that involves an international group of scholars. Taken together, the volumes in this series will become a standard reference for educators and policy analysts for years to come.

The groundbreaking account of U.S. clandestine efforts to use Southeast Asian Buddhism to advance Washington’s anticommunist goals during the Cold War How did the U.S. government make use of a “Buddhist policy” in Southeast Asia during the Cold War despite the American principle that the state should not meddle with religion? To answer this question, Eugene Ford delved deep into an unprecedented range of U.S. and Thai sources and conducted numerous oral history interviews with key informants. Ford uncovers a riveting story filled with U.S. national security officials, diplomats, and scholars seeking to understand and build relationships within the Buddhist monasteries of Southeast Asia. This fascinating narrative provides a new look at how the Buddhist leaderships of Thailand and its neighbors became enmeshed in Cold War politics and in the U.S. government’s clandestine efforts to use a predominant religion of Southeast Asia as an instrument of national stability to counter communist revolution.

This work - previously published as a special issue of the journal 'Democratization' - brings together essays that offer theoretical and empirical insights into the relationship between religion and democracy.

This is the first comprehensive study of socially and politically engaged Buddhism in the lands of its origin. Nine accounts of contemporary movements in India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Tibet, Taiwan, Vietnam, and Japan are framed by interpretive essays. The historical development and institutional forms of engaged Buddhism are considered in the light of traditional Buddhist conceptions of morality, interdependence, and liberation; and Western ideas of freedom, human rights, and democracy. Since the fiery self-immolation of the Vietnamese monk Thich Quang Duc on a Saigon street in 1963, "engaged Buddhism" has spread throughout Asia and the West. Twice in recent years the Nobel Prize for peace was awarded to Buddhists for their efforts to free their compatriots from totalitarian regimes. Engaged Buddhism presents ordained and lay Buddhist activists like Thich Nhat Hanh of Vietnam, Buddhadasa Bhikkhu and Sulak Sivaraksa of Thailand, A. T. Ariyaratne and the Sarvodaya Shramadana movement of Sri Lanka, Daisaku Ikeda and the Soka Gakkai movement of Japan, followers of the Indian Untouchable leader, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, and Buddhist women throughout Asia. These leaders have campaigned relentlessly, attracted and organized millions of new converts, faced death threats, landed in jail, founded schools and universities, and produced a massive new Buddhist literature to restore social and economic justice to their societies.

An unparalleled portrait, Donald K. Swearer's Buddhist World of Southeast Asia has been a key source for all those interested in the Theravada homelands since the work's publication in 1995. Expanded and updated, the second edition offers this wide ranging account for readers at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Swearer shows Theravada Buddhism in Southeast Asia to be a dynamic, complex system of thought and practice embedded in the cultures, societies, and histories of Thailand, Myanmar (Burma), Laos, Cambodia, and Sri Lanka. The work focuses on three distinct yet interrelated aspects of this milieu. The first is the popular tradition of life models personified in myths and legends, rites of passage, festival celebrations, and ritual occasions. The second deals with Buddhism and the state, illustrating how King Asoka serves as the paradigmatic Buddhist monarch, discussing the relationship of cosmology and kingship, and detailing the rise of charismatic Buddhist political leaders in the postcolonial period. The third is the modern transformation of Buddhism: the changing roles of monks and laity, modern reform movements, the role of women, and Buddhism in the West.

Silver Medalist, 2020 Independent Publisher Book Awards in the Religion (Eastern/Western) Category This groundbreaking book explores Buddhist thought and culture, from multiple Buddhist perspectives, as sources for feminist reflection and social action. Too often, when writers apply terms such as "woman," "femininity," and "feminism" to Buddhist texts and contexts, they begin with models of feminist thinking that foreground questions and concerns arising from Western experience. This oversight has led to many facile assumptions, denials, and oversimplifications that ignore women's diverse social and historical contexts. But now, with the tools of feminist analysis that have developed in recent decades, constructs of the feminine in Buddhist texts, imagery, and philosophy can be examined—with the acknowledgment that there are limitations to applying these theoretical paradigms to other cultures. Contributors to this volume offer a feminist analysis, which integrates gender theory and Buddhist perspectives, to Buddhist texts and women's narratives from Asia. How do Buddhist concepts of self and no-self intersect with concepts of gender identity, especially for women? How are the female body, sexuality, and femininity constructed (and contested) in diverse Buddhist contexts? How might power and gender identity be perceived differently through a Buddhist lens? By exploring feminist approaches and representations of "the feminine," including persistent questions about women's identities as householders and renunciants, this book helps us to understand how Buddhist influences on attitudes toward women, and how feminist thinking from other parts of the world, can inform and enlarge contemporary discussions of feminism.

It is said that the famous ninth century Chinese Buddhist monk Linji Yixuan told his disciples, "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him." The deliberately confounding statement is meant to shock people out of complacent ways of thinking. But beyond the purposeful jolt from complacency there is another intention. This axiom suggests that, for liberation, one should seek the Buddha nature that resides within, rather than a mere Buddha exterior. The metaphor of killing the Buddha dislodges a person from the illusion that enlightenment lies outside the body. The proclamation also highlights the power of violence, even on a symbolic level. Violence abounds in Buddhist thoughts, doctrine, and actions, however unacknowledged or misunderstood. If You Meet the Buddha on the Road addresses an important absence in the study of religion and violence: the religious treatment of violence. In order to pursue an understanding of the relationship between Buddhism and violence, it is important to first consider how Buddhist scriptures and followers understand violence. Drawing on Buddhist treatments of violence, Michael Jerryson explores the ways in which Buddhists invoke, support, or justify war, conflict, state violence, and gender discrimination. In addition, the book examines the ways in which Buddhists address violence as military chaplains, cope with violence in a conflict zone, and serve as witnesses of blasphemy to Buddhist doctrine and Buddha images.

This study examines the impact of Buddhism on the political process of Asian countries in recent times. The intersection between Buddhism and politics; religious authority and political power is explored through the engagement of Buddhist monks and lay activists in the process of nation-building, development, and implementation of democracy.

Against the backdrop of the ongoing Rohingya crisis, this book takes a close and detailed look at the rise of militant Buddhism in Sri Lanka, Burma and Thailand, and especially at the issues of ‘why’ and ‘how’ around it. We are well aware of Christian fundamentalism, militant Judaism and Islamist Salafism-Jihadism. Extremist and violent Buddhism however features only rarely in book-length studies on religion and political violence. Somehow, the very idea of Buddhist monks as the archetypical ‘world renouncers’ exhorting frenzied mobs to commit acts of violence against perceived ‘enemies of the religion’ seems to be outright ludicrous. Recent events in Myanmar/Burma, but also in Thailand and Sri Lanka, however indicate that a militant strand of Theravada Buddhism is on the rise. How can this rise be explained, and what role do monks play in that regard? These are the two broad questions that this book explores.