Topic:
Arakan (Burma), Th eravada Buddhism, colonial history, ethnic identity, monastic historiograp
Description:
"Th ere is an abundance of scholarly material on the relation between the temporal and the
spiritual power in Southeast Asian Buddhist kingdoms some of which I discuss in the notes
or refer to in the bibliography. Th e latest contribution to the field is Ian Harris, ed. Buddhism, Power and Political Order (London: Routledge, 2007).
2) Steven Collins’s discussion of “kingship and its discontents” in his land-mark Nirvana
and Other Buddhist Felicities: Utopias of the Pali Imaginaire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) contributed to a “new vision of Buddhist history” because his analysis
leads beyond earlier approaches such as Melford Spiro, Burmese Supernaturalism (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1967), Melford Spiro, Buddhism and Society: A Great Tradition
and its Burmese Vicissitudes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), and Stanley J.
Tambiah, World Conqueror and World Renouncer: A Study of Buddhism and Polity in Th ailand against a Historical Background (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). Collins argues that “most ethnographies and histories do not make [. . .] a separation” between
“Buddhism as constructed by scholars” and the “socio-cultural life . . . lived historically, first
in the conditions of pre-modern agrarian states, and then in the context of modernization,
nation-building, colonialism and capitalism”: Collins, Nirvana and Other Buddhist Felicities: 568..."
Source/publisher:
"Academia.edu" (USA)
Date of Publication:
2008-05-13
Date of entry:
2019-10-30
Grouping:
- Individual Documents
Category:
Countries:
Myanmar, Bangladesh
Administrative areas of Burma/Myanmar:
Rakhine State
Language:
English
Local URL:
Format:
pdf
Size:
258.16 KB (51 pages)
Resource Type:
text
Text quality:
- Good