Architects of Buddhist Leisure: Socially Disengaged Buddhism in Asia’s Museums, Monuments, and Amusement Parks

McDaniel, Justin Thomas (著)

作者

McDaniel, Justin Thomas (著)

出版日期

2017

頁次

224

出版者

University of Hawai'i Press

出版者網址

https://uhpress.hawaii.edu/journals/

出版地

Honolulu, HI, US [檀香山, 夏威夷州, 美國]

叢書名

Contemporary Buddhism

資料類型

書籍=Book

使用語言

英文=English

附註項

Author Affiliation: Professor, Buddhist Studies; Chair, Department of Religious Studies, University of Pennsylvania.

Series Editor: Mark M. Rowe

摘要

Buddhism, often described as an austere religion that condemns desire, promotes denial, and idealizes the contemplative life, actually has a thriving leisure culture in Asia. Creative religious improvisations designed by Buddhists have been produced both within and outside of monasteries across the region—in Nepal, Japan, Korea, Macau, Hong Kong, Singapore, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam. Justin McDaniel looks at the growth of Asia’s culture of Buddhist leisure—what he calls “socially disengaged Buddhism”—through a study of architects responsible for monuments, museums, amusement parks, and other sites. In conversation with noted theorists of material and visual culture and anthropologists of art, McDaniel argues that such sites highlight the importance of public, leisure, and spectacle culture from a Buddhist perspective and illustrate how “secular” and “religious,” “public” and “private,” are in many ways false binaries. Moreover, places like Lek Wiriyaphan’s Sanctuary of Truth in Thailand, Suối Tiên Amusement Park in Saigon, and Shi Fa Zhao’s multilevel museum/ritual space/tea house in Singapore reflect a growing Buddhist ecumenism built through repetitive affective encounters instead of didactic sermons and sectarian developments. They present different Buddhist traditions, images, and aesthetic expressions as united but not uniform, collected but not concise: Together they form a gathering, not a movement.

Despite the ingenuity of lay and ordained visionaries like Wiriyaphan and Zhao and their colleagues Kenzo Tange, Chan-soo Park, Tadao Ando, and others discussed in this book, creators of Buddhist leisure sites often face problems along the way. Parks and museums are complex adaptive systems that are changed and influenced by budgets, available materials, local and global economic conditions, and visitors. Architects must often compromise and settle at local optima, and no matter what they intend, their buildings will develop lives of their own. Provocative and theoretically innovative, Architects of Buddhist Leisure asks readers to question the very category of “religious” architecture. It challenges current methodological approaches in religious studies and speaks to a broad audience interested in modern art, architecture, religion, anthropology, and material culture.

Front Matter i
Table of Contents vii
Series Editor's Preface ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
1 Monuments and Metabolism: Kenzo Tange and the Attempts to Bring New Architecture to Buddhism's Oldest Site 30
2 Ecumenical Parks and Cosmological Gardens: Braphai and Lek Wiriyaphan and Buddhist Spectacle Culture 82
3 Buddhist Museums and Curio Cabinets: Shi Fa Zhao and Ecumenism without an Agenda 131
Conclusions and Comparisons (pp. 162-176)
Conclusions and Comparisons 162
Notes 177
Bibliography 205
Index 215
Back Matter 225

ISBN

9780824874407 (open access); 9780824865986 (hbc); 9780824876753 (pbc)

DOI

https://doi.org/10.26530/oapen_626388

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