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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.

Architecture and recreation --- Buddhist architecture --- Tange, Kenzō, --- Lek Wiriyaphan. --- Fazhao, --- Architecture, Buddhist --- Architecture and leisure --- Leisure and architecture --- Recreation and architecture --- Fa Zhao, --- 法照, --- Wiriyaphan, Lek --- 丹下健三, --- Religious architecture --- Recreation

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This is a fascinating study of rare Siamese illuminated manuscripts of two kinds, biological and cosmological. Beautiful in themselves, they are produced under unusual conditions and no one of these manuscripts is like another, though they draw on a common pool of rituals, actions and stories. This ground-breaking publication examines closely and contextualizes fourteen of the most striking and visually unique manuscripts of this kind known, in or outside Thailand.00These manuscripts are religious in nature, containing several genres of Buddhist texts including liturgical, narrative, historical, grammatical, psychological, ritual, and magical material, but, compared to other Thai and other South-East Asian examples they are particularly strong in the realms of medical, biological and cosmological Thai thought. A recurrent feature is the story of Phra Malai, a monk whose travels to various heavens and hells is described and illustrated. A number of rare medical manuscripts serve to reveal how mythology, biology, astrology, physiognomy and pharmacology are blended together in the pre-modern Siamese/Thai tradition.00These and other such illuminated manuscripts were produced in 18th- and 19th-century Siam (as Thailand was then known) and are richly illustrated both with delightful and evocative depictions of the Buddha, Hindu deities, Bodhisattvas, nuns, monks, and laypeople, and with some grotesque and terrifying ones ? they attest to a particular interest in corpses and their implications among some of their readers.00The author, who has both lived the Buddhist life in Thailand and researched in Thai monasteries, has an extensive knowledge not only of the history but of the dynamic of Thai religion, studying not just older texts but continuing rituals and contemporary media. He was inspired to write this book by the very great value he saw in these particular manuscripts, a most unusual collection amassed with a discriminating eye.

Illumination of books and manuscripts, Thai.

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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. Justin McDaniel looks at the growth of Asia's culture of Buddhist leisure 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. Provocative and theoretically innovative, Architects of Buddhist Leisure challenges current methodological approaches in religious studies and speaks to a broad audience interested in modern art, architecture, religion, anthropology, and material culture.

Architecture and recreation. --- Buddhist architecture --- Architecture and recreation --- Fazhao, --- Lek Wiriyaphan. --- Tange, Kenzō,

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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. Justin McDaniel looks at the growth of Asia's culture of Buddhist leisure 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. Provocative and theoretically innovative, Architects of Buddhist Leisure challenges current methodological approaches in religious studies and speaks to a broad audience interested in modern art, architecture, religion, anthropology, and material culture.

Architecture and recreation. --- Buddhist architecture --- Architecture and recreation --- Fazhao, --- Lek Wiriyaphan. --- Tange, Kenzō,