Archives

As a Visiting Research Scholar at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies here at Kyoto University, I am writing two chapters of a book focused on a comparative study of ritual in various Theravada cultures. Specifically, I am researching and writing about pchum ben (an annual festival for the dead/ancestors in Cambodia) and kathina (the merit-making robe-giving rite to Buddhist monks by laity in Burma). These two studies are part of a book that will also include chapters focused on selected rites in Sri Lanka, Laos and Thailand as well.

My field is the history of religions, or the comparative study of religion. Over the years, my research has evolved from philosophically oriented interpretations derived from close textual analyses of Sanskrit and Pali Buddhist texts, as seen in my first book Discipline: the Canonical Buddhism of the Vinayapitaka (Motilal Banarsidass, 1981), to more historical/critical and anthropologically oriented studies of Buddhist practices; that is, from the study of religious ideas in the abstract to the study of religious practice in the lives of various types Buddhist people in social and historical contexts. Two of my studies on Buddhism in Sri Lanka (Buddha in the Crown: Avalokitesvara in the Buddhist Traditions of Sri Lanka [Oxford, 1991] and The Buddhist Visnu [Columbia, 2004]) have been focused more precisely on the problem of how elements from one given religious tradition (Mahayana Buddhism or Hinduism respectively) have been absorbed and transformed by religious practitioners in another (Theravada Buddhism). A related problem present in both of these studies, as well as in The Religious World of Kirti Sri: Buddhism, Art and Politics in Late Medieval Sri Lanka (Oxford, 1996) and Spirits of the Place: Buddhism and Lao Religious Culture (Hawaii, 2009) is the manner in which the changing contours of the socio-political world affect the dynamic of change in religious culture.