Her volume reveals that central modernist features as outlined by McMahan and others (Baumann 2001, Lopez 2012)-such as privileging individual experience and meditation over ritual, the appeals to the rational and scientific foundations of the Buddhist tradition over its “traditional” or “cultural” elements, and its mostly white, liberal, and upper-middle-class audience-have become increasingly questioned across American convert groups. In an engaging and comprehensive scholarly and ethnographic study of current trends in meditation-based convert Buddhist groups in North America, Ann Gleig attempts to answer McMahan’s question. The immediate origin of Buddhism Beyond Borders lies in a four-day conference held in March 2010 at the Institute of Buddhist Studies at the Graduate T Before reflecting on the text's conclusions, however, let's look further into its conception and content. As Richard Payne advocates in his Afterword, the text suggests the need to replace a rhetoric of rupture that emphasizes difference and opposition with a narrative of similarity and continuity that is more faithful to the historical complexity of Buddhism's spatial and temporal movement. In doing so, the collection also makes a compelling case for bringing the subfield out from the margins into the mainstream of Buddhist Studies by showing its subject matter is not a deviant from the norm but, in fact, exemplifies what Buddhism as a living, moving tradition has always done: creatively adapt, absorb and assimilate. Hence it shifts attention from the bounded category of nation to the cultural flows of the transnational and replaces the static binary framework of traditional (authentic) Asian Buddhism vs modern (inauthentic) American Buddhism with a dynamic model that reveals/revels in fluidity, hybridity and multiplicity. The text aims to expand both the geographical boundaries of American Buddhism and the theoretical parameters that have often defined its academic study. The choice to represent the collection with a universal rather than national flag and the contrast in how such a symbol has been received in scholarly and practice communities signifies much of what is explored in Buddhism Beyond Borders. The Wheel of Life or Samsara is one of the most profound of all the Buddhist teachings for its’ encapsulates. It is one of the earliest historical examples of a visual aid used in teaching to explain the workings of karma. who not only decorate their temples with the flag, but sometimes even include a statue of Olcott himself. The Wheel of Life or Samsara was designed by the Buddha Shakyamuni himself as a total explanation of Buddhist teaching. " Although Olcott and the Protestant Buddhism he produced has generally been dismissed if not reviled by Western Buddhist scholars as inauthentic and diluted, he is still revered by Sri Lankan Buddhists in the U.S. Not an American flag, as one might assume given the subtitle of the edited collection, but rather the Buddhist flag designed in 1885 by the Colombo Committee, a group of Ceylonese Buddhists, and modified by Henry Steel Olcott, the first " White Buddhist. He front cover of Buddhism Beyond Borders: New Perspectives on Buddhism in the United States is decorated with a flag.
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