The Buddha's tooth: western tales of a Sri Lankan relic
Part One: The Portuguese and the Tooth Relic -- Chapter One: The Tale of the Portuguese Tooth and Its Sources -- Chapter Two: Where the Tooth Was Found: Traditions about the Location of the Relic in Sri -- Lanka -- Chapter Three: Whose Tooth Was It? Traditions about the Identity of the Relic -- Chap...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Print Book |
| Language: | English |
| Subito Delivery Service: | Order now. |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Chicago London
University of Chicago Press
[2021]
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| In: | Year: 2021 |
| Series/Journal: | Buddhism and modernity
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| Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains: | B
Buddha 563 BC-483 BC
/ Tooth
/ Relic
/ Dalada Maligava (Kandy)
/ Britons
B Sri Lanka / Buddha 563 BC-483 BC / Tooth / Relic / Portuguese people |
| IxTheo Classification: | AG Religious life; material religion AX Inter-religious relations BL Buddhism KBM Asia TA History |
| Further subjects: | B
Buddhism and state (Sri Lanka)
B Gautama Buddha Relics (Sri Lanka) |
| Online Access: |
Table of Contents Blurb Literaturverzeichnis |
| Parallel Edition: | Electronic
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| Summary: | Part One: The Portuguese and the Tooth Relic -- Chapter One: The Tale of the Portuguese Tooth and Its Sources -- Chapter Two: Where the Tooth Was Found: Traditions about the Location of the Relic in Sri -- Lanka -- Chapter Three: Whose Tooth Was It? Traditions about the Identity of the Relic -- Chapter Four: The Trial of the Tooth -- Chapter Five: The Destruction of the Tooth -- Conspectus of Part One: The Storical Evolution of the Tales of the Portuguese Tooth -- Part Two: The British and the Tooth Relic -- Chapter Six: The Cosmopolitan Tooth: The Relic in Kandy before the British Became Aware of -- It -- Chapter Seven: The British Takeover of 1815 and the Kandyan Convention -- Chapter Eight: The Relic Returns: The Tooth and Its Properties Restored to the Temple -- Chapter Nine: The Relic Lost and Recaptured: The Tooth and the Rebellion of 1817- -- Chapter Ten: The Relic Disestablished: Missionary Oppositions to the Tooth -- Chapter Eleven: Showings of the Tooth: The Story of the King of Siam's Visit (1897) -- Chapter Twelve: Showings of the Tooth: The Story of Queen Elizabeth's Shoes (1954) "Hair, teeth, fingernails, pieces of bone-bodily fragments supposedly from the Buddha himself have a complicated history. These relics have long served as objects of veneration for many Buddhists, and unsurprisingly, when Western colonial powers subjugated populations in South Asia, they used, manipulated, and even destroyed these relics to exert control. In this account of colonial Portuguese and British dealings with one of the most famous relics of the Buddha-the tooth relic-John S. Strong treats us to a masterful analysis of this relic's contested origins, its manipulation by colonial powers, and its multiple functions across several colonial contexts. Strong revisits two well-known stories about the West's encounter with Buddhism in South Asia. The first story concerns a tooth identified by the Portuguese as being a relic of the Buddha in the mid-sixteenth century. This tooth was taken by the Portuguese from Sri Lanka back to Goa where it was publicly crushed, burned, and thrown into a river as a display of colonial power. The second story concerns another tooth, also identified as a relic of the Buddha and first enshrined at the end of the sixteenth century. After the British conquered Kandy in the second decade of the nineteenth century, they realized the value of this tooth for furthering their colonial ambitions, and what followed was a long and complicated history of British interactions with the tooth up through Sri Lankan independence in 1948 and beyond. Through a meticulous study of these two encounters, Strong reveals the importance of multicultural cosmopolitan objects for understanding the history of Buddhism in South Asia"-- |
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| Item Description: | Includes bibliographical references and index |
| ISBN: | 022680173X |