The Buddha’s Busted Finger: Craft, Touch, and Cosmology in Theravada Buddhism
This article is about the bodily connection between Theravada Buddhist craftspeople, monks, and laypeople to the objects they create and touch. Textual and contemporary accounts of Buddhist material production emphasize the importance of physical touch in the formal aspects, embodied efficacy, and s...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Oxford University Press
2022
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| In: |
Journal of the American Academy of Religion
Year: 2022, Volume: 90, Issue: 1, Pages: 52-85 |
| Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains: | B
Thailand (Nord)
/ Theravada
/ Anthropology of religion
/ Material popular culture
/ Craft
/ Sacral building
/ Sacred object
/ Mudrās (Hinduism)
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| IxTheo Classification: | AD Sociology of religion; religious policy AG Religious life; material religion BL Buddhism KBM Asia |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | This article is about the bodily connection between Theravada Buddhist craftspeople, monks, and laypeople to the objects they create and touch. Textual and contemporary accounts of Buddhist material production emphasize the importance of physical touch in the formal aspects, embodied efficacy, and social salience of Buddhist objects, including Buddha images, brick stupas, and shrines. Here, I explore how the hands of skilled and unskilled Buddhist craftspeople manipulate, form, and connect divine, material, and social expressions of Theravada Buddhism. The handiwork of Buddhists gestures towards the ethical possibilities and cosmological significance of religious crafting, installation, and construction. Drawing on a variety of Theravada Buddhist sources, this article introduces "religious building" as a usable analytic category that can reveal why religion itself is often organized around, and generated through, acts of material and spatial production. |
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| ISSN: | 1477-4585 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: American Academy of Religion, Journal of the American Academy of Religion
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1093/jaarel/lfac003 |