This volume investigates the historic and ethnographic accounts of the ongoing religious contestations over the status of the Mahabodhi Temple complex in Bodhgaya (a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2002) and its surrounding landscape to critically analyse the working and construction of sacredness. It endeavours to make a ground-up assessment of ways in which human participants in the past and present respond to and interact with the Mahabodhi Temple and its surroundings.
The volume argues that sacredness goes beyond scriptural texts and archaeological remains. The Mahabodhi Temple is complex and its surround-ing landscape is a 'living' heritage, which has been produced socially and constitutes differential densities of human involvement, attachment, and experience. Its significance lies mainly in the active interaction between religious architecture within its dynamic ritual settings. This endless con-testation of sacredness and its meaning should not be seen as the 'death' of the Mahabodhi Temple; on the contrary, it illustrates the vitality of the ongoing debate on the meaning, understanding, and use of the sacred in the Indian context.
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Sprache
Verlagsort
Verlagsgruppe
Zielgruppe
Für höhere Schule und Studium
Postgraduate
Maße
Höhe: 234 mm
Breite: 156 mm
Gewicht
ISBN-13
978-1-032-65431-7 (9781032654317)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Klassifikation
Nikhil Joshi is a Research Fellow in the Department of Architecture at National University of Singapore. Educated at the University of Pune, University of York, and National University of Singapore, he is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, UK, and recipient of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings Lethaby Scholarship, UK.
List of Illustrations. Foreword. Acknowledgements.
1. The 'Living' Humanized Sacred Place: An Introduction 2. The Origins and History of the Mahabodhi Temple 3. Constructing Sacred Placeness: Rituals Around the Bodhi Tree 4. Divergence, Convergence: Hindu-Buddhist Encounters 5. Anagarika Dharmapala: A Modern Political Activist and Defender of the Dharma 6. Deconstructing the Great Case 7. The Two Faces of Bodhgaya: Sacred to Buddhists and Hindus
Appendices. Appendix 1: The Bodh Gaya Temple Act, 1949. Appendix 2: The Budh-Gaya Temple Case. Appendix 3: Letter from Mr. Beglar to the Mahant of Buddha-Gaya Math. Appendix 4: Excerpts of the Court Judgement.
Bibliography. Further Reading. Index.
