Description
Scitus Academics LLC Buddhist Modernities by Ileana Dorji
The 21st century is witnessing a resurgence and globalization of religion.
Around the world, religion has become an increasingly more vital and
pervasive force in both personal and public life. Buddhism has adapted to
rapid economic, social, cultural and political transformations in the modern,
post-modern and globalized world. Since its inception in India in the sixth
century BC, Buddhism spread, first throughout Asia, and then globally in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The transformations Buddhism has been
undergoing in the modern age have inspired much research over the last
decade. The main focus of attention has been the phenomenon known as
Buddhist modernism, science, or gender equality. Buddhism has shown a
remarkable flexibility and an ability to co-exist with a variety of social structures
as it spread not only to farming and herding societies, but also to
highly complex Asian and Western urban centers. In the West, the popularity
of Buddhism was inspired by the academic study of Asian religions, the
romanticism of Orientalism, the Beat-generation of the 1950s, the hippies of
the 1960s and the contemporary New Age-movement – as well as by Asian
migration to the West. Buddhists work, not only for world peace, but also for
increased social engagement, ecological awareness and gender equality.
Buddhist Modernities: Re-inventing Tradition in the Globalizing Modern
World offers studies on Buddhist modernism by attempting to clarify the
highly diverse ways in which Buddhist faith, thought, and practice have
developed in the modern age, both in Buddhist heartlands in Asia and in the
West. At the same time – both in the past and in the contemporary world –
Buddhist clerics have encouraged to, and also engaged in, armed conflicts
and wars. This Book covers, with a thematic and/or regional focus, such
modern Buddhist developments.