Buddhism and Society: A Great Tradition and Its Burmese Vicissitudes

Front Cover
University of California Press, May 27, 1982 - Religion - 510 pages
The current Western interest in Buddhism and other Eastern religions is--among other reasons--both the result of and the stimulation for an entire library of books purporting to bring the Wisdom of the East to an audience for whom the wisdom of the West has failed. This book is not an example of that genre. It is an attempt to interpret Buddhism in the light of some current theories about religion. As a work of scholarship, rather than a homiletic tract or an apologetic treatise, its aim is to understand Buddhism as one historical variant of the generic human attempt to find meaning and hope in a sacred order that transcends the mundane order of existence; its aime is not to encourage or discourage either a devotional or a soteriological interest in Buddhism.
 

Contents

An Anthropological Problem
3
A Religion of Radical Salvation
31
I A Religion of Proximate Salvation
66
II The Central Concept of Merit
92
III The Key Doctrine of Karma
114
A Religion of Magical Protection
140
A Religion of Chiliastic Expectations
162
Its Generic Attributes
191
I The Normative Structure
279
II The Social Structure
305
I Recruitment Structure
321
II Character Structure
351
The Sangha and the State
378
The Status of the Monkhood in Burmese Society
396
A Critique
425
Buddhism and Burmese Society
438

I Calendrical Rituals
209
II LifeCycle Rituals
232
Crisis Rituals
255
On the Burmese Romanization
479
Index
495
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About the author (1982)

Melford Elliot "Mel" Spiro (April 26, 1920 – October 18, 2014) was an American cultural anthropologist specializing in religion and psychological anthropology.

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