For the colonial-era K’iche’an Maya, water was a constant, ambiguous feature of their highland Guatemalan world with the power to destroy, create, or transform. The element featured prominently in Indigenous narratives of the past as a key interactant in development of their communities’ ancestral identities and as an instrument that could be manipulated by the gods and ancestors. Upon their arrival in Guatemala in the sixteenth century, Spanish missionaries brought with them another conception of water as a vehicle for divine grace in the first Catholic rite, baptism. Water’s role in Indigenous cosmology presented, in theory, a point of articulation for explaining to K’iche’an peoples the spiritual transformation that baptism represented in Catholic doctrine. Close examination of colonial Indigenous accounts of the baptismal encounter, however, indicate that K’iche’an authors integrated their own understanding of water into reception of baptism as an index of sociopolitical identity. By reinforcing the key roles of local leaders in shaping community identity and interpreting the Catholic initiation rite as a sociopolitical statement, the K’iche’an encounter with baptismal water ultimately reflected the reality of early colonial Guatemala in which spiritual and political conquest were deeply intertwined.
{"title":"Water, Identity, and Baptism in K’iche’an Maya Narratives from Colonial Highland Guatemala","authors":"Mallory E. Matsumoto","doi":"10.1086/726712","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/726712","url":null,"abstract":"For the colonial-era K’iche’an Maya, water was a constant, ambiguous feature of their highland Guatemalan world with the power to destroy, create, or transform. The element featured prominently in Indigenous narratives of the past as a key interactant in development of their communities’ ancestral identities and as an instrument that could be manipulated by the gods and ancestors. Upon their arrival in Guatemala in the sixteenth century, Spanish missionaries brought with them another conception of water as a vehicle for divine grace in the first Catholic rite, baptism. Water’s role in Indigenous cosmology presented, in theory, a point of articulation for explaining to K’iche’an peoples the spiritual transformation that baptism represented in Catholic doctrine. Close examination of colonial Indigenous accounts of the baptismal encounter, however, indicate that K’iche’an authors integrated their own understanding of water into reception of baptism as an index of sociopolitical identity. By reinforcing the key roles of local leaders in shaping community identity and interpreting the Catholic initiation rite as a sociopolitical statement, the K’iche’an encounter with baptismal water ultimately reflected the reality of early colonial Guatemala in which spiritual and political conquest were deeply intertwined.","PeriodicalId":45784,"journal":{"name":"HISTORY OF RELIGIONS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139306135","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":":Kindred Spirits: Friendship and Resistance at the Edges of Modern Catholicism","authors":"Edward Baring","doi":"10.1086/726714","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/726714","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45784,"journal":{"name":"HISTORY OF RELIGIONS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139293467","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article examines the shifting status of Inca religion in European discourse between 1550 and 1900. It is argued that a trope of Inca Exceptionalism—the idea that Inca religion was uniquely rational and admirable—can be discerned throughout this period, albeit to varying degrees, ultimately reaching a crescendo during the Enlightenment. Contrasting accounts of Aztec religion are also discussed, given the widespread tendency among European authors to see Inca religion as superior to its Mesoamerican counterparts. Following the Enlightenment, there is a marked decline in the prestige afforded to Inca religion, which was viewed in increasingly negative terms by nineteenth-century anthropologists and philologists. The article presents a range of interpretations as to why understandings of Inca religion altered so much over the time period in question and suggests that the discourse on Inca religion is illustrative of shifting intellectual frameworks with respect to the wider category of religion itself. Finally, it is argued that Inca religion cannot be understood apart from the distinctively aniconic nature of Inca visual culture, a material fact that exerted considerable influence over European perceptions of religion in the Americas.
{"title":"The Incas and the Enlightenment: Andean Idols and European Discourses on Religion, 1550–1900","authors":"Darryl Wilkinson","doi":"10.1086/726715","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/726715","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the shifting status of Inca religion in European discourse between 1550 and 1900. It is argued that a trope of Inca Exceptionalism—the idea that Inca religion was uniquely rational and admirable—can be discerned throughout this period, albeit to varying degrees, ultimately reaching a crescendo during the Enlightenment. Contrasting accounts of Aztec religion are also discussed, given the widespread tendency among European authors to see Inca religion as superior to its Mesoamerican counterparts. Following the Enlightenment, there is a marked decline in the prestige afforded to Inca religion, which was viewed in increasingly negative terms by nineteenth-century anthropologists and philologists. The article presents a range of interpretations as to why understandings of Inca religion altered so much over the time period in question and suggests that the discourse on Inca religion is illustrative of shifting intellectual frameworks with respect to the wider category of religion itself. Finally, it is argued that Inca religion cannot be understood apart from the distinctively aniconic nature of Inca visual culture, a material fact that exerted considerable influence over European perceptions of religion in the Americas.","PeriodicalId":45784,"journal":{"name":"HISTORY OF RELIGIONS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139302068","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
As an imperial city at the crossroads, Istanbul functioned as a window onto debates about the complex relation between faith and knowledge during an era of interreligious conflict and changing political allegiances. Taking seventeenth-century Istanbul as a case study, this article examines how and why religious conflict unintentionally led to a new form of religious dialogue that stimulated knowledge exchange between Muslims and Christians. The changing nature of interreligious dialogue between Ottomans and Europeans occurred in the context of ongoing religious crises on both sides: within Muslim communities and between Western and Eastern Christianities. It argues that confessional conflict ironically helped to develop grounds for a rapprochement between Ottoman and European intellectual worlds to redefine faith beyond the textual domains of theology. Through scholarly engagements, learned Europeans began to appreciate commonality with respect to matters of faith, while also becoming gradually aware that distinct individuals of the same religion vary on the nature of true faith. Faith eventually began to be understood in its own pluralities and irreconcilable conflicts through everyday encounters in Istanbul. By comparing faiths in Islam, early modern scholars faced the paradox of their own time: the irreducibility of religious difference within any one religion. Recapturing the genealogy of the comparative approach to faith in the form of dialogue, this study sheds light on the origins of religious relativism, which is conventionally associated with the European Enlightenment.
{"title":"Comparing Faiths: The Making of Religious Dialogue between the Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe","authors":"D. Yıldırım","doi":"10.1086/726716","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/726716","url":null,"abstract":"As an imperial city at the crossroads, Istanbul functioned as a window onto debates about the complex relation between faith and knowledge during an era of interreligious conflict and changing political allegiances. Taking seventeenth-century Istanbul as a case study, this article examines how and why religious conflict unintentionally led to a new form of religious dialogue that stimulated knowledge exchange between Muslims and Christians. The changing nature of interreligious dialogue between Ottomans and Europeans occurred in the context of ongoing religious crises on both sides: within Muslim communities and between Western and Eastern Christianities. It argues that confessional conflict ironically helped to develop grounds for a rapprochement between Ottoman and European intellectual worlds to redefine faith beyond the textual domains of theology. Through scholarly engagements, learned Europeans began to appreciate commonality with respect to matters of faith, while also becoming gradually aware that distinct individuals of the same religion vary on the nature of true faith. Faith eventually began to be understood in its own pluralities and irreconcilable conflicts through everyday encounters in Istanbul. By comparing faiths in Islam, early modern scholars faced the paradox of their own time: the irreducibility of religious difference within any one religion. Recapturing the genealogy of the comparative approach to faith in the form of dialogue, this study sheds light on the origins of religious relativism, which is conventionally associated with the European Enlightenment.","PeriodicalId":45784,"journal":{"name":"HISTORY OF RELIGIONS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139301286","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":":Buddhist Historiography in China","authors":"Natasha Heller","doi":"10.1086/726717","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/726717","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45784,"journal":{"name":"HISTORY OF RELIGIONS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139303648","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This review article examines two recent books that each adopt different stands on the contributions to be made by theory—or perhaps better, metatheory—in the study of religion. For while one aims to cultivate the role of the scholar as being a bit of a scandalous fool, the other strongly encourages colleagues to adopt an interpretive method that, or so it is claimed, contributes to solving a variety of pressing societal problems.
{"title":"The Who, Why, and What of Religion—and Its Study","authors":"R. Mccutcheon","doi":"10.1086/725410","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/725410","url":null,"abstract":"This review article examines two recent books that each adopt different stands on the contributions to be made by theory—or perhaps better, metatheory—in the study of religion. For while one aims to cultivate the role of the scholar as being a bit of a scandalous fool, the other strongly encourages colleagues to adopt an interpretive method that, or so it is claimed, contributes to solving a variety of pressing societal problems.","PeriodicalId":45784,"journal":{"name":"HISTORY OF RELIGIONS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72768292","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Buddhist fund-raising poetry lays at the intersection of literary arts, religious meaning making, and economic exchange. A twelfth-century woodblock print of Venerable Miaozhan’s Gāthā 妙湛和尚偈頌 contains 180 previously lost poems by the Chan master Miaozhan Sihui 妙湛思慧 (1071–1145). Neither Venerable Miaozhan’s Gāthā nor Miaozhan himself have previously been studied, likely because this rare text was in private collections until recently. Unusually, most of his poems are about fund-raising. This article introduces the text of Venerable Miaozhan’s Gāthā and its author, as well as the social networks encoded in his poems. Then, I focus on verses about fund-raising, economic exchange, and the role of tea in donations. Socioeconomic changes after war, the economic practices of monastery estates, and fund-raising instructions in ritual handbooks all provide contexts that partially explain Miaozhan’s fund-raising poetry. I interpret Miaozhan’s fund-raising poems as a religioliterary technology that circulated into the world where it could participate in the fashioning of religious meaning amid economic relationships between the monastery and its patrons.
{"title":"Buddhist Fund-Raising Poems and Other Lost Verses from Venerable Miaozhan’s Gāthā (Printed 1142)","authors":"J. Protass","doi":"10.1086/725412","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/725412","url":null,"abstract":"Buddhist fund-raising poetry lays at the intersection of literary arts, religious meaning making, and economic exchange. A twelfth-century woodblock print of Venerable Miaozhan’s Gāthā 妙湛和尚偈頌 contains 180 previously lost poems by the Chan master Miaozhan Sihui 妙湛思慧 (1071–1145). Neither Venerable Miaozhan’s Gāthā nor Miaozhan himself have previously been studied, likely because this rare text was in private collections until recently. Unusually, most of his poems are about fund-raising. This article introduces the text of Venerable Miaozhan’s Gāthā and its author, as well as the social networks encoded in his poems. Then, I focus on verses about fund-raising, economic exchange, and the role of tea in donations. Socioeconomic changes after war, the economic practices of monastery estates, and fund-raising instructions in ritual handbooks all provide contexts that partially explain Miaozhan’s fund-raising poetry. I interpret Miaozhan’s fund-raising poems as a religioliterary technology that circulated into the world where it could participate in the fashioning of religious meaning amid economic relationships between the monastery and its patrons.","PeriodicalId":45784,"journal":{"name":"HISTORY OF RELIGIONS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87572674","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Unlike comparable texts found in other religious traditions, hagiographies of Chinese Buddhist monks were composed by writers from outside the ecclesia, that is, Confucian scholar-officials. This difference produced, according to some scholars, a “peculiar distortion” in the transmission of the Chinese Buddhist religious heritage. This article examines the results of this anomaly, focusing on inscriptions composed for burial stupas, our richest source for biographical information about illustrious clergy. It concentrates on the Southern Song dynasty (1127–1279), an era that saw a thriving Buddhist church, intensified state control over the sangha and its abbacies, and the rise of Neo-Confucian orthodoxy, all of which shaped Chinese intellectual and cultural life for centuries. These shifts helped produce a epigraphic literature that turned away from an earlier emphasis on miracles and asceticism toward a less spectacular, more subdued mode of sacredness. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, great monks were represented as remarkable men who won acclaim in the dusty world but, as true vessels of the dharma, remained unbound to it. Fully awakened to the Buddha-truth, detached from worldly concerns, and leaving behind relics upon their passing, they also proved themselves to be skillful managers of monastic affairs and drew the reverence of their peers, scholar-officials, and the Song throne. Their mastery of this balancing act made for a new, domesticated charisma, adjusted for the changed political circumstances but that still set these men far apart from the rest of lay and clerical society.
{"title":"A Domesticated Charisma: Buddhist Hagiographies in Southern Song China (1127–1279)","authors":"Mark Halperin","doi":"10.1086/725411","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/725411","url":null,"abstract":"Unlike comparable texts found in other religious traditions, hagiographies of Chinese Buddhist monks were composed by writers from outside the ecclesia, that is, Confucian scholar-officials. This difference produced, according to some scholars, a “peculiar distortion” in the transmission of the Chinese Buddhist religious heritage. This article examines the results of this anomaly, focusing on inscriptions composed for burial stupas, our richest source for biographical information about illustrious clergy. It concentrates on the Southern Song dynasty (1127–1279), an era that saw a thriving Buddhist church, intensified state control over the sangha and its abbacies, and the rise of Neo-Confucian orthodoxy, all of which shaped Chinese intellectual and cultural life for centuries. These shifts helped produce a epigraphic literature that turned away from an earlier emphasis on miracles and asceticism toward a less spectacular, more subdued mode of sacredness. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, great monks were represented as remarkable men who won acclaim in the dusty world but, as true vessels of the dharma, remained unbound to it. Fully awakened to the Buddha-truth, detached from worldly concerns, and leaving behind relics upon their passing, they also proved themselves to be skillful managers of monastic affairs and drew the reverence of their peers, scholar-officials, and the Song throne. Their mastery of this balancing act made for a new, domesticated charisma, adjusted for the changed political circumstances but that still set these men far apart from the rest of lay and clerical society.","PeriodicalId":45784,"journal":{"name":"HISTORY OF RELIGIONS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81101917","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article traces the rise of a Pure Land movement in twentieth-century China and the canonization of its leader, Monk Yinguang, as a patriarch and an emanation of Bodhisattva Great Power, one of the two bodhisattvas flanking Buddha Amitābha in the Western Pure Land. Although scholars have long recognized this influential tradition of practice, its lack of institutions such as direct master-disciple transmission has posed methodological challenges to the study of this distinct yet decentralized Buddhist tradition. How has this movement reproduced itself over the last century and around the globe? How do scholars make sense of the patriarchs of a tradition without lasting institutions? Using the materials collected by Yinguang’s followers, this article uncovers the anchoring schemas that canonized Yinguang as the thirteenth Pure Land patriarch when China was plagued by war, poverty, and colonial intrusion. I argue that Yinguang’s rise hinged crucially on a refashioning of the bodhisattva spirit as poor people’s philanthropy (PPP). PPP’s simple guidelines reformulated the premodern nonelite soteriology into a spiritual blueprint for commoners who wished to secure Great Power’s protection through their daily pious actions and to establish local civil society organizations. In contrast to other movements that established centralized organizations, Yinguang’s indifference toward institutionalization, far from being a disadvantage, opened up new possibilities. By disseminating ideas instead of institutions, PPP both remade Yinguang into a spiritual leader who transcended any particular organization and ensured that the flourishing of the movement was not tied to the success or failure of any particular group.
{"title":"War, Public Letters, and Piety: The Making of a New Pure Land Patriarch in Modern China","authors":"J. Zu","doi":"10.1086/725398","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/725398","url":null,"abstract":"This article traces the rise of a Pure Land movement in twentieth-century China and the canonization of its leader, Monk Yinguang, as a patriarch and an emanation of Bodhisattva Great Power, one of the two bodhisattvas flanking Buddha Amitābha in the Western Pure Land. Although scholars have long recognized this influential tradition of practice, its lack of institutions such as direct master-disciple transmission has posed methodological challenges to the study of this distinct yet decentralized Buddhist tradition. How has this movement reproduced itself over the last century and around the globe? How do scholars make sense of the patriarchs of a tradition without lasting institutions? Using the materials collected by Yinguang’s followers, this article uncovers the anchoring schemas that canonized Yinguang as the thirteenth Pure Land patriarch when China was plagued by war, poverty, and colonial intrusion. I argue that Yinguang’s rise hinged crucially on a refashioning of the bodhisattva spirit as poor people’s philanthropy (PPP). PPP’s simple guidelines reformulated the premodern nonelite soteriology into a spiritual blueprint for commoners who wished to secure Great Power’s protection through their daily pious actions and to establish local civil society organizations. In contrast to other movements that established centralized organizations, Yinguang’s indifference toward institutionalization, far from being a disadvantage, opened up new possibilities. By disseminating ideas instead of institutions, PPP both remade Yinguang into a spiritual leader who transcended any particular organization and ensured that the flourishing of the movement was not tied to the success or failure of any particular group.","PeriodicalId":45784,"journal":{"name":"HISTORY OF RELIGIONS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81806391","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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