The Buddhist Saints of the Forest and the Cult of Amulets

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
Part I. The arahant and the Path of Meditation:
2. The Buddhist conception of the arahant
3. The Path of Purification: the ascetic practices
4. The stages and rewards of Buddhist meditation
5. The forest-monk tradition in Southeast Asia: a historical backdrop
Part II. The hagiography of a Buddhist saint: text and context
the politics of sectarianism:
6. The biography of a modern saint
7. The Buddha's life as paradigm
8. The ordering principles behind Buddhist saintly biography
9. The disciples of the Master
10. The biographer as exemplary forest-monk, meditator, and teacher
11. Sectarianism and the sponsorship of meditation
12. The Mandnikdi sect's propagation of lay meditation
13. The center–periphery dialectic: the Mahathat and Bovonniwet sponsorship of meditation compared
Part III. The cult of amulets: the objectification and transmission of charisma:
14. The cult of images and amulets
15. An enumeration of historic and popular amulets
16. The 'likeness' of the image to the original Buddha: the case of the Shillala Buddha
17. The process of sacralizing images and amulets: the transfer of power by monks
18. Amulets blessed by contemporary forest saints
19. Saints on cosmic mountains
Part IV. Conceptual and theoretical clarifications:
20. A commentary on millennial Buddhism in Thailand and Burma
21. The sources of charismatic leadership: Max Weber revisited
22. The objectification of charisma and the fetishism of objects

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• Table of Contents (75 KB)
• Marketing Excerpt (647 KB)
• Copyright Information Page (75 KB)
• Index (1383 KB)
• Front Matter (325 KB)