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This article documents and analyzes the ways in which mass-produced imagery, frequently intended for secular functions, is creatively repurposed at Buddhist shrines in Ladakh, India. I argue that these inventive reformulations of printed material—often requiring cutting, pasting, and reframing—play a critical role in the construction and vitality of Ladakhi Buddhist shrine assemblages. While scholars have recently examined the role of early photography in Tibet and the Western Himalaya, this paper pays attention to a broader spectrum of mass-produced imagery found in newspapers, advertisements, magazines, and travel guides, which is often refashioned and reused at shrines. The article proposes a tripartite typology for mass-produced images, some of which were never intended for religious use though they feature Buddhist content. Case studies illustrate that these innovative practices of repurposing mass-produced imagery are the result of several concerns; central among them is upholding a Buddhist precept about perceiving and caring for images of the Buddha. Other notable motivations and practices of preservation relate to generating blessings and merit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tibetan and Himālayan Buddhist doctrine and meditative traditions have been extensively studied and are well-known even to non-scholars, but pilgrimage and other non-elite practices have received far less attention. Pilgrimage is one of the most important practices for Tibetan and Himālayan Buddhists, whether traditional scholars, ordinary monks, lay yogis, or Buddhist laypeople. Scholarship on pilgrimage has increased significantly since the 1990s, and has tended to focus on territories within the political boundaries of the Tibetan provinces of the People's Republic of China. This study looks at a pilgrimage in what was once the far western end of the Tibetan empire, but is now within the political boundaries of India. Being outside of the People's Republic of China, this pilgrimage escaped the disruption of such practices that occurred within the PRC during the Cultural Revolution and after. Having interviewed people in the region, and performed the pilgrimage myself, this study shows that this pilgrimage possesses features common to Tibetan pilgrimage to sites of tantric power, but also has its own unique qualities. This study provides new data that contributes to the growing body of knowledge of Tibetan pilgrimage and to our understanding of such practices among the Buddhists of Himālayan India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper surveys the travels and networks of several Buddhist figures early in the modernization of this increasingly global tradition. Revisiting renowned Buddhist representatives, such as Shaku Sōen and Anagarika Dharmapala, reinforces the prominence of principal nodes in this expanding network—both in terms of seminal reformers and crucial arenas of encounter, such as Meiji Japan and Ceylon at the end of the nineteenth century. This study asserts the significant and compounding effect of early cross-cultural encounters at a formative period for modern Buddhism. Although the importance of face-to-face meeting—and the subsequent publications, correspondence, and travels—spanned relationships within and beyond Asia, the paper nevertheless suggests an Asian centre of gravity for Buddhism’s modernization and global dissemination. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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During his exiles from Lhasa in the 1910s, the Thirteenth Dalai Lama visited the holy places of Wutai Shan in China and Bodh Gaya in India. After his return, he commissioned paintings of these two places in cosmological mural programs of his palaces. While conforming to earlier iconographic traditions, these paintings employed empirical modes of representation unprecedented in Tibetan Buddhist paintings, revealing a close connection to the Dalai Lama's prior travels. This essay traces how these “modernized” renditions were incorporated into an existing pictorial template, and examines the deft rearticulation of a Buddhist cosmology in light of the Dalai Lama's own encounter with the shifting geopolitical terrains of the early twentieth century. I show that painting served as a powerful medium through which the Dalai Lama asserted his spiritual sovereignty and temporal authority over modernity's work of boundary making. The study elucidates a sphere of agency and creativity in the court of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama that has evaded historical inquiries to date. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Central to the modern rebirth of Bodh Gaya as the place of Buddha's enlightenment is the growing influence of Buddhist missionaries and transnational religious networks on this pilgrimage landscape in North India. Although this process began in the late nineteenth century, it was not until after India's independence that Buddhism became an integral part of the nation-building project and a key site of post-colonial diplomacy with neighbouring Asian countries. Symbolic of these international and diplomatic ties are the increasing numbers of foreign Buddhist monasteries and temples that have acquired land around Bodh Gaya. This paper seeks to document the historical and transnational religious processes that support the growing globalization of Bodh Gaya and to survey the institutional means through which monasteries have elevated the Buddhist memory of the site. In tracing these different national and regional networks of Buddhism, I argue that there is an underlying tension between Buddhist culture anchored in the national polity and the forces of globalization and religious experience that seek to transcend it. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses social engagement as a form of pilgrimage activity in sites along the Buddhist pilgrimage circuit including Bodhgaya in India. Topics covered include Bodhgaya as the most important pilgrimage site in the Buddhist world, how Bodhgaya's landscape was changed by transnational networks involving Buddhist pilgrims, and the increase of Buddhist operated non-government organizations (NGO). Also mentioned are the traditional forms of Buddhist expression.

The article examines the large public festivals in late imperial Hangzhou, notably the processions of major gods such as Marshal Wen and the Emperor of the Eastern Peak, and their place in local religious culture. It argues that, while the Buddhist pilgrimage attracted large numbers of people from outside the city, the Hangzhou local religious landscape was more deeply framed by Daoist rituals. It then explores the successive policies towards the festivals by the late Qing and Republican regimes, and looks at how they transformed the festivals, aimed some specific types of religious practices rather than others, and thus reshaped the local religious landscape over the course of one century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the architecture and artistic expression of the Temples of Angkor, Cambodia. It informs that the temple complex of Angkor signifies centuries of conflict among competing economic, political, and social interests. It also presents several photographs of Angkor temples, which are the site of the Buddhist pilgrimage.

The small temple of Triloknath, also called Re phag, is spectacularly located at the edge of a cliff high above the Chandrabhaga River in Lahul and a popular pilgrimage center for both Hindus and Buddhists. The temple complex tries to fulfill the demands of both religious groups and contains a wide courtyard, decorated with Śiva-symbols as well as Buddhist prayer flags, a liṅgam shrine and a chapel with a huge prayer-wheel. The temple itself possesses a modern anteroom that leads to the old, original part of the monument, namely the sanctum with a square ground plan, of the Nāgara type with a rather massive śikhara and a richly decorated doorway. A careful art historical and architectural analysis of the building reveals that Buddhist elements, such as Buddha-figures in the brackets of the columns and vajra-motifs, as well as the main image, a special form of an Avalokiteśvara, indicate the Buddhist origin of the temple, probably before the tenth century. However, the simple Nāgara structure with the spire, and later additions to the monument, also attract Hindu pilgrims and make the Triloknath temple one of the most famous pilgrimage centres in the Himalayan area. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay reflects on the roles of the researcher, gender, place, and nostalgia in the making of an ethnographic documentary film on a contemporary pilgrimage confraternity. Every year the group visits Ōyama, a sacred mountain in central Kanagawa Prefecture, on the occasion of the mountain-opening ceremony on 27 July. The Ohana Confraternity mainly consists of members working at two manufacturing companies in Tokyo. A sense of belonging to the group is mostly based on professional and personal relationships rather than a common sense of faith. The yearly pilgrimage is an example of how contemporary corporations use religious rituals to foster social relations and promote a productive work ethic among their employees. The presence of a foreign researcher and a local archivist influenced the ritual activities of the confraternity in many, sometimes unexpected, ways. Gender determined the place of individual members (including the researcher) in the group and their mode of association with the confraternity. The group's approach to traditions and rituals of the pilgrimage was nostalgic yet playful and malleable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The seventh century Chinese Buddhist, Fa Zang played a key role in systematizing the Huayan school of Chinese Buddhism. Fa Zang devotes energy to the problem. His solution comes in the form of three tests offered as tools that can be employed by practitioners. A Huayan practitioner's continued spiritual growth requires balancing three approaches to determine the moral value of a message and messenger. That is to say, the aspirant is encouraged to apply traditional criteria of proper conduct, consider doubts that arise in light of their application, and also nurture an unconditional faith.

It is, of course, not only works of great art, but also popular art, and even natural things, that can be transformed by context and audience. This essay shows how the pilpal tree under which Sakyamuni sat in the meditation leading to his enlightenment in the fifth century BC was scarcely noticed a millennium later in the seventh century CE when the famous Chinese Buddhist pilgrim, Xuanzang visited the region. Another millennium later, in the nineteenth century, the tree was seriously decayed, but today at the dawn of the twenty-first century the highly-venerated Bodhgaya tree is vigorous, apparently the "product of restoration and replacement, much like the nearby temple." Even nature can be transformed by belief. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I examine the way holy men's huts are portrayed in eighteenth century Buddhist tales from the Saikoku and Bandô Japanese Buddhist pilgrimage routes. These stories suggest that holy men's huts are ultimately located in places beyond the ordinary human life of suffering, marked as it is by impermanence and instability. That the hermit's hut transcends the transient world is indicated in two important ways in these tales. First, the holy men's statues of the Buddhist celestial bodhisattva Kannon, which they carry or carve while on the road, display a preternatural mobility or immobility which force the ascetics to stop their peregrination. Second, the places they build their huts to enshrine the statues are revealed as spiritual places (reijô), Pure Land paradises where the living Kannon has a permanent abode. These holy men's huts were the prototypes of the Saikoku and Bandô temples that continue to attract multitudes of Japanese pilgrims who travel there even today seeking freedom from the sorrows of transmigration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]