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The community of Buddhists imagined within the narrative world of the Maṇimēkalai itself is considered – a community whose locus is not the geographical region of Tamil‐speaking southern India in the narrative present, as might be expected, but rather that of all India and the far‐flung reaches of South‐east Asia in the era of the future Buddha's earthly birth. Focusing on the central role played by the begging bowl that never empties if used in service to the poor, it is argued that the bowl itself signals the coming of the future Buddha and embodies those moral values that will enable the Maṇimēkalai's audience to participate in that glorious community to come. Attention to the central locations of the narrative similarly reveals the text's expansive vision of Buddhist community that involves not only the subcontinent but also an island kingdom somewhere in South‐east Asia. Through reference to other Buddhist literature of this early medieval period, it is argued that the Maṇimēkalai participates in larger Asian patterns of redrawing the Buddhist world, relocating its centers away from the cities of northern India associated with Gautama Buddha and toward new foci of Buddhist activity in South India, Sri Lanka, China, and South‐east Asia.

The commentary on the Vīracōliyam discussed here (which really constitutes a text in its own right) brings together fragments of a considerable corpus of Buddhist narrative and devotional poetry in Tamil, of which nothing else remains. Expanding on the Vīracōliyam's project by substantiating the language of the Buddha‐to‐be with Tamil literary examples, the commentary envisions a community of readers who share a profound devotion to the Buddha and a moral vision of human kindness and self‐sacrificing compassion for the welfare of others. In drawing from texts that are not explicitly Buddhist for many of his moral illustrations, the commentator clearly envisions Buddhism as one among many sectarian communities in Tamil‐speaking literary culture; in quoting so broadly, he both locates and subtly reworks common intersectarian concerns and claims a part of the literary corpus in Tamil for Buddhism. In its failure to cite the Maṇimēkalai even once, the commentary further suggests that despite their common language and common geographical origin, the Maṇimēkalai and the Vīracōliyam did not belong to a single community of Tamil‐speaking Buddhists. Rather, each envisions and enacts a textual community unique to its own cultural and historical location, with each text revealing a distinct moment in the way Tamil‐speaking Buddhist communities represented and imagined themselves in diverse religious and linguistic landscapes.

This chapter illustrates how the Thai Buddhist community appeared more harmonious and stable—and more resilient to the exogenous pressures of the Cold War—than the Buddhist establishment of neighboring Laos, just to the east across the Mekong from Khon Kaen, Ubon, and other Isan provinces. By 1958, Cold War tensions in Laos had already escalated to an intensity never experienced in Thailand—a civil war loomed. The chapter shows how U.S. officials, undertaking a series of Buddhist programs on both sides of the Mekong under separate United States Information Service (USIS) and Asia Foundation auspices, sought to ensure that the clerical establishments of both countries would serve their interests in the Cold War fight.

This chapter surveys psychotherapists’ common understandings for the primary terms the volume tracks: psychotherapy, religion, secular, science, medicine, Buddhism, spirituality, and terms for the ultimate aim of life such as enlightenment. Psychotherapists’ “conventional definitions” for these concepts are established as drawn from both textual analysis and data from interviews and ethnographic observation. The chapter then explains how therapists inherited these conventional definitions through brief histories of how European communities came to invent a modern concept of religion that is based on a Protestant prototype of inner belief or came to discover a Buddhism defined as atheistic (despite the evidence of Buddhist communities throughout history who propitiate deities). The chapter thus clarifies the socially constructed nature of these core concepts, concepts to which psychotherapists then contribute to in an ongoing revision and reconstruction.

This introductory chapter provides a background of the revival of women's monasticism in Japan. During the second month of the first year of the Kenchō era (1249), twelve women received the complete nuns' monastic precepts (bikuni gusokukai) of the Four-Part Vinaya from the priest Eison. For several years, these women had been living as lay monastics in the ancient temple Hokkeji (the Lotus Temple) in Japan's southern capital of Nara. Taking 348 vows from Eison, they received conferral as full-pledged members of the Buddhist monastic community, or sangha. This ordination of twelve bikuni marked the first time in at least four hundred years that a group of women took the entire set of nuns' precepts in a manner recognized as legitimate by the male authorities of Buddhist monastic institution in Japan.

This chapter focuses on the modern Buddhist communities that emerged in response to the decline of the traditional culture and linked to transnational organizations that sought to propagate Buddhist ideas in new ways. In this context of transnational modern Buddhism, a different kind of organization emerged, one emphasizing lay authority and mobilizing communities to work toward a new modern form of Buddhist nationalism. In particular, the chapter studies the Young Men's Buddhist Association (YMBA), its accomplishments and eventual submergence within a wider nationalist struggle. The emergence of this association was framed by Burma's colonial realities and its development intersected with multiple transnational contexts.

By the Conclusion, the diversity that exists among psychotherapists’ approaches to Buddhist traditions is clear. However, Prescribing the Dharma also informs larger questions in religious studies by observing that this diversity is generated out of therapists’ shifting definitions of what is religious and not-religious. Examining common operative understandings of categories like religion, science, and medicine yields a number of conclusions not only about the interpretive utility of these categories, but their function in the lives of communities in the United States. The Conclusion delineates six central findings that can be derived from Prescribing the Dharma’s research. It is then divided into six sections each of which expands upon those findings and their application to the field.

This chapter provides the temporal and theoretical starting point for a discussion of recruitment, monastic training, and institution building. Discussing the life events of one monk, Venerable Narada, from his decision to become a monastic to his choice to remain in the sangha for life, it examines how social bonds influence the decisions that people—monastic and lay—make about their role in society and their commitment to the sangha. By assessing carefully the factors that contributed to Narada's decision to serve people's social and economic needs, the chapter maintains that the model of generalized economic exchange that is sometimes used to describe Buddhist monasticism as a social institution limits our ability to understand and appreciate how groups of monastics and laypeople interact on a regular basis. Although it may correctly be asserted that both monastics' material needs and the laity's ritual wants and their desire for merit are central factors that draw and hold together groups of monastics and laypeople, it is argued that social ties based on shared emotions and collective histories play a central role in the formation and continuation of Buddhist monastic communities.

Vanessa Sasson’s chapter summarizes the wealth of recent scholarship on the neglected topic of the place of family, children, parenting, and enculturation in the history of Buddhism and in the experience of Buddhist householder communities. Demonstrating how modern monastics do not live isolated from their home communities and families, the author connects modern insights with recent textual Vinaya studies oindicating that this was true in unexpected ways in ancient and later Indian Buddhism. The chapter then describes the challenges faced in handling ethnocentric student preconceptions about Buddhism (i.e., that it is not for children). The chapter documents the need for a historical imagination that includes the reality that all Buddhist communities are filled with families and that there are all kinds of traditions that include those families as practitioners. Recent research on this theme is outlined.