Benjamin Fleming

Traditionally, research on the history of Asian religions has been marked by a bias for literary evidence, privileging canonical texts penned in ‘classical’ languages. Not only has a focus on literary evidence shaped the dominant narratives about the religious histories of Asia, in both scholarship and popular culture, but it has contributed to the tendency to study different religious traditions in relative isolation from one another. Today, moreover, historical work is often based on modern textual editions and, increasingly, on electronic databases. What may be lost, in the process, is the visceral sense of the text as artifact – as a material object that formed part of a broader material culture, in which the boundaries between religious traditions were sometimes more fluid than canonical literature might suggest. This volume brings together specialists in a variety of Asian cultures to discuss the methodological challenges involved in integrating material evidence for the reconstruction of the religious histories of South, Southeast, Central, and East Asia. By means of specific ‘test cases,’ the volume explores the importance of considering material and literary evidence in concert. What untold stories do these sources help us to recover? How might they push us to reevaluate historical narratives traditionally told from literary sources? By addressing these questions from the perspectives of different subfields and religious traditions, contributors map out the challenges involved in interpreting different types of data, assessing the problems of interpretation distinct to specific types of material evidence (e.g., coins, temple art, manuscripts, donative inscriptions) and considering the issues raised by the different patterns in the preservation of such evidence in different locales. Special attention is paid to newly-discovered and neglected sources; to our evidence for trade, migration, and inter-regional cultural exchange; and to geographical locales that served as "contact zones" connecting cultures. In addition, the chapters in this volume represent the rich range of religious traditions across Asia – including Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Shinto, and Chinese religions, as well as Islam and eastern Christianities.

This article considers the practices about ‘the special dead’ related to the monastery at Pāhāṛpur (‘Hill--town’) in the Rājshāhī region of North--Western Bangladesh. This Early Medieval community was rich in religious diversity from the Gupta to Pāla periods—dense with evidence of Jain, Hindu, and Buddhist activity. There are a number of stūpa structures throughout the grounds for the burial of revered teachers and leaders such that the living comingled with the dead in an academic and religious setting. The Pāla era monastery was dedicated to advanced learning, meditation, worship, student housing, and burial. At the centre of the monastery is a large stūpa that has been celebrated widely for its diverse imagery in the form of terracotta plaques and relief sculptures with Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain themes. This article focuses on the reception history of this site and especially on its unique role as a mediator of religious voices from the region’s past. Under Dharmapāla, the site ...

The medieval Hindu god Śiva rivaled Vis&dotbelow;n&dotbelow;u in popularity. Yet the origins of Śaivism remain mysterious. How can we explain Śiva's seemingly sudden appearance as a major figure on the Indian religious scene? To address this question, this dissertation focuses on the tenth to thirteenth centuries CE, exploring our earliest literature for the cult of the jyotirlin˙gas ("lin˙gas of light").

tively), McCloud reaches an aural metaphor for thinking about the relationship between spiritual warfare and its wider context, saying that “the structures of late-modern neoliberalism ... thunderously reverberate throughout the Third Wave movement, shaping the movement’s cadence to greater or lesser effects in different contexts” (109). Arriving with the tone of a general conclusion, the concept of reverberation seems to communicate something like a feedback loop or an ecology – something between complete independence on the one hand and a simple linear causation on the other. Unfortunately, like many attempts to find a middle path between agency and structure, exactly what this something is remains vague. Readers will likely find more value in the series of concrete, heterogeneous connections in each of the chapters than in the attempt to rally these connections into a single, overarching relationship. With an increasing number of works in cultural studies interpreting ghosts, hauntings, and possessions as the eruption of traumatic memories or as lingering guilt toward the dead, McCloud extends our attention to those who take their demons to be literal demons, rather than some psychological metaphor or literary trope. For its concise treatment of a novel topic, scholars of American religion and theorists of modernity should study American Possessions. For the rare ability to bring critical, yet not dismissive, understanding to a sensationalized and often ridiculed practice, McCloud’s latest book is valuable for a wide audience within and beyond the study of religion and material culture. of demon-induced desire and sexual immorality, McCloud examines a variety of instances that exemplify the somewhat awkward theological phrase, “freely compelled.” Rather than simply parading these mutually exclusive positions as irrational, McCloud argues that this confusion over the relationship between agency, structure, and history is drawn from a wider crisis in late-modern conceptions of the individual, which sway between constraint and freedom, or between social-historical beings and rational, autonomous agents. In a book concerned with the purification of material objects, spaces, individuals, and entire cultures, McCloud does little purification of his own. Or, to use the language that the author borrows from Bruno Latour, American Possessions is filled to the brim with hybrids. This is perhaps the greatest strength of the project. The themes that run through Third Wave spiritual warfare are not artificially sectioned off and understood as an anomaly of contemporary American culture. On the contrary, spiritual warfare is a thread of believing and practicing that can be woven seamlessly with ghost hunting reality television, the iconic figure of Oprah, the popular therapeutic practices of self-help, the folklore of the Bermuda Triangle, and other apparently disparate phenomena. These connections are visible thanks to the author’s ability to sit with and learn from these hybrids, rather than dissecting them and banishing their parts into separate analytic categories with clear boundaries. After tracing the ways in which Third Wave manuals make sense of things, therapy, and agency (chapters two, three, and four respec-

In research on premodern South Asia, land-grant inscriptions have typically been mined for historical and geographical data. This article suggests that copperplate land-grant inscriptions may also provide an overlooked source of evidence for ideas about sacred space within and between South Asian religions. It focuses on inscriptions recording the granting of land by Buddhist kings to Brahman priests in medieval Bengal, and it hones in on the literary, oral, ritual, and performative elements of the inscriptions in relation to the spaces delineated by acts of granting. Drawing upon broader theoretical discussions concerning gift-giving in relation to economies and exchanges of religious prestige and royal power, it attempts to offer new perspectives towards gift-giving and the economy of the sacred in Hindu and Buddhist traditions. In the process, it attempts to draw out some of the broader ritual and “religious” implications of what is typically treated as an “economic” transaction ...

... may help to explain why Avimukteçvara later emerged as the single jyotirli ga of the city, superior to and symbolic of the rest ... that these lists can tell us a great deal about the develop-ment, conceptualization, and consolidation of medieval Indian ideas about sacred geography. ...

This article is the first publication of the Bogra copperplate, the eighth known land-grant inscription issued by Śrīcandra (r. c. 925–975 ce), one of the kings of the Candra dynasty of Bengal. A diplomatic transcription is included, together with an annotated English translation and a critically edited text in Devanāgarī. The inscription describes a gift of land to a Brahmin named Śrīkaradatta Śarman, who probably hails from North Bengal (“Hastipada [in the region of] Śrāvasti”). While the praśasti (praise) portions largely parallel the king's other known inscriptions, the inscription contributes new information about place names and regions associated with the Candra dynasty, as well as attesting the movements of Brahmins associated with the Parāśara Gotra and Chandoga Caraṇa. The article also provides an overview and assessment of research on the inscriptions and history of the Candra dynasty, particularly in light of the discovery and identification of this new inscription.

This pair of essays reflects upon the unexpected encounter of Hindu and Jewish perspectives in the wake of the prohibition of wigs with human hair from India for use by Jewish women by prominent Haredi (‘‘ultra-orthodox’’) legal authorities in May 2004. The rulings sparked distress among Haredi communities in New York, London, and Jerusalem; some women took to the streets to burn their wigs, attracting international media attention. Yet questions about the status of the wigs also occasioned intensive halakhic discussions of Hindu rituals among Orthodox Jews, centered on tonsuring practices of pilgrims to the Ve kateśvara temple near the city of Tirupati in Andhra Pradesh, India. These essays explore some of the insights that arise when one examines the controversy from historical perspectives, and in relation to theoretical questions about comparison and the study of religions. The first essay focuses on the tensions surrounding hair and its interpretation within Vaisnavite textual ...

A jyotirliṅga (“liṅga of light”) is one of the foremost ways that the deity Śiva has been represented in mythology and art. It is an important sub-type of the deity’s liṅga (mark, sign, phallus). A well-known example is the network of twelve pilgrimage sites spread across the Indian subcontinent. In their related mythology each site accounts for a theophany of Śiva in light form, descending from heaven and remaining at the pilgrimage center in the form of a liṅga. The development and growth of this pilgrimage network within the sacred topographies of Śiva is relatively understudied, but new scholarship in the Purāṇas and Śaivadharma traditions as well as the archaeology of individual sites connected to these texts are helping to alleviate this paucity. Beginning in roughly the 10th century, fire and light imagery is integrated into different forms of Śaiva ritual, myth, and art as part of a strategy to popularize Śaivism. While the theme ‘God is light’ (numen lumen) is ubiquitous ac...

The University of Pennsylvania possesses the largest collection of Sanskrit and vernacular Indian languages in the Western hemisphere. In 2014, UPenn was awarded a three-year Preservation and Access Grant (PW-51547-15) from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), entitled “Providing Global Access to Penn’s Indic Manuscripts.” The project was completed in 2017, within the scheduled three-year period for the award. The original terms of the grant stipulated that staff at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library (now absorbed by the Kislak Center) at Penn Libraries was to catalog, rehouse and digitize its Indic manuscript collection, building on efforts from previous years. The collection highlights Penn’s historical commitment to traditional Sanskrit studies and also includes a broad range of vernacular sources including Pali, Prakrit, Hindi, Awadhi, Bengali Marathi, Gujarati, Marwari, Persian, Tamil, and Telugu. In this article I outline some of the recent history leading up to the NEH project, including my own involvement as project cataloger and collection consultant. I will then give an overview of the project and highlight some of its scope, content, and significance. Finally, I will consider some possibilities for promoting the collection in the future.

unto itself, from which it is impossible to climb out. This volume offers a glimpse into that universe. &dquo;Gandharan Buddhism,&dquo; a contentious phrase in its own right, refers to the Buddhisms that arose in parts of Northern Pakistan and Eastern Afghanistan, especially in the Kusana era and directly following. These varieties of Buddhism are important for understanding the development of Buddhism outside of India, its growth in Central Asia, and its transmission into China. The articles in this volume were first presented at a 1999 conference at McMaster University and the University of Toronto, organized by Phyllis Granoff, Koichi Shinohara and Neil Kreitman. They are here divided into three sections: Archaeology, Texts and Art. The volume contains over 100 black and white photographs (both familiar and new); these are clear and found throughout. The Introduction is brief and, unfortunately, does little to synthesize the results of the articles that follow; the editors rightly stress, however, the need for more interdisciplinary work on Gandharan Buddhism. A Prologue by John Rosenfield augments the Introduction with an assessment of some of the major conceptual issues in the study of Gandharan Buddhism and its place in Kusana history. In particular, Rosenfield appeals for caution when applying the term &dquo;Mahayana,&dquo; which emerged slowly in this region; most Gandharan art, he suggests, represents earlier types of Buddhism (24). The three articles in Part 1 consider archaeological evidence from Gandharan Buddhist centres. The article by the late Maurizio Taddei, to whom the volume is dedicated, presents recent archaeological evidence in light of Gandharan sculpture. Taddei stresses context, above all, for the interpretation of art and text; this is important for more accurate dating, for establishing how archaeological layers developed and evolved over time, and for exploring how objects are reused and redeployed as the community grew (48). Pierfrancesco Callieri’s contribution presents

ABSTRACT This article reconsiders sites, practices, and ideas about the physical remains of the special dead in South Asian religions. Questioning the common notion of “relics” as a point of distinction between “Buddhism” and “Hinduism,” it explores the constellation of ideas and practices surrounding the remains of gods, demons, people, and animals in South Asian religions. Archaeological and literary evidence for liṅgas, stūpas, and related sites and structures are used to explore shared discourses and practices among Buddhists and Śaivas in particular. Through such test cases, it shows how bones and other physical remains of the special dead could become areas of engagement, especially when linked to sacred landscape. Attention to these contact zones reveals sharing, borrowing, and competition among ancient and medieval groups that modern scholarship has studied primarily in terms of assumed differences between “Hinduism” and “Buddhism.”

The University of Pennsylvania possesses the largest collection of Sanskrit and vernacular Indian languages in the Western hemisphere. In 2014, UPenn was awarded a three-year Preservation and Access Grant (PW-51547-15) from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), entitled “Providing Global Access to Penn’s Indic Manuscripts.” The project was completed in 2017, within the scheduled three-year period for the award. The original terms of the grant stipulated that staff at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library (now absorbed by the Kislak Center) at Penn Libraries was to catalog, rehouse and digitize its Indic manuscript collection, building on efforts from previous years. The collection highlights Penn’s historical commitment to traditional Sanskrit studies and also includes a broad range of vernacular sources including Pali, Prakrit, Hindi, Awadhi, Bengali Marathi, Gujarati, Marwari, Persian, Tamil, and Telugu.  In this article I outline some of the recent history leading up to the NEH project, including my own involvement as project cataloger and collection consultant. I will then give an overview of the project and highlight some of its scope, content, and significance. Finally, I will consider some possibilities for promoting the collection in the future.

This article considers the relationship between printed, written, and oral traditions in Hindu purāṇas and stotras along with their interaction and intersection with the development of sacred topographies. The question of the universalizing tendencies of purāṇic literature vs. the regionally specific concerns of stotras is raised. After this general discussion, special consideration is given to the Dvādaśajyotirliṅgastotra and the development of the cult of the twelve jyotirliṅgas (liṅgas of light) in the Deccan region.

Galley Proof from - Material Culture and Asian Religions: Text, Image, Object, ed. Benjamin J. Fleming and Richard Mann, Routledge 2014.

The codex has become ubiquitous in the modern world as a common way of presenting the materiality of texts. Much of the scholarship on the History of the Book has taken this endpoint for granted even when discussing pre-modern writing and manuscript cultures. In this essay, I would like to open the discussion to other possibilities. I will draw on my research on medieval South Asian religions and from my hands-on work with manuscripts in two collections: the Rāmamālā Library in Bangladesh and the Indic collection at the University of Pennsylvania. Drawing examples from these two collections as well as noting broader patterns within them, this essay reflects on what South Asian manuscript traditions can contribute to our understanding of the materiality of texts. First, I consider how different articulations of orality, memory, ritual, and aesthetics in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism helped to shape the development and formation of manuscript traditions in South Asia with dynamics that might differ from medieval manuscript traditions shaped by Christianity in the West. Then, I turn to specific insights into the materiality of South Asian manuscripts in relation to the task of cataloguing, preserving, and digitizing materials in the Rāmamālā library.

This article reconsiders sites, practices, and ideas about the physical remains of the special dead in South Asian religions. Questioning the common notion of “relics” as a point of distinction between “Buddhism” and “Hinduism,” it explores the constellation of ideas and practices surrounding the remains of gods, demons, people, and animals in South Asian religions. Archaeological and literary evidence for liṅgas, stūpas, and related sites and structures are used to explore shared discourses and practices among Buddhists and Śaivas in particular. Through such test-cases, it shows how bones and other physical remains of the special dead could become areas of engagement, especially when linked to sacred landscape. Attention to these contact zones reveals sharing, borrowing, and competition among ancient and medieval groups that modern scholarship has studied primarily in terms of assumed differences between “Hinduism” and “Buddhism.”

In research on premodern South Asia, land-grant inscriptions have typically been mined for historical and geographical data. This article suggests that copperplate land-grant inscriptions may also provide an overlooked source of evidence for ideas about sacred space within and between South Asian religions. It focuses on inscriptions recording the granting of land by Buddhist kings to Brahman priests in medieval Bengal, and it hones in on the literary, oral, ritual, and performative elements of the inscriptions in relation to the spaces delineated by acts of granting. Drawing upon broader theoretical discussions concerning gift-giving in relation to economies and exchanges of religious prestige and royal power, it attempts to offer new perspectives towards gift-giving and the economy of the sacred in Hindu and Buddhist traditions. In the process, it attempts to draw out some of the broader ritual and “religious” implications of what is typically treated as an “economic” transaction – namely, the transfer of land from royal to priestly control, which forms the heart of the copperplate’s function and formation.

The category of “liṅga and yoni” has had a disproportionate place within Western scholarship on Hinduism since colonial times. Accordingly, this article begins with the historiography of the topic, with special attention to the reification of the category within Western scholarship. The rest of the article is geared toward pointing readers to the relevant primary sources (e.g., iconographical, mythological, ritual, philosophical, epigraphical), in the hopes of facilitating further study that may open up new perspectives.

This pair of essays reflects upon the unexpected encounter of Hindu and Jewish perspectives in the wake of the prohibition of wigs with human hair from India for use by Jewish women by prominent Haredi (‘‘ultra-orthodox’’) legal authorities in May 2004. The rulings sparked distress among Haredi communities in New York, London, and Jerusalem; some women took to the streets to burn their wigs, attracting international media attention. Yet questions about the status of the wigs also occasioned intensive halakhic discussions of Hindu rituals among Orthodox Jews, centered on tonsuring practices of pilgrims to the Ve kateśvara temple near the city of Tirupati in Andhra Pradesh, India. These essays explore some of the insights that arise when one examines the controversy from historical perspectives, and in relation to theoretical questions about comparison and the study of religions. The first essay focuses on the tensions surrounding hair and its interpretation within Vaisnavite textual traditions and ritual practices, while the second essay situates the controversy within the history of Jewish discourses about ritual, ‘‘idolatry,’’ and the ‘‘Other.’’

The linga is well-known as the dominant emblem of the Hindu god Śiva. This article seeks to provide an accessible survey of the mythology and iconography of the linga, and the scholarly discussion about them. It considers some of the ancient objects that scholars have identified as lingas, reflecting on the methodological challenges involved in their interpretation. It also considers major narrative, theological, and pilgrimage traditions surrounding lingas, as preserved in the Puraṇas, and some of the prescriptions for their construction and installation, as outlined in agamas and reflected in current practice. The author suggests, moreover, that linga worship may have played an important role in the trans-regional spread and consolidation of Śaivism as we know it.

The medieval Hindu god Śiva rivaled Vis&dotbelow;n&dotbelow;u in popularity. Yet the origins of Śaivism remain mysterious. How can we explain Śiva's seemingly sudden appearance as a major figure on the Indian religious scene? To address this question, this dissertation focuses on the tenth to thirteenth centuries CE, exploring our earliest literature for the cult of the jyotirlin˙gas ("lin˙gas of light").