Browsing by Subject "Monasticism"

My dissertation explores how constructions of memory, space, and violence intersected in the history of early Christianity. It analyzes the crucial roles of memory and space/place in the formation, practice, and understanding of late ancient asceticism in Egypt's northwestern desert (Scetis, Kellia, Nitria, and Pherme). After a "barbarian" raid of Scetis in the early fifth century supposedly exiled Christian monks from the desert, Egypt came to be remembered as the birthplace of ascetic practice. Interpreting texts (in Coptic, Latin, Greek, Syriac, and Classical Arabic) and archaeological remains associated with the northwestern Egyptian desert, my dissertation investigates ascetic ideas about the relationship between memories and places: memory-acts as preserved in the liturgical and literary texts, memory in the liturgical contexts of church and cell, the ascetic use of Scriptural interpretation to thwart "worldly" recollection caused by demonic incitement to abandon the desert, and remembrance of a past moment through the perceived loss of Scetis. Wedding textual evidence, material culture, and theoretical insights, I highlight how the memorialization of a particular moment in the history of early Christian asceticism overshadowed other, contemporary late ancient asceticisms. My dissertation produces a new understanding of the negotiations between memory and space, often a process of contestation, and sheds new light not only on how violence was performed in late antiquity, but also on modern struggles over memorialized locales.

Among the numerous commitments late ancient Christians throughout the Roman Empire shared with their non-Christian neighbors was a preoccupation with justice. Not only was the latter one of the celebrated characteristics of God, the New Testament had charged Christians, particularly those who served as bishops or elders, with ensuring and maintaining justice in their communities from the tradition's very origins. In the early fourth century, this aspect of episcopal responsibilities had received an unexpected boost when the Emperor Constantine not only recognized bishops' role in intra-Christian conflict resolution, but expanded their judicial capacity to include even outsiders in the so-called audientia episcopalis, the bishop's court.

Christians had, of course, never resolved the question of what constituted justice in a vacuum. Yet bishops' increasing integration into the sprawling and frequently amorphous apparatus of the Roman legal system introduced new pressures as well as new opportunities into Christian judicial discourse. Roman law could become an ally in a minister's exegetical or homiletical efforts. Yet it also came to intrude into spheres that had previously regarded themselves as set apart from Roman society, including especially monastic and clerical communities. The latter proved to be particularly permeable to different shades of legal discourse, inasmuch as they served as privileged feeders for episcopal sees. Their members were part of the Christian elites, whose judicial formation promised to bear disproportionate fruit among the laity under their actual or eventual care. This dissertation's task is the examination of the ways in which Christians in these environments throughout the Latin West at the turn of the fifth century thought and wrote about justice. I contend that no single influence proved dominant, but that three strands of judicial discourse emerge as significant throughout these sources: that of popular philosophical thought; that of biblical exegesis; and that of reasoning from Roman legal precept and practice. Late ancient Christian rhetoric consciously and selectively deployed these threads to craft visions of justice, both divine and human, that could be treated as distinctively Christian while remaining intelligible in the broader context of the Roman Empire.

This thesis applies David Harvey's theory of time and space compression into the modern Chinese society, especially in the terms of religious development. The theory will also give the reason for the occurrence of popular short-term monastic life programs which are launched be Chinese Buddhism. I will introduce the basic information of short-term monastic life in the first chapter, which include its history, how temple stay program works in China, and its social influence. In the second chapter, I will summarize different theories of time and space compression in modernization, and analyze how these theories can be applied into Chinese society. Based on these theories, the inner contradiction of compression of time and space will be revealed. Then in the third chapter, the case study will be used to explain how short-term monastic life serves a social and psycho-social function, and how short-term monastic life solves the problems under time and space compression in contemporary Chinese society. Meanwhile, in the following chapter, I will try to discuss although temple stay program can work effectively as a social and psychological function, it also shows many characters of time and space compression under the process of globalization. Also, I will argue that the conflict of short-term monastic life about the time and space compression is indeed an epitome of the conflict of globalization. In the last chapter, I will also discuss the necessity of improving Buddhist activities and how Buddhist activities should face and solve the current problems caused by modernization.

This dissertation examines the “memory economy” of church reform from the late ninth through thirteenth centuries. It argues that monastic communities and aristocratic households of the period used the human body as a touchstone for the discussion of memory as a key stake in the social and political life of the high middle ages. The argument centers around several key sites of analysis: excommunication, burial, bodily wounding and mutilation, and liturgical cursing. Centering the analysis on these sites of cultural activity allows close readings of the complex dialectic which develops around memory. Using memory as the central focus of the study allows insight into the ways in which the semi-literate communities of the secular nobility participated in and drove the course of church reform, rather than functioning as mere sources of converts or sources of gifts. Doing so allows an intervention that shits the field of medieval memory studies away from manuscripts and narratives, and towards a methodology that puts activity and social practice at center stage.

What do Buddhist monks really know about Buddhism? How do they imagine their religion, and more importantly, how does their understanding of their tradition differ from the one found in our typical introduction to Buddhism textbooks? In order to address these fundamental questions, this dissertation concentrates on the educational programs and curricular canons of Korean Buddhism. It aims to find out which part of their enormous canonical and non-canonical literature do Korean Buddhist professionals choose to focus on as the required curriculum in their training (and what do they leave out), why is it chosen and by whom, and how does this specific education shape their understanding of their own religion and their roles within it. It tracks down the 20th-century invention of the so-called `traditional' Korean monastic curriculum and delineates the current 21st-century curricular reforms and the heated debates surrounding them. Ultimately, it illustrates how instead of Buddhist academics learning from the Buddhists about Buddhism, it is actually often the Buddhists in their monasteries who end up simulating the educational agendas of Buddhist studies.

Research for this work involved diverse methodologies. Multiple-sited ethnographic fieldwork in monasteries was supplemented by archival digging in the Chogye Order's headquarters in Seoul and textual analysis of historical records, Buddhist media reports, and online blogs. I have visited the current official 17 monastic seminaries in Korea, as well as many of the new specialized monastic graduate institutes and lay schools, interviewed teachers and students on site, and inspected classrooms and schedules. During winter 2013-4 I have conducted a full-scale participant observation attending the Buddhist lay school of Hwagyesa, during which I engaged some of my classmates with in-depth interviews, and distributed a written attitude survey among the class.