Buddhism and Its Religious Others - Proceedings of the British Academy by C V Jones Hardcover

About the Book

Buddhism and Its Religious Others examines how Buddhist literature and art from pre-modern Asia understand and represent the character and value of other religions. It looks at the strategies employed by Indian, Chinese, Japanese, and Southeast Asian Buddhists to challenge and claim authority over traditions that opposed Buddhism and its influence.

Book Synopsis

Throughout its history, Buddhism has developed alongside other traditions of religious belief and practice. Forms of Buddhism have in every era, region, and culture been confronted by rival systems that challenged its teachings about the world, how to behave in it, and liberation from it. This volume collects studies of Buddhist literature and art that represent the religious other to their audiences. Contributing authors examine how Buddhists in India, China, and elsewhere across Asia have understood their place in shared religious landscapes, and how they have responded to the presence and influence in the world of traditions other to their own. The studies in this volume consider a variety of 'others' that Buddhists of different times and situations have encountered, and the variety of mechanisms that Buddhists have employed to make sense of them. Chapters of this volume explore the range of attitudes that Buddhists have expressed with respect to other religions, how they have either accommodated the other within their worldview, or pronounced the redundancy of their ideas and activities. These chapters illuminate how over the centuries Buddhists have used and reused stories, symbols, and other strategies to explain religious others and their value, in which every representation of the other is always also a comment on the character and status of Buddhism itself.

Review Quotes

This is an impressively researched and eloquently written book whose individual chapters cohere into presenting a vivid and variegated picture of Buddhism and Its Religious Others..., I can truly say that this volume fills a substantial lacuna in the field, and that it will therefore prove immensely useful to students and scholars studying, teaching and/or researching interreligious relations, as well as Buddhist religious and intellectual history across Asia.

About the Author

Christopher V. Jones is a research associate and affiliated lecturer at the Faculty of Divinity, and a Bye-Fellow of Selwyn College, University of Cambridge. He has trained and taught at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and his research focuses on aspects of primarily Mah?y?na Buddhist literature across Sanskrit, Chinese and Tibetan sources. He is the author of The Buddhist Self: On Tath?gatagarbha and ?tman (2021).