A quantitative study explored the values profile of teen self-identifying Buddhists growing up in Britain and the degree to which religious affiliation, sex, age, social class and convert or heritage religious style linked with features of their Buddhist identity and values. A variety of attitude statements including those concerning personal well-being, psychological type, discrimination, the media, friends, work, school, Religious Education, family, substance use, collectivism, tradition and religion, were rated for levels of agreement using postal and online surveys of 417 self-identifying Buddhists aged between 13 and 20. Likely antecedents of Buddhist identity were found to include parenting style, spiritual teachers, temple training and ethos, shrines and religious practice in the home, collectivism, cleavage against assimilation and intuitive psychological type. Teen years saw a decline and relativising of Buddhist values except for inspiration towards engaged Buddhism and spending time in the monastic order. Likely consequences of Buddhist identity were found to include impact on lifestyle, commitments and personality. Being Buddhist and male was different from being Buddhist and female in that males were more extraverted and ordination-oriented in their faith aspirations and less concerned about their children growing up Buddhist. Lower class Buddhists were more likely to be collectivist and traditional. Middle class Buddhists were more vertical individualist and interested in a monastic vocation. In terms of religious style, heritage Buddhists were found to be more extrinsic and traditional in their religiosity than convert Buddhists for whom religiosity was more intrinsic and reform orientated. This dissertation offers quantitative evidence for individual differences between convert and heritage Buddhist styles of religiosity and commends emphasising religious practice rather than beliefs, scripture and spirituality when portraying Buddhism in school Religious Education.

Templegoing teens : the religiosity and identity of Buddhists growing up in Britain

2 Lists of illustrations 10 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 13 Introduction 15 Structure of the thesis ................................................................................. 16 Chapter 1: Research and its contexts.................................................. 18 An overview of the rituals of Parn Yak and sak yant ...................................... 18 Research objectives ....................................................................................... 19 The objectives of the study are: ..................................................................... 21 The key research questions are: .................................................................... 21 A Theoretical context ..................................................................................... 21 Constructing the definition of ‘ritual’ ............................................................... 23 Ritual and performance ............................................................................. 25 The term ‘ritual’ in Thai worldview and in this research ............................. 29 On the issue of efficacy .................................................................................. 31 Previous studies on Thai rituals ..................................................................... 38 The problematic nature of research: Controversies over rituals and research into them ........................................................................................................ 43 The fieldwork .................................................................................................. 45 Notes on the fieldwork .................................................................................... 48 My position in the field study ..................................................................... 49 4 Challenges of conducting the fieldwork and limitations of the findings ...... 52 The examples of ethnographic experiences of Parn Yak and sak yant .......... 56 Wat Noinai Temple, Nonthaburi ................................................................ 56 The tradition and practices of sak yant ...................................................... 61 Wat Bang Phra Temple ............................................................................. 61 The notion of ‘tradition’ and ‘authenticity’ in Thai contemporary ritual ............ 64 Formulation, modification and change....................................................... 65 Tradition and authenticity .......................................................................... 67 Relevant terms ............................................................................................... 76 Trance-possession .................................................................................... 76 Therapeutic ............................................................................................... 84 A Theoretical Framework ............................................................................... 85 Bodymind .................................................................................................. 88 Body as an active experiential site for transformation ............................... 90 Body as ‘being-in-the-world’ ...................................................................... 92 The interpretation of the world ................................................................... 94 Experiencing is believing ........................................................................... 96 Now is the knowing: being and becoming here and now........................... 98 ‘In-betweeness’ of performance .............................................................. 103 The uses of the term ‘liminality’ ............................................................... 104 Bewilderment: an in-between state in applied drama .............................. 107 Applied drama’s notion of a facilitator...................................................... 111

The efficacies of trance-possession ritual performances in contemporary Thai Theravada Buddhism

In 1959, a group of architects and policy makers gathered in Delhi to debate the direction for post-1947 architecture; they firmly chose modernist free expression over a state-driven revivalist style. Despite this prevailing modernist direction for India's architecture, revival buildings of the 1950s demonstrate India's negotiation with and construction of its past at a crucial time in the formation of a national identity. The Ashok Hotel and the Vigyan Bhavan in Delhi differ from earlier revivals; they exist within the context of Nehruvian rewriting of Indian history to highlight particular moments of unity and religious harmony in the subcontinent's past. These 1955 buildings proclaim an Indianness focused on two distinct periods of the region's history: the generalized, collapsed ancient Buddhist past and the specific, targeted Akbari Mughal past. They thereby demonstrate the machinations of the formation of national identity in India as worked out in history-writing, architecture, and public debate.

REVIVING THE PAST: Post-Independence Architecture and Politics in India's Long 1950s

Buddha‐izing a Global City‐State: Transnational Religious Mobilities, Spiritual Marketplace, and Thai Migrant Monks in Singapore

Buddhism, often described as an austere religion that condemns desire, promotes denial, and idealizes the contemplative life, actually has a thriving leisure culture in Asia Creative religious improvisations designed by Buddhists have been produced both within and outside of monasteries across the region—in Nepal, Japan, Korea, Macau, Hong Kong, Singapore, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam Justin McDaniel looks at the growth of Asia’s culture of Buddhist leisure—what he calls “socially disengaged Buddhism”—through a study of architects responsible for monuments, museums, amusement parks, and other sites In conversation with noted theorists of material and visual culture and anthropologists of art, McDaniel argues that such sites highlight the importance of public, leisure, and spectacle culture from a Buddhist perspective and illustrate how “secular” and “religious,” “public” and “private,” are in many ways false binaries Moreover, places like Lek Wiriyaphan’s Sanctuary of Truth in Thailand, Suối Tien Amusement Park in Saigon, and Shi Fa Zhao’s multilevel museum/ritual space/tea house in Singapore reflect a growing Buddhist ecumenism built through repetitive affective encounters instead of didactic sermons and sectarian developments They present different Buddhist traditions, images, and aesthetic expressions as united but not uniform, collected but not concise: Together they form a gathering, not a movement

Despite the ingenuity of lay and ordained visionaries like Wiriyaphan and Zhao and their colleagues Kenzo Tange, Chan-soo Park, Tadao Ando, and others discussed in this book, creators of Buddhist leisure sites often face problems along the way Parks and museums are complex adaptive systems that are changed and influenced by budgets, available materials, local and global economic conditions, and visitors Architects must often compromise and settle at local optima, and no matter what they intend, their buildings will develop lives of their own Provocative and theoretically innovative, Architects of Buddhist Leisure asks readers to question the very category of “religious” architecture It challenges current methodological approaches in religious studies and speaks to a broad audience interested in modern art, architecture, religion, anthropology, and material culture

An electronic version of this book is freely available thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched, a collaborative initiative designed to make high-quality books open access for the public good The open-access version of this book is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 40 International (CC BY-NC-ND 40), which means that the work may be freely downloaded and shared for non-commercial purposes, provided credit is given to the author Derivative works and commercial uses require permission from the publisher

Architects of Buddhist Leisure: Socially Disengaged Buddhism in Asia’s Museums, Monuments, and Amusement Parks

Sandra Cate's pioneering ethnography of art-making at Wat Buddhapadipa, a Thai Buddhist temple in Wimbledon, England, explores contemporary art at the crossroads of identity, authority, and value. Between 1984 and 1992, twenty-six young Thai artists painted a series of temple murals that continue to attract worshippers and tourists from around the world. Their work, both celebrated and controversial, depicts stories from the Buddha's lives in otherworldly landcapes punctuated with sly references to this-worldly politics and popular culture. Schooled in international art trends, the artists reverse an Orientalist narrative of the Asian Other, telling their own stories to diverse audiences and subsuming Western spaces into a Buddhist worldview. In her investigation of temple murals as social portraiture, Cate looks at the ongoing dialectic between the "real" and the "imaginary" as mural painters depict visual and moral hierarchies of sentient beings. As they manipulate indigenous notions of sacred space and the creative process, the Wat Buddhapadipa muralists generate complex, expansive visions of social place and identity.

Sandra Cate

Papers

Making Merit, Making Art: A Thai Temple in Wimbledon