New Books in Buddhist Studies

Rewriting Buddhism: Pali Literature and Monastic Reform in Sri Lanka, 1157–1270 (UCL Press, 2020) is the first intellectual history of premodern Sri Lanka’s most culturally productive period. This era of reform (1157–1270) shaped the nature of Theravada Buddhism both in Sri Lanka and also Southeast Asia and even today

Scholars of religion have mostly abandoned the concept of "syncretism" in which certain apparent deviations from "standard" practice are believed to be the result of a mixture of religions. This is particularly relevant to Thailand, in which ordinary religious practice was seen by an earlier generation of scholars as a

Glenn’s latest, Non Buddhist Mysticism: Performing Irreducible and Primitive Presence (Eyecorner Press, 2022), presents a radical reorientation to “spiritual” practice. Drawing from François Laruelle’s concept of future mysticism and the author’s own previous work on non-buddhism, Glenn Wallis galvanizes a materialist

In Buddhist cosmology, pretas make up one of several categories of rebirth. They are best known as "hungry ghosts," pitiful beings with miniscule mouths and bloated stomachs whose state of extreme starvation is a result of stinginess and immorality in a former life. But they were not always portrayed in this way. Of An

Nāgārjuna (c. 150-250), founder of the Madhyamaka or Middle Way school of Buddhist philosophy and the most influential of all Buddhist thinkers aside from the Buddha himself, concludes his masterpiece, Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way, with these baffling verses: For the abandonment of all views He taught the true

In this episode Dr Pierce Salguero sits down with Ruth Westoby a scholar, teacher, and practitioner of yoga. We discuss Ruth’s work on the body in early hatha yoga texts. We talk about the broad diversity of approaches to the material body in these sources, including their ideas about gender, the cultivation of powers,