This volume investigates the historic and ethnographic accounts of the ongoing religious contestations over the status of the Mahabodhi Temple complex in Bodhgaya (a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2002) and its surrounding landscape to critically analyse the working and construction of sacredness. It endeavours to make a ground-up assessment of ways in which human participants in the past and present respond to and interact with the Mahabodhi Temple and its surroundings.
The volume argues that sacredness goes beyond scriptural texts and archaeological remains. The Mahabodhi Temple is complex and its surrounding landscape is a living heritage, which has been produced socially and constitutes differential densities of human involvement, attachment, and experience. Its significance lies mainly in the active interaction between religious architecture within its dynamic ritual settings. This endless contestation of sacredness and its meaning should not be seen as the death of the Mahabodhi Temple; on the contrary, it illustrates the vitality of the ongoing debate on the meaning, understanding, and use of the sacred in the Indian context.
Please note: Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the Hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka
The volume investigates the historic accounts of the religious contestations over the status of the Mahabodhi Temple complex in Bodhgaya (a UNESCO World Heritage Site) & argues that sacredness goes beyond scriptural texts & archaeological remains.
* T&F does not sell or distribute the Hardback in South Asia.
List of Illustrations. Foreword. Acknowledgements.
1. The Living Humanized Sacred Place: An Introduction
2. The Origins and
History of the Mahbodhi Temple
3. Constructing Sacred Placeness: Rituals
Around the Bodhi Tree
4. Divergence, Convergence: Hindu-Buddhist Encounters
5. Anagarika Dharmapla: A Modern Political Activist and Defender of the
Dharma
6. Deconstructing the Great Case
7. The Two Faces of Bodhgay: Sacred
to Buddhists and Hindus
Appendices. Appendix 1: The Bodh Gaya Temple Act,
1949. Appendix 2: The
Budh-Gaya Temple Case. Appendix 3: Letter from Mr. Beglar to the Mahant of
Buddha-Gaya Math. Appendix 4: Excerpts of the Court Judgement.
Bibliography. Further Reading. Index.
Nikhil Joshi is a Research Fellow in the Department of Architecture at National University of Singapore. Educated at the University of Pune, University of York, and National University of Singapore, he is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, UK, and recipient of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings Lethaby Scholarship, UK.