Gathering Leaves and Lifting Words: Histories of Buddhist Monastic Education in Laos and Thailand (Critical Dialogues in Southeast Asian Studies) Book

Gathering Leaves and Lifting Words examines modern and premodern Buddhist monastic education traditions in Laos and Thailand. Through five centuries of adaptation and reinterpretation of sacred texts and commentaries, Justin McDaniel traces curricular variations in Buddhist oral and written education that reflect a wide array of community goals and values. He depicts Buddhism as a series of overlapping processes, bringing fresh attention to the continuities of Theravada monastic communities that have endured despite regional and linguistic variations. Incorporating both primary and secondary sources from Thailand and Laos, he examines premodern inscriptional, codicological, anthropological, art historical, ecclesiastical, royal, and French colonial records. He traces how pedagogical techniques found in premodern palm-leaf manuscripts are pervasive in modern education by looking at modern sermons, and even television programs and web sites. McDaniel explores curriculum as an interpretive category for the history of religions, Buddhist studies, and Asian Studies. He builds on the work of anthropologists and historians who have studied the competing influences and changing concerns that over time create libraries, notions of textuality, and teaching methods. McDaniel describes the differences between religious canons of scripture in vernacular and classical languages amid premodern and modern educational developments. He illustrates how these rhetorical styles, methods, literary cultures, and interpretive communities are the "proximate mechanisms" of history, which are often ignored by historians for the study of institutional evidence, or "structural mechanisms." As the first comprehensive study of monastic education in Thailand and Laos, Gathering Leaves and Lifting Words will appeal to a wide audience of scholars and students interested in religious studies, anthropology, social and intellectual history, and pedagogy.Read More