Attracting the Heart: Social Relations and the Aesthetics of Emotion in Sri Lankan Monastic CultureAn idealized view of the lifestyle of a Buddhist monk might be described according to the doctrinal demand for emotional detachment and, ultimately, the cessation of all desire. Yet monks are also enjoined to practice compassion, a powerful emotion and equally lofty ideal, and live with every other human feeling—love, hate, jealousy, ambition—while relating to other monks and the lay community. In this important ethnography of Buddhism in Sri Lanka, Jeffrey Samuels takes an unprecedented look at how emotion determines and influences the commitments that laypeople and monastics make to each other and to the Buddhist religion in general. By focusing on "multimoment" histories, Samuels highlights specific junctures in which ideas about recruitment, vocation, patronage, and institution-building are dynamically negotiated and refined. Positing a nexus between aesthetics and affect, he illustrates not only how aesthetic responses trigger certain emotions, but also how personal and shared emotions, at the local level, shape notions of beauty. |
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... Kandy.33 The boys in Madavala were easily drawn to the temple through Sumedha's dharma school . Sumedha had to work much harder in Mahavela to build a con- duit from the village to the temple . One reason for this , according to Sumedha ...
... Kandy . One or two weeks after our return to Kandy , I stopped by Polgoda Vihara to conduct follow - up interviews with some of the novices . While there , a woman and her small boy showed up , seemingly unannounced . Although I did not ...
... Kandy to administer his temple in Udu- vela . While living in Kandy he continued maintaining ties with Kumbukväva . Such ties grew even stronger after Ajit , a teenage lay boy from the village , began living at Sumedha's temple while ...
Contents
Affective Bonds and the Making of a Social | 1 |
AestheticAffective Social Networks | 43 |
4 | 63 |
Copyright | |
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Attracting the Heart: Social Relations and the Aesthetics of Emotion in Sri ... Jeffrey Samuels No preview available - 2010 |