Abstract

Abstract The articles in this special issue illuminate the importance of aesthetics, affect, and emotion in the formation of religious communities through examples from the Buddhist world. This introduction reads across the contributors’ findings from different regions (China, India, Japan, and Tibet) and eras (from the 17th to the 21st centuries) to highlight common themes. It discusses how Buddhist communities can take shape around feelings of togetherness, distance, and absence, how bonds are forged and broken through spectacular and quotidian aesthetic forms, and how aesthetic and emotional practices intersect with doctrinal interpretations, gender, ethnicity, and social distinction to shape the moral politics of religious belonging. We reflect on how this special issue complicates the idea of Buddhist belonging through its focus on oft-overlooked practices and practitioners. We also discuss the insights that our studies of Asian Buddhist communities offer to the broader study of religious belonging.

Highlights

  • Aesthetic forms and emotional practices central to community formation and religious belonging have remained under-researched in the study of Buddhism

  • We ask what can be learned about ongoing Buddhist belonging and community formation from analyses of how aesthetic forms – rituals, scriptures, images, accounts of dreams and visions, meals, music, and more – elicit affects and emotions

  • One concern shared by the subjects who appear in these articles is which activities, objects, bodies, and emotions do or do not count as or feel authentically “Buddhist.” What and who should and should not belong to their communities? People who appear in these studies articulate a moral politics of belonging through quotidian concerns, such as how food is prepared and consumed (Kolata and Gillson 2021), how one appreciates music (McLaughlin 2021), the emotional style of interactions between community members (Caple 2021), or if one has the innate sensibility to feel whether or not a Buddhist commodity for sale in a local market is “true” (Brox 2021)

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Summary

Introduction

Aesthetic forms and emotional practices central to community formation and religious belonging have remained under-researched in the study of Buddhism. By paying attention to the formulation of Buddhist ideas and practices of belonging within institutions and in vernacular contexts across Asia through text-based and ethnographic research, these articles generate novel concepts and provide new insights into aesthetic and emotional dimensions of religious belonging and community-building that apply beyond Buddhist contexts.

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