Winner of the Henry J. Benda Prize sponsored by the Association for Asian Studies

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...

Winner of the Henry J. Benda Prize sponsored by the Association for Asian Studies

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...

While European manuscripts have been the subject of numerous historical, philological, and art historical studies over the past three decades, the study of the material culture of Asian (Buddhist, Hindu, Islamic, Taoist, and the like) manuscript traditions remains a relatively unexplored field. But Asian manuscripts, as the contributors to From Mulberry Leaves to Silk Scrolls demonstrate, contain much more than the semantic meaning of the words they reproduce. The ten essays collected here look closely at a wide variety of manuscript traditions with a special focus on both their...