Indian Monastic Buddhism

Indian edition. This work includes two books in one volume, Bones, Stones and Buddhist Monks and Buddhist Monks and Business Matters.

In Part One: Bones, Stones and Buddhist Monks, Schopen provides an essential foundation for a social history of Indian Buddhist monasticism, challenging the popular stereotype that represents the accumulation of merit as once the domain of the la...

Indian edition. This work includes two books in one volume, Bones, Stones and Buddhist Monks and Buddhist Monks and Business Matters.

In Part One: Bones, Stones and Buddhist Monks, Schopen provides an essential foundation for a social history of Indian Buddhist monasticism, challenging the popular stereotype that represents the accumulation of merit as once the domain of the layperson while monks concerned themselves with more sophisticated realms of doctrine and meditation.

In Part Two: Buddhist Monks and Business Matters is the second in a series of collected essays by one of today's most distinguished scholars of Indian Buddhism. In these articles, Schopen once again displays the erudition and originality that have contributed to a major shift in the way that Indian Buddhism is perceived, understood, and studied.

The work includes essays on the business side of running a monastery; monastic ownership; property dealings; debts, deaths, dealings and the division of property; a monk and his money; monastic law; marking time in Buddhist monasteries; ritual rites and relics; the suppression of nuns; immigrant monks; and some monastic rules for redacting canonical texts.

"Unquestionably the freshest, most exciting scholarship to have emerged in the field in half a century. Schopen is amazingly prolific, unfailingly interesting, enrichingly edifying and, more often than not, completely convincing. He seeks to do for Buddhist studies what Marx did to Hegel: to stand it on its head." Buddhist Studies Review.

Schopen has been the most influential scholar in Buddhist studies in the last quarter century, and rightly so." Journal of the American Academy Religion.

"Witty and always provocative...Schopen has the uncanny knack for making seemingly bland rock inscriptions and short passages from understudied ancient Buddhist manuscripts speak volumes about the lived world of Indian Buddhism." History of Religions.