The Power of the Written Word in Manichaeism

The prominent role books and the act of writing played in the life of the Manichaean Church distinguishes Manichaeism even among other “religions of the book.” This article tackles the question whether the primacy of writing was established by Mani himself or resulted from a development that occurred within the first generations of Mani’s followers. The analysis of the extant fragments of Mani’s own works and early Manichaean texts such as the work of Baraies preserved in the Cologne Mani Codex and the Kephalaia indicate that Mani’s superiority as a writing prophet and the ritual meaning of writing most likely were not part of Mani’s original teaching. Rather, they resulted from the efforts of Manichaean theologians who sought to demonstrate the exceptional status of Mani’s revelation and prophetic mission based on his writings. The Prologue to the Kephalaia of the Teacher played a significant role in this development and contributed extensively to the ritualization of writing in Manichaeism.

Nothing Personal: Blavatsky and Her Indian Interlocutors

The Theosophical Society was an influential transnational religious movement founded by H. P. Blavatsky and others in 1875. With its theology of the impersonal Divine, Theosophy was particularly influential on the New Age, which inherited a propensity to see the divine in impersonal terms. Offering a corrective to the recent historiographical tendency that focuses solely on Theosophy’s Western aspects, this article analyzes Blavatsky’s written “conversations” on the nature of the Divine with two Indian Theosphists, T. Subba Row (1856–1890) and Mohini Chatterji (1858–1936). Contextualizing these discussions both globally and locally, it reveals Blavatsky’s engagement with Subba Row’s Vedantic reading of John Stuart Mill and her concurrent rejection of Mohini’s Brahmo-Samaj inspired theism. The article considers the power dynamics that lay behind these negotiations. It argues that they involved a mutual drive for legitimacy and were the result of complex transcultural encounters that resist reductionist historiographical tendencies.

Feasting with Buddhist Women: Food Literacy in Religious Belonging

This ethnographic study shows that women’s knowledge and practices involving food in Japanese Buddhist contexts circulate as gendered currency. It emphasizes how what we term “food literacy” cultivates aesthetic and affective senses of belonging among Buddhist practitioners. We argue that this embodied knowledge helps women negotiate their experiences of Buddhism and show how these experiences articulate the complexities of their bounded and self-disciplining Buddhist selves. Women use food literacy to teach, learn, and practice the way Buddhism feels and etch it into their own and others’ emotional, social, and material bodies. By recognizing women as stewards of religion, particularly through food literacy, we also elucidate how women’s uses of mundane practices illuminate food literacy as a value carrier that generates belonging through food. Such practices can equally become sites of failure to connect if the intended recipients do not share understandings or appreciations of the aesthetic and affective dimensions of it.

Beethoven and Buddhism in a Japanese Religion: Culture as Cultivation in Soka Gakkai

Why is the museum at the headquarters of the lay Japanese Buddhist organization Soka Gakkai full of pianos? How did Gakkai members in Japan come to revere the compositions and ethos of Ludwig van Beethoven as means of defending Buddhist orthodoxy? And how did this Buddhist organization come to rely on classical music as a key form of self-cultivation and institution building? This article draws on ethnographic engagements with musicians in Soka Gakkai, along with study of the Gakkai’s development in 20th-century Japan, to detail how practitioners’ Buddho-cultural pursuits demonstrate ways cultural practices can create religion. Attention to Soka Gakkai’s fusions of European high culture with lay Buddhist teachings and practices troubles static definitions of “Buddhism” and signals the need for broader inquiry into the nature of religious belonging through investigations of aesthetic forms.

Feeling Apart: Relations of Belonging in Tibetan Buddhist Lay-Monastic Communities

Studies of belonging and community formation often emphasize commonality of values, emotions, and feelings. This article highlights the importance of practices that create relations of distance between members as well as closeness. Drawing on fieldwork in institutionalized Tibetan Buddhist communities in northeastern Tibet (Amdo/Qinghai), I focus on everyday practices of respect and faith that materialize community by putting monks, reincarnate lamas, and laity “in their place.” This can include the most quotidian of acts, such as standing when someone enters a room. I argue that such practices of “feeling apart” and their refusal are central to individual negotiations of religious belonging and to the dynamic, ongoing process of community formation. The importance of these practices becomes particularly apparent when, as is the case in northeastern Tibet, seemingly taken-for-granted relations of belonging and the emotional style that enacts and creates these relations are felt to be precarious.