With the rise of religious fundamentalisms, religion has had rather bad press. Yet this feeling of suspicion has apparently not yet reached Buddhism, which is usually presented as a nonviolent teaching founded on compassion. This is in large part owing to the influence of such figures as the Dalai Lama and the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hahn, who are beloved by the media and who command large Western followings. It is also a result of the attempt among some scholars but more often among Western practitioners to differentiate Buddhism from other religions (and from religion in general) by claiming for it the title of “spirituality.” For that very reason, Western adherents of Buddhism see in it a teaching particularly needed for our time. Even when it is described as a religious phenomenon, Buddhism is considered to be the exception among the world religions. It is said to have had no crusades or holy wars, unlike Christianity or Islam. It is allegedly not attached to holy places, out of which it has expelled others, such as Judaism or militant Hinduism. Its name was not associated with an expansionist military ideology, such as Shinto.

The Sinhalese scholar Walpola Rahula is one of the Buddhist apologists who claim that there never was a “Buddhist war.” In a popular book entitled What the Buddha Taught, Rahula writes: “That spirit of tolerance and compassion has been one of the most highly regarded ideals of the Buddhist culture and civilization from the outset. This is why there is not one single example of persecution or one drop of blood shed either in the conversion of people to Buddhism or in the spread of Buddhism over its two thousand five hundred year history.”

On an April evening in 1999, in Sringeri, a small town in South India, the retired schoolteacher Meshtru and I walked together on our way to our homes after the lively celebrations of the Rama ‘s festival. We stood to chat at the street corner where our paths would part. “It went really well!” I said. Meshtru's family, with whom I had become friendly over the years of my research in Sringeri, had been publicly thanked for sponsoring the evening's festive activities. “It went well, yes, this service to Rama!” he acknowledged. Amid nods and goodnights to familiar passersby, he narrated this experience. I still had my tape recorder on from the music performance I had been recording at the celebrations we had just attended.

Meshtru: My father was initiated into the great Rama Tāraka Mantra by the previous guru.

My father lived a good long life; not once did he come to depend on others.

He died peacefully, chanting “Rama, Rama. …”

He dedicated a good part of his life to serving in the temple of Sharada.

But when he was dying, he said, “Despite the wealth we once had, today I am reduced to not having money even to have my corpse carried when I die.”

My brother assured him that God would take care of everything.

I'm telling you this to illustrate how the results of good service accrue.

Whatever else it means, to see or be seen is to enter into a relationship, even if doing so involves practices as different as ignoring those who glare at us, returning the gaze of a lover, or cherishing the photograph of a lost family member. Different as they are, each of these behaviors is an example of the many kinds of relatedness that constitute interaction with images. I say “interaction” because it becomes clear upon inspection that a viewer's action toward objects, images, or people is often far more than unilateral. Each looks back; sometimes they even see us before we see them. Of special interest here is how images of the living and the dead, of gods, or of mythic heroes connect to the viewer's body. Seeing bridges the gap separating seer and seen, connecting the two in some way. Representation vanishes in the way that a tool in one's hand fades from consciousness as a sign in the midst of using it. Before use, the tool only signifies what it might actually do. In use, the tool ceases to be separate from the body and becomes instead a physical extension of it. Likewise, when they join viewers to those they love, fear, or hate, images are organic projections of the eyes, material forms of beholding. It is this tangible look, the look of the sacred, that reveals the role of the body in vision, and that will be the subject of this chapter.

Wilfred Cantwell Smith opened The Meaning and End of Religion, published in 1962 shortly before he took charge of Harvard's Center for the Study of World Religions, with a conspicuously slanted account of the scholarly enterprise of studying religion. Privileging experiential faith, Smith reproached “certain scholars,” unnamed, for the vanity of their empiricism and historicism, for their underlying irreverence and insensitivity. “Such scholars might uncharitably be compared to flies crawling on the outside of a goldfish bowl,” Smith concluded, “making accurate and complete observations on the fish inside, measuring their scales meticulously, and indeed contributing much to a knowledge of the subject, but never asking themselves, and never finding out, how it feels to be a goldfish.” Here instead, Smith argued, was a subject that demanded “imaginative sympathy” and “appreciative understanding,” even perhaps “something akin to awe” and “experiential participation.” Only careless hubris allowed scholars to think that religion was a “field of study” in which “a would-be surveyor” could draw its bounds and stride confidently across it: “One must tread softly here,” Smith advised, echoing a line from William Butler Yeats, “for one is treading on men's dreams.” Smith insisted that he wanted to hold onto “the hard-won heritage of scholarship and science” in the academy, alongside “the precious heritage of ultimates at the heart of the world's faith.” Still, when it came to the study of religion, he clearly wished to put the former in the service of the latter. Critical suspicion and secular scholarship did not measure up well against the higher ideals of sympathetic appreciation and spiritual cosmopolitanism.

With this act of generosity from a member of the audience, Dallas-based Pentecostal Bishop T. D. Jakes lifted his hands and walked back and forth across the floor of the stage. The announcement had come seemingly as a surprise, a spontaneous gesture in the midst of the bishop's plea to his audience for financial support. Bishop Jakes's comments were directed toward the primarily American donors gathered together that morning in Soweto. The need he spoke of was specific. South Africa, like other African nations, is experiencing a crisis of clean water. Women and children walk miles to collect water from polluted streams. Those in remote areas of South Africa, like persons located in similarly isolated regions of India and other countries of the “developing” world, are in a quandary. “If you don't drink it, you die. And, if you drink it, you die,” in Jakes's words. Added to this, the HIV/AIDS epidemic has devastated many in the country, especially in neighboring Swaziland, the second stop on the bishop's tour. The HIV/AIDS pandemic has left countless children orphaned and thousands of others without sufficient medical attention or even proper medical diagnosis. The work of responding to this crisis, Jakes insisted, should come from the Christian church.

Sex has been a fundamental descriptive category in religious studies for centuries. It is difficult, in fact, to imagine a subject that has played a greater role in shaping the conceptual frameworks that have dominated this field. The subject of sexual relations has been pivotal in accounting for something called “religion” in human experience, in generating curiosity and producing analyses about religious others, and in establishing boundaries between Christianity and other religions. The history of academic religious fascination with sex is a shifting and complex one, to be sure, and it has perennially had to contend with suspicions that its purveyors might turn out to be furtive libertines or voyeurs. But there is no missing the centrality of this subject in the genealogy of theories that have dominated the modern study of religion.

Recent decades have, nonetheless, witnessed a steep rise in the number of works devoted to sexuality in religious studies, generated by considerably different concerns and questions than their predecessors. This upsurge has been part of a larger trend throughout the humanities and social sciences, where, for nearly a quarter-century, questions about sexual identity, orientation, desire, and embodied practice, along with inquiries into legal proscriptions and protections, have proliferated. Scholarly publishing in the study of religion, as well as the conference programs of learned societies such as the American Academy of Religion and the Society for Biblical Literature, illustrate the prominence of such research in the discipline.

INTRODUCTION

Many (not all) scholars of religion become restive sooner or later with the simple sufficiency of explanations of religious phenomena and experiences in terms of the social and psychological. It is not that these scholars of religion propose foregoing social explanations. It is that they recognize that such accounts fall short of the realness of the phenomena they purport to describe and explain in people's experience. And not just this: social accounts that pretend to be exhaustive distort those experiences and diminish them, precisely as historical and cultural phenomena. Such explanations are empirically insufficient, in other words. The famous epistemic “bracket” of religious studies, which is the practice of setting aside questions about the ontological realness of religious phenomena as a condition of research – we are not interested in whether or not the Blessed Mother really appeared to Bernadette at Lourdes, we say, thus immediately making the seer into a psychotic – begins to seem false or inadequate. These scholars have witnessed something in their fieldwork or historical study, close to home and across the globe, which they want to name and without which theories of religion seem to be beside the point. They have seen, for example, how Jesus is a real figure in a Pentecostal woman's everyday experience, as real to her as the other people around her, as real as her kitchen table and her arthritis. She does not “believe in” Jesus. Jesus is present to her. Moreover, this woman’s Jesus has an existence that is greater than the sum of her intentions, desires, needs, hopes, and fears, and that cannot be completely accounted for with reference to her social circumstances. He has a life of his own in her life.

Over the past several years, a number of scholars have diagnosed a crisis in the field of the study of religion. Unlike previous debates within religious studies, this recent crisis has focused not so much on the object of study but on both the relationship of the researcher to his or her subject and the nature of research we as “critical scholars of religion” should conduct. Institutional and professional anxieties over the legitimacy of the field of religious studies within the broader academy have intensified the urgency of this debate. Above all, the dividing line between scientific scholarship and metaphysical speculation is increasingly drawn around the ill-defined notion of critique. As José Cabezón has cogently observed, “It is our commitment to a project defined … in terms of criticism, methodological rigor, theory, self-awareness and so forth – that we believe gives us … the wherewithal to clarify the opacities and to unmask the misrecognitions that are [supposedly] endemic to the first-order discourses and practices of religion that are constitutive of both our object and our Other.” The establishment of something called the critical study of religion, as opposed to theological assertion or parochial apologetics, has become the primary justification for the place of scholars of religion within the academy.

INTRODUCTION

Max Weber, writing during a period that he felt marked a shift into a new world of modernity, described that world as follows:

The emergence of modernity has entailed a loss of the enchanted cosmology that defined traditional societies. Weber characteristically viewed such a rationalization of the world in ambivalent terms. It has led to the recognition that the world is governed by humans, not gods, and it has allowed us to make a rational science of human society. These were, to Weber, overall good things, and the resulting disenchantment of the world ought thus to be thought of as something we must learn to bear as the flip-side of the same coin. Those too weak to face this shift can always return to the churches – the remnants of the traditional world.

This tradition–modernity distinction has dominated not only the field of religious studies but also commonsensical views in the West for the past two centuries concerning religions in general. Humans before the modern period believed themselves to be living in a world created and controlled by gods; according to this framework, in which the cosmos was therefore structured, humanity had a predefined place and purpose for existence, and human societies were given order through religious beliefs and institutions.

Since the closing decade of the millennium, social friction generated by the presence of substantial numbers of Muslim immigrants in Europe, as well as the threat of Muslim terrorists, has given a new impetus to the fear of politicized religion. Violent and intolerant “Fundamentalist movements “ have emerged not only in the Muslim world (although these are the most frightening in the West) but also in Israel and the United States. The secular values of liberal democracy are under siege – or so the Western media tell us. Academics who teach religious studies have responded eagerly, seeing in this an opportunity to demonstrate the public relevance of their expertise. What is to be done about the dangers of religious belief to liberal democracies?

More generally one may ask: What are the relations between the secular promise of liberal democracy and the conditions for private belief in transcendence? There is no simple answer to this question, of course, because modern religion has both hindered and aided liberal values and because liberal values are more contradictory and ambiguous than is sometimes acknowledged. But I want to begin with other questions: What is “religion”? How has it come to be defined in the ways it has? What are some of the political consequences of making belief central to the definition?

The Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies comes at a critical and challenging time for the academic study of religion in the United States and around the world. The field of religious studies is at a crossroads, having embarked for the past two decades on a fundamental reexamination of its most basic ideas and terms, while the world at large has awakened to the enduring public salience of religion and to religion's importance to the everyday lives of much of the planet's population. Recent political events have given an anxious edge to this curiosity about religion, but religious conflict and violence, important and compelling as these are as subjects, do not exhaust the place of religion in the contemporary world, nor do they account completely for the intensified academic interest in the study of religion across the humanities and social sciences. Rather, people of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have turned out to be not nearly as disenchanted as earlier generations of thinkers about religion had predicted – just the opposite, in fact. The secular and the sacred are braided together today, sometimes in novel configurations and in unexpected places, and there are those who suggest that we have never been modern, never completely disenchanted. This has invited renewed attention to what religion is and what religion does to and for individuals and communities, social movements, global and national economies, and to the politics of nation-states and the relations between them.

Even the most cursory glance at works written by a number of contemporary religious studies scholars reveals a disturbing use of the term “theology,” at least to this theologian. “Theology” is usually (and unfortunately) mentioned in a pejorative sense. Often “theology” appears as the negative foil to the study of religion. Lived religion is opposed to abstract dogmatic propositions; the empirical study of devotional practices is contrasted with the prescriptions of religious authorities far removed from the reality of religion and everyday life; and the value-neutral academic study of religion is preferred to the subjective imposition of theological doctrines.

Given the agreement among some – if not most – religious studies scholars that theology must be decisively disciplined, the presence in this particular book of a chapter on theology and religious studies might raise a few eyebrows, if not elicit a few groans. Is it not the contemporary consensus that the two disciplines, religious studies and theology, are best seen in the disjunctive terms of “either/or”? Is religious studies not premised on its liberation from theology, which is also its ticket to acceptance in the secular academy?

When a theologian cannot recognize herself in descriptions of her discipline by scholars of religion, then she must address the challenge of the disjunction. The aim of this chapter is twofold: first, to set up the historical terms in which the fraught relationship between theology and the study of religion has come to be; and, second, to make a case for a way of doing theology that can be productive for the study of religion.

INTRODUCTION

“It is not easy to speak of practice other than negatively,” Pierre Bourdieu writes. Like many such key words, practice might be better thought of as a term that invokes several loosely bound, historically developed debates. One does not need to delve too far into religious studies before noting the ubiquity of discussions surrounding practice and the word's wide semantic field. Practice can, for example, signal interest in the things religious people do (praying, singing, meditating, and reading, to name just some of the things religious people do) within the genealogies and traditions associated with these activities. Practice also signals a theoretical and conceptual turn to religion that emphasizes embodiment, habit, and daily activity as much as earlier generations emphasized belief, texts, and orthodox theologies proper. Discussions of practice also engage debates about the normative and ethical impact of certain modes of action, linking studies of religion to questions of virtue, its proper cultivation, and of the relation of religious virtues to civic, democratic, or political practice.

Invoking practice, in other words, signals “particular formations of meaning – ways not only of discussing but at another level of seeing many of our central experiences,” as cultural critic and historian Raymond Williams put it. With this in mind, we can venture that the commonalities among divergent uses of practice center on the “everyday” living expressions of religions and on investigations of religion's power and authority unfolding in habitual and embodied actions.

INTRODUCTION

In 1455, King Tilokaraja of Chiang Mai, a northern kingdom in what we now know as Thailand, began to build a new Buddhist temple in imitation of the Maha Bodhi temple at Bodh Gaya (India), which marks the site of Sakyamuni Buddha‘s enlightenment. After first installing a bodhi tree – a devotional reminder of the Buddha‘s enlightenment – transferred from one of Chiang Mai's most powerful existing Buddhist sites, Tilokaraja continued to sponsor work at the new temple for years to come. Spaces for the veneration of Sakyamuni Buddha were constructed, along with a pavilion for the recitation of Buddhist texts and a monastic library. This temple in Chiang Mai, the Seven Spires Monastery, later housed a large gathering of Buddhist monks invited by the king to purify and recite the contents of canonical Buddhist texts.

The labor, wealth, and royal support required for this temple and its editorial assembly, as well as the importance of both to subsequent Thai Buddhist memory, remind us that the texts central to religious traditions and communities of practitioners are – and long have been – alive in the world. Such texts are performed in liturgy and ritual. They are references used in sophisticated intellectual debate, as well as tools for basic education. Celebrated within religious communities, texts also shape the world of material culture, guiding the creation of statues and paintings and providing descriptive models for the construction of spaces for ritual and devotion. Those books or manuscripts deemed transformatively powerful are drawn into the work of magic and protective ritual. To possess religious texts, or to support their production, is often (especially in a manuscript culture) a display of wealth and power.

INTRODUCTION

Law, like religion, is a virtually universal feature of human society – law, that is, understood in its simplest sense, as the organizing structure for collective life. All societies have law. Law, like religion, is also enormously varied across space and time and has been variously theorized throughout history. Indeed, there is much evidence that, as with religious pluralism, legal pluralism is a better description of the natural state of the case than the singular “rule of law” now often imagined and celebrated as a unitary and a historical desideratum. We may learn more, in other words, about what the great legal comparativist Karl Llewellyn called “law-stuff,” in all societies, by assuming multiplicity, whatever the structure of official power, than by accepting the narrow positivist reading of law employed by most scholars today. Yet law continues to be understood by many to derive its authority and definition exclusively from the sovereign modern state, pushing to the side and to the past many rival normative structures – including religion.

The nature of law is, of course, the subject of an extensive literature. I begin with law in the context of this book because it seems often to be the case that scholars of religion who see religion as multiplicitous and variously embedded in cultures nonetheless accept modern law's account of itself as lacking those qualities, notwithstanding overwhelming evidence to the contrary. One's model of law, as of religion, necessarily affects how one understands the interaction of law and religion and, importantly, the possibility of their separation.

INTRODUCTION

All religion is material religion. All religion has to be understood in relation to the media of its materiality. This necessarily includes a consideration of religious things, and also of actions and words, which are material no matter how quickly they pass from sight or sound or dissipate into the air. But the difficult part comes in understanding what precisely constitutes the materiality of material religion, what makes religious materiality either significant or religious, and according to whom.

Within religious studies and the human sciences more broadly, there has been a growing interest in what the study of materiality offers for our understanding of the lived experience and practices of religion. The move to materiality allows us to reconsider (and resuscitate) the very concept of religion itself, for one thing, which has long been recognized as Protestant idealism masquerading as a neutral analytic. “Religion” is not always about belief or the problem of meaning, nor can religion always be recognized as something discrete in culture and society. (This is the paradox of the modern understanding of religion: religion is immaterial but treated always as a distinctive entity apart from everything else.) Approaching “religion” as “material religion“ allows us to consider the material as part and parcel of our interests and of the religious worlds of the people we study. The materiality of religious life is not incidental. As Talal Asad writes, “the materialities of religion are integral to its constitution.”

To Valerius Maximus, the fawning author of Memorable Doings and Sayings, dedicated to the Roman emperor Tiberius sometime between 14–37 ce, it was self-evident that Roman religious practices were profoundly traditional. “Our ancestors (Maiores),” he states at the very beginning of his tract in his discussion of “On Religion” (De religione), decreed the very foundations and institutions of Roman religion. The “ancients” (antiques) zealously sought both to observe and to expand religion, and Valerius Maximus reports approvingly of several rituals and auguries that were performed “in the way of our ancestors,” the mos maiorum.

It is generally not wise to rely on the testimony of Valerius Maximus, a man who, as one classical scholar writes, “possessed neither sharpness of intellect nor clarity of style.” In this case, however, Valerius Maximus accurately reflected not only the common Roman belief about their own religion but also a sentiment widely shared throughout the circum-Mediterranean and Near East. Piety, defined by Cicero (first century bce) as “justice towards the gods,” meant in part honoring ancestral customs. One of the primary reasons that Romans looked askance at early Christians was that Christians rejected the customs of their ancestors. Nor were Romans alone in their insistence on preserving ancestral practices. In the face of immense social, economic, political, and religious challenges, Egyptians in late antiquity tenaciously held to traditional religious practices.