Buddhists in India Today: Descriptions, Pictures and Documents
By- Detlef Kantowsky
Detlef Kantowsky’s Buddhisten in Indien heute (1999)
brought to a German audience new material, including many photographs and
documents, on six facets of Buddhists’ life in India today. This English
translation by Hans-Georg Tuerstig will bring Kantowsky’s innovative study to
an even wider audience. He has examined the literature on the New Buddhists,
converts in the wake of Dr B.R. Ambedkar’s conversion to Buddhism in 1956, and
also studied the All India Bhikkhu Sangha, the organization of monks chiefly
from that conversion. The efforts of the
Sangha as documented in their conferences are the new material in the
literature on the Ambedkar movement.
The Maha Bodhi Society chapter also contains an
unusual document, a letter from the founder, Anagarika Dharmapala, and the
chapter on Bodh Gaya introduces three maps from very different perspectives.
The central meaning of Nagpur to the Ambedkar movement is brought out and the
Indian wing of the British Friends of the Western Buddhist Order, the TBMSG, is
analysed. The Life of S.N. Goenka, who brought Vipassana meditation back to
India, and his establishment, Dhammagiri, brings the book to the close.
Dr Kantowsky examines these facets of Buddhists today
in a very personal way, including his opinions as well as the useful
photographs and documents he has discovered in his journey among Buddhists. He
has allowed Eleanor Zelliot to add her comments, sometimes contradictory, in a
chapter at the end of the volume to which he replies in a Postscript. The
result is a stimulating account of a living religion.
Dr D.
Kantowsky, born in Berlin in 1936, retired as Professor of Sociology from
the University of Konstanz (Germany) in 1999. He pursued postgraduate studies
at Banaras Hindu University from 1964 to 1967 and spent more than a year in a
village of Varanasi district. He has maintained close research contacts with
the region ever since, and is founder-editor (1990) of a series of publications
on ‘Buddhist Modernism’ especially in the West.
Professor emerita of History of Carleton College, Eleanor Zelliot has been visiting India for half a century. Since 1963 she has
done research on and written about the Ambedkar movement and all its facets.
She has also written on Maharashtrian intellectual history and the medieval
bhakti movement.
ISBN 81-7304-511-9 2003 238p.
Rs.500/Pounds 40
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