The Buddha’s Busted Finger
Craft, Touch, and Cosmology in Theravada Buddhism
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8201784 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Anthony Lovenheim Irwin (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 90 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 52-85 |
| Publication date | 2022-05-20 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of the American Academy of Religion (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0002-7189 • E-ISSN: 1477-4585 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/jaarel/lfac003 |
| OpenAlex | W4206624347 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 34 |
This article is about the bodily connection between Theravada Buddhist craftspeople, monks, and laypeople to the objects they create and touch. Textual and contemporary accounts of Buddhist material production emphasize the importance of physical touch in the formal aspects, embodied efficacy, and social salience of Buddhist objects, including Buddha images, brick stupas, and shrines. Here, I explore how the hands of skilled and unskilled Buddhist craftspeople manipulate, form, and connect divine, material, and social expressions of Theravada Buddhism. The handiwork of Buddhists gestures towards the ethical possibilities and cosmological significance of religious crafting, installation, and construction. Drawing on a variety of Theravada Buddhist sources, this article introduces “religious building” as a usable analytic category that can reveal why religion itself is often organized around, and generated through, acts of material and spatial production
Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Buddhism · Craft · Embodied cognition · Epistemology · Gautama Buddha · Gesture · Linguistics · Multimedia · Sociology · USable · Visual arts · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Computer Science · Eurasian Exchange Networks · History · Islamic Studies and History · Philosophy
Dialectic in practical religion
Counterheritage
Nirvana and Other Buddhist Felicities
The Lovelorn Ghost and the Magical Monk
Crossing and Dwelling
Merit-Transference in the Kammic Theory of Popular Theravada Buddhism
The Material Culture of Ritual Concealments in the United States
Conjuring Boundaries
Minaret Building and Apprenticeship in Yemen
Death, Memory and Building
The Body of the Artisan
Beyond Mediation
Tools and world-making in the worship of Vishwakarma
No Ethics Without Things
Divinely significant
Media and the senses in the making of religious experience
The Materiality of Finnish Folk Magic
The agency between images
Famous Buddha Images and the Legitimation of Kings
The Meaning and End of Religion; A New Approach to the Religious Traditions of Mankind
The HanImaginaireof Writing as Weaving
Things Fall Apart
The Alchemy of Charity
The Saint with Indra's Sword
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 3 |
| Citation span | 2025 - 2026 (2) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |