Reimagining the Buddha: Studies in Religion and Culture

How mass-produced religious imagery has impacted Buddhist life in Sri Lanka

Written by a practicing Buddhist monk, this religious ethnography of contemporary Sinhalese Buddhism examines how the recent proliferation of religious objects and images has evoked a new concept of the Buddha in contemporary Sri Lanka. Placed amid the mundane settings of homes, hospitals, prisons, offices, factories, shops, and roadsides, today's more easily manufactured Buddha statues have elicited new forms of visual practice and bodily engagement. These representations of the Buddha play a new set of roles in healing and emotional support amid adversity, moral formation among children and adults, and the strengthening of family and social bonds. This Buddha is no longer merely a distant figure of the past who dispensed wisdom through the discourses preserved in the ancient Pali texts but a Buddha who cares, one who is both immanent and empathetic. Through personal interviews and groundbreaking archival research, Soorakkulame Pemaratana explores who the Buddha has become for Sinhalese Buddhists in the industrialized, postcolonial world they inhabit.