Haunting the Buddha

Abstract

Although Buddhist monasteries are commonly understood as being institutions dedicated to non‐attachment and transcendence, the architectures of the earliest known monasteries are overwhelmingly decorated with sculptural images of minor deities and spirits directly associated with wealth, health and worldly success (yakshas, nagas, etc). This text refutes the notion that the presence of these deities is linked to periods of decline in Buddhism by demonstrating how the inclusion of these semi‐divine figures was part of an intentional process by which the Buddhist monastic community managed to attract adherents and expand into new regions. Specifically, the incorporation of these supernatural beings into Buddhist contexts provided the Buddhists with a social role as the tamers and keepers of potentially dangerous and unpredictable spirits. This new social relevance ensured Buddhist patronage after the cessation of royal support (c. 200‐100 bce) and provided the monastic community with a strategy for expansion. Both the architecture and the sculpture served as important visual markers that signified the spiritual authority of Buddhist teachings and identified the monastic community as spiritually accomplished individuals worthy of support. This work situates Buddhism within the social and political contexts of early India and in so doing explores the contributions made to the developing monastic institution by the religious ideas and local beliefs that surrounded it.

‘I am Iraq’<br>Law, life and violence in the formation of the Iraqi state

“…212 DeCaroli similarly asserts that individuals who challenge the very grounds of the political order often experience banishment from law's protection precisely because they threaten to impose a new law in place of the old. 213 Therefore, relegation to bare life in one space of exception might make way for the creation of a new form of qualified life through new forms of organisation that emerge in opposition to the political order that originally enacted the exception.…”

“…241 More than two years after the invasion, faced with an overwhelming expansion of sovereign power beyond the state and the institutionalisation of a new political order in Iraq, many sectarian groups attempted to recover their autonomy and assert their authority through violent drives to integrate their definition of population and nation. 242 They asserted their ethnic and sectarian identities through the expulsion and extermination of those designated as foreign to the territory or the nation, 243 and they instrumentalised the four million persons forcibly displaced in the state-building process as objectives rather than byproducts of the conflict -what Helton would call 'displacement by design'. 244 They dialectically constructed their identities through 'boundary maintenance' against other identities, 245 acting as 'ethnopolitical entrepreneurs' performing and invoking ethnic and sectarian identities in order to mobilise, justify and ultimately reify them and to inform and legitimise their politics.…”