![]() | Attracting the Heart: Social Relations and the Aesthetics of Emotion in Sri Lankan Monastic Culture Subjects: Monastic and religious life (Buddhism) -- Sri Lanka; Buddhist sanghas -- Social aspects -- Sri Lanka; Buddhist monks -- Sri Lanka -- Social life and customs; Aesthetics -- Religious aspects -- Buddhism; Emotions -- Religious aspects -- Buddhism; An idealized view of the lifestyle of a Buddhist monk might be described according to the doctrinal demand for emotional detachment and, ultimately, the cessation of all desire. Yet monks are also enjoined to practice compassion, a powerful emotion and equally lofty ideal, and live with every other human feeling--love, hate, jealousy, ambition--while relating to other monks and the lay community. In this important ethnography of Buddhism in Sri Lanka, Jeffrey Samuels takes an unprecedented look at how emotion determines and influences the commitments that laypeople and monastics make to each other and to the Buddhist religion in general. By focusing on "multimoment" histories, Samuels highlights specific junctures in which ideas about recruitment, vocation, patronage, and institution-building are dynamically negotiated and refined. Positing a nexus between aesthetics and affect, he illustrates not only how aesthetic responses trigger certain emotions, but also how personal and shared emotions, at the local level, shape notions of beauty. Jeffrey Samuels is professor of religious studies at Western Kentucky University. |
![hidden image for function call](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/1x1.png)