Burma, or Myanmar as it was renamed in 1989, is largely ignored within the discipline of South Asian Studies, despite its cultural, religious, economic, and strategic significance for the wider worlds of Asia. Burma is often studied either in isolation or alongside Southeast Asian countries such as Thailand, Vietnam, and Malaysia, despite its equally important historical and cultural connections to communities, states, and networks across what is now India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, or Nepal. In this Roundtable, four scholars of South Asia discuss Burma's erasure within the discipline, the origins and limitations of traditional area studies frameworks, and the possibilities afforded by Burma's inclusion within a more expansive conception of South Asia.

Despite a recognition of religion as a resource for coping in later life, few studies have examined how religion is summoned to cope with the stressors of late-life immigration. Drawing upon data generated in a phenomenological study of the aging-out-place experience, this article presents a hermeneutic analysis of textual extracts addressing 10 Sri Lankan-born late-life immigrants’ Buddhist beliefs and practices, and how these beliefs and practices contributed to coping with immigration stressors. Four shared experiences facilitated through religious engagement were revealed: religious engagement as a source of purpose, making meaning of suffering and experiencing hope, non-attachment, and connecting to the past and the ethnoreligious community. Late-life immigrants drew on religious engagement to remain resolute amidst adversities, thus reinforcing the importance of culturally responsive milieus and services to support religion-focused coping. Findings are interpreted in relation to Pargament’s (1997) theory of religious coping.

This article argues that the Mongol empire's famous religious tolerance cannot be explained solely through its adoption of Inner Asian imperial political traditions of ruling over ethnically and religiously diverse subjects. Instead, this pluralism can be ascribed to a wider religious pattern of the Mongols. The first part argues that the analytical category of immanentist religions explains not only the inter-cultic transparency exhibited by the Mongol courts, but also the few explicit instances where the Chinggisid rulers reacted with ‘religious’ violence. The article further explores the strategies employed by the religious vectors, mainly Buddhists and Muslims, to address, accommodate, and subvert the Chinggisids’ patterns of religiosity and primarily their pluralism, and the Mongols’ deified mode of sacralizing kingship. Focusing on the Mongol-Ilkhanid court in Iran, the article examines how religious representatives used conceptual affinities and equivalences between the Mongol traditions and certain principles of their own religious frameworks to gain influence and favour, and persuade the khans to convert or retain their earlier commitment to the new religious affiliation. Employing this assimilative approach, they manoeuvred within the religious, immanentist paradigm of their nomadic patrons while moulding and manipulating it to their own religious, transcendentalist ends. The article further demonstrates how this ‘translation’ process of Chinggisid patterns became an arena of Buddhist–Muslim rivalry and competition, but also cross-cultural fertilization.

This article compares the ideas, connections, and projects of two South Asian figures who are generally studied separately: the Indian pan-Islamist Muhammad Barkatullah (1864–1927) and the Sinhalese Buddhist reformer Anagarika Dharmapala (1864–1934). In doing so, I argue that we can understand these two figures in a new light, by recognizing their mutual connections as well as the structural similarities in their thought. By focusing on their encounters and work in Japan, this article demonstrates how Japan—particularly after defeating Russia in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905—had become a significant site for inter-Asian conversations about world religions. Importantly, exploring the projects of Barkatullah and Dharmapala makes visible the fact that, from the late nineteenth century until the outbreak of the First World War, religion played a central role—alongside nationalism, race, and empire—in conversations about the possible futures of the international order.

Buddhism is a tradition that set itself decidedly against theism, with the development of complex arguments against the existence of God. I propose that the metaphysical conclusions reached by some schools in the Mahayana tradition present a vision of reality that, with some apparently small modification, would ground an argument for the existence of God. This argument involves explanation in terms of natures rather than causal agency. Yet I conclude not only that the Buddhist becomes a theist in embracing such explanations as legitimate, but also ipso facto abandons their metaphysical project and ceases to be a Buddhist.

Although allegations of monastic financial embezzlement and sexual misconduct are the most frequent and outrageous monastic scandals reported in Thailand's media outlets, this article discusses a separate category of scandal I label ‘everyday scandals.’ This type of scandal describes the phenomenon of monks committing bodily transgressions, including inappropriate behaviours outside the temple and unacceptable presentations of the body. For Thai Buddhist laity, photos of monks taking trips to the mall and working out at a gym can be indicators that their religion is in decline. A proper male monastic body enacting acceptable behaviour signals the difference of the monastic life from the lay life, ensuring the efficacy of merit and ritual performance. The regulation of everyday monastic life is a fertile topic in Thai media. Because the Buddhist monastic institution is interconnected with the Thai nation-state, the male monastic body is a site of evaluation and critique. At stake is national Thai heritage and pride in Thailand's majority religion: Buddhism. Besides the strength of contemporary Thai Buddhism, everyday scandals also reveal continuity in the discourse of decline and anxiety over monastic behaviour, which began with the earliest Buddhist communities. The threat of Buddhism's decline is part of a continuum of debates within monastic texts and Buddhist history regarding proper monastic behaviours in public.

The Maldives Heritage Survey was established to document cultural heritage vulnerable to human and environmental threats in the Maldives. An open-access online database is being produced to inform academic studies, support heritage-management plans and create a permanent archive of digital heritage resources.

Using received texts and excavated funerary epitaphs, this article examines the intricacies of gender and migration in early medieval China by exploring women's long-distance mobility from the fourth century to the sixth century, when what is now known as China was divided by the Northern Wei and a succession of four southern states—the Eastern Jin, Liu-Song, Southern Qi, and Liang. I focus on three types of migration in which women participated during this period: war-induced migration, family reunification, and religious journeys. Based on this analysis, I propose answers to two important questions: the connection between migration and the state, and textual representations of migrants. Though the texts under consideration are usually written in an anecdotal manner, the references to women, I argue, both reveals nuances in perceptions of womanhood at the time and elucidates the contexts within—and through—which long-distance travel became possible for women.

The Buddhist no-self and no-person revisionary metaphysics aims to produce a better structure that is motivated by the normative goal of eliminating, or at least reducing, suffering. The revised structure, in turn, entails a major reconsideration of our ordinary everyday person-related concerns and practices and interpersonal attitudes, such as moral responsibility, praise and blame, compensation, and social treatment. This essay explores the extent to which we must alter and perhaps discard some of our practical commitments in light of the Buddhist revisionism. I do not argue here that we should change our ordinary practices, concerns, and attitudes, or that the Buddhist metaphysics does succeed in presenting a better structure. Rather, I offer it as an alternative structure that should be considered seriously.