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Description of  Guardians of the Buddha s Home: Domestic Religion in Contemporary J do Shinsh (Contemporary Buddhism)

In Guardians of the Buddhas Home, Jessica Starling draws on nearly three years of ethnographic research to provide a comprehensive view of Jdo Shinsh (True Pure Land) temple life with temple wives (known as bmori, or temple guardians) at its center. Throughout, she focuses on domestic religion, a mode of doing religion centering on more informal religious expression that has received scant attention in the scholarly literature. The Buddhist temple wifes movement back and forth between the main hall and the back stage of the kitchen and family residence highlights the way religious meaning cannot be confined to canonical texts or to the area of the temple prescribed for formal worship. Starling argues that attaining Buddhist faith Read more