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Little Buddhas: Children and Childhoods in Buddhist Texts and Traditions. Edited by Vanessa R. Sasson. Religion, Culture, and History Series of the American Academy of Religion. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. xvi + 524 pp. $150 cloth, $49.95 paper, avail- able at Oxford Scholarship Online.
O ver the last several decades, scholarship in Buddhist Studies has increas- asocial and homeless renunciant, one who "goes forth from the home into homelessness," having severed all worldly and familial ties. In fact, recent scholarship on the social history of Buddhism has gradually uncovered a very different Buddhist monk-one who is fully embroiled in the world and deeply involved in the surrounding community, owns personal wealth and property and engages in complicated financial transactions, is deeply committed to cultic practices (such as the worship of images and relics), and remains intimately connected to the family he has supposedly "renounced" and left behind. In this new body of scholarship, we encounter objects and figures that were formerly obscured-money, food, art, physical objects, women, and children.
Vanessa Sasson's wonderful new collection Little Buddhas: Children and Childhoods in Buddhist Texts and Traditions might be seen as a fitting sign of the maturity of this trend. Growing well beyond its origins in a 2009 panel at the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting, this impressive volume (exceeding five hundred pages in length) brings together nineteen contributors from the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, France, Sweden, and Taiwan, representing the disciplines of religious studies, South Asian studies, East Asian studies, Buddhist studies, anthropology, and art history. It ranges widely over geographical regions, historical periods, Buddhist traditions, and approaches to childhood, yet manages to feel like a cohesive collection, with many of the contributors explicitly pointing to parallels and connections between different chapters.
The volume opens with a useful introduction by Sasson, who reviews some of the seminal previous...