Monasteries, Shrines and Society: Buddhist and Brahmanical Religious Institutions in India in Their Socio-Economic Context

For long, Indian Buddhist and Brahmanical religious institutions have generally been studied from art-historical perspectives. This has resulted into a general neglect of the contours of the vast functional matrices these institutions have created or were parts there of. Eassays in this book attempt to explore the functional roles of Indian Buddhist and Brahmanical religious institutions by perceiving them as important constituents of the overall societal matrix: as institutions in dynamic interactions with other societal institutions, acting and reacting with them, influencing them and getting influenced by them in turn. These institutions interacted with their socio-economic context in a variety of ways. This book hopes to be an Endeavour in unraveling some dimensions of these interactions, and seeks to explain the decline of Indian Buddhism and survival and expansion of Brahmanism in terms of their engagements with societal institutions and processes.