New Books In Communications

New media technology changes culture. And when it comes to religion, new technology changes the way people think and practice their traditions. And while we usually think of technology as some new gadget or machine, there was a time when the written word itself was a new technology, and this had a profound impact how Buddhism was practiced in South and South East Asia. This is the subject of Daniel Veidlinger‘s new book, Spreading the Dhamma: Writing, Orality, and Textual Transmission in Buddhist Northern Thailand (University of Hawaii Press, 2006). In today’s interview, the inaugural show for the New Books in Buddhist Studies channel of the New Books Network, we talk with Prof. Veidlinger about his book and the way some other books changed Buddhism in Thailand. The “other books” we’ll be talking about, of course, are the books of the Buddhist canon, a collection of texts that when printed today runs some 15,000 pages. A millennia ago, however, these texts were carved into palm leaves and just as likely to be

We don’t think much about institutions. They just seem to “be there.” But they have a history, as Ian McNeely and Lisa Wolverton show in their important new book Reinventing Knowledge. From Alexandria to the Internet (W.W. Norton, 2008). The book deals specifically with institutions in which knowledge has been created, preserved, and transmitted: the library, the monastery, the university, the Republic of Letters, the academic disciplines, and the laboratory. In clear, readable and spicy prose, McNeely and Wolverton show how each of these institutions was created, how they developed, and how they have been molded to novel purposes in successive ages. Reading Reinventing Knowledge is especially enlightening in that it demonstrates an important fact about history: the present is always assimilating and transforming the past. As McNeely and Wolverton show, our beloved “ancient” institutions are actually quite modern in their form and function, if not name. What we call a “university” would be unrecognizable to