Affective Futures and Relative Eschatology in American Tibetan Buddhism. Issue 1 (1st September 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Binning, Amy
• Is Part Of: Religion and society. Volume 11:Issue 1(2020)
• Page Start: 45
• Page End: 60
• Publication Date: 2020-09-01
• Subjects: affective temporality -- decline -- future -- Kaliyuga -- landscape -- preparedness -- prophecy -- sacred materials; Religion and sociology -- Periodicals; 306.605
• DOI: 10.3167/arrs.2020.110104
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2150-9298

Abstract

Abstract: Tibetan Buddhist prophecies of decline are largely unattended when it comes to practitioners' lived experiences. This article considers such narratives through a focus on a community of American Buddhists in California. The relationship between Buddhist narratives of degenerating future and the American landscape is played out through the creation and distribution of sacred objects, which are potent containers for—and portents of—prophetic futures. Ruptures in time and landscape become, through the frame of prophecy, imaginative spaces where the American topography is drawn into Tibetan history and prophetic future. Narratives of decline, this article argues, also find common ground with salient American rhetoric of preparedness and are therefore far from fringe beliefs, but a more widely available way of thinking through quotidian life.