If my book sounds interesting to you, please consider ordering a copy from Cornell University Press. How and why did a transnational Buddhist organization allow their plan to create so much suffering for impoverished rural Indians? What were the cultural logics at work on both sides of the controversy? My ethnography of a future statue of the Maitreya Buddha (himself the “future Buddha”) is a story about divergent, competing visions of Kushinagar’s potential futures. FPMT has over a hundred centers, and its Buddhist practitioners are an international lot hailing from everywhere from San Jose (California, US) to San José (Spain). Since the majority of the supporters of the Maitreya Project statue are “converts” to Tibetan Buddhism (what I am calling “non-heritage” practitioners), my book narrates the spectacular collision of cultural values between small agriculturalists in rural India and transnational Buddhists from around the world. It felt like picking up a “paper baby” (as anthropologist Signithia Fordham, has called our laboriously constructed publications) for the first time.Īnti-Maitreya Project protest in Kushinagar The cover-a skilled graphic designer at the press had brought my vision to perfect fruition-was awash in movement and bright colors, which seems perfectly apt for a book about the impact of global forces on a rural Indian locality. It was the first shipment of freshly printed books. I opened the box, and saw the familiar faces of informants from India looking back at me. About a month before the official publication date, I received a box from an address I did not recognize in North Carolina. It is my first book, so as you might imagine, Telluride friends, it’s an emotional and joyful occasion. My book, Battling the Buddha of Love: A Cultural Biography of the Greatest Statue Never Built, has just been published by Cornell University Press. Battling the Buddha of Love: A Cultural Biography of the Greatest Statue Never Built

Maitreya project relic tour