The Mahabodhi Temple at Bodhgaya: Constructing Sacred Placeness, Deconstructing the 'Great Case' of 1895

This volume investigates the historic and ethnographic accounts of the ongoing religious contestations over the status of the Mahā
bodhi Temple complex in Bodhgayā
(a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2002) and its surrounding landscape to critically analyse the working and construction of sacredness. It endeavours to make a ground-up assessment of ways in which human participants in the past and present respond to and interact with the Mahā
bodhi Temple and its surroundings.
The volume argues that sacredness goes beyond scriptural texts and archaeological remains. The Mahā
bodhi Temple is complex and its surround-ing landscape is a 'living' heritage, which has been produced socially and constitutes differential densities of human involvement, attachment, and experience. Its significance lies mainly in the active interaction between religious architecture within its dynamic ritual settings. This endless con-testation of sacredness and its meaning should not be seen as the 'death' of the Mahā
bodhi Temple
on the contrary, it illustrates the vitality of the ongoing debate on the meaning, understanding, and use of the sacred in the Indian context.

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