Space for Worship in East Asia

This volume presents new scholarships on East Asian worship spaces in various areas and from many different religious backgrounds. Architecture is a comprehensive expression of, and the most visible contributor to, the identity of a place, religious, cultural, and regional, deeply rooted in a specific historicity and locality. The subject's focus on the space for worship allows authors to investigate a sacred site from both Buddhist and Daoist religious backgrounds, analyze a folk cult again the ancestor worship tradition in a Confucian society, and search for common spirituality shared between Buddhism and Christianity. The focus on worshiping space also allows authors to choose a wide range of scales, perspectives, disciplinary lenses, and methodological approaches for their topic. Space for worship can be physical, including architecture, the formal, structural, functional, and ritual aspects associated with it, and representational, literary, social, conceptual, and psychological. Included in this collection are discussions on an entire system of sacred mountains as well as a single building, a detailed visual analysis of a cave as well as the spreading of a vernacular cult traced mainly through literary sources, formal study illustrated with professional survey drawings as well as comparative research using anthropological field method. Together, this anthology features case studies on the space for worship in East Asia with both broadness and depth.