“Attitudes and Interpretations in Comparative Religion”

WHATIS the attitude of the scholar of Comparative Religion to religion and
religiosity? What is the specific method in Comparative Religion? Does the
study of religions differ from other corresponding disciplines?
The present volume tries to answer these questions on the basis of fieldwork
among Sinhalese Buddhist monks in Sri Lanka and Orthodox monks and
pilgrims on the Holy Mountain of Athos in Greece. Apart from refining a more
perceptive view of religion and religiosity, the study elucidates the definition of
religion and the principles applied in the comparative study of religions by
factual cases from these two cultural fields.
The shift from the classical fieldwork procedure and its detached approach to
the modem attitude of informed empathy and its engaged method is illustrated in
the analyses of a Sinhalese Buddhist monk’s dilemma of prolonged liminality and
of pilgrimage rediscovered by Europeans on Mount Athos. With empirical data
and specific questions as cicerone, one of the findings is that commuting between
engagement and detachment opens up new perspectives in interpreting and
understanding religious practices, world views and socio-cultural settings foreign
to our own.
RENE GOTHONI is Docent full-time in Comparative Religion at the
University of Helsinki, Finland, Ordinary Member of the Finnish Society of
Sciences and Letters, and Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge. His
publications indude Modes of Life ofTheraväda Monks (Studia Orientalia 52,
1982), Paradise within Reach (Helsinki University Press, 1993), Taies and
Truth (Helsinki University Press, 1994), How to Survive in Acadeniia
(Helsinki University Press, 1996) and Carl Robert Sederholnis liv, verk oeh
intellektuella individuation (Finnish Sodety of Sciences and Letters, 1996).

FF Communications 272