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Podcast: New Books in Buddhist Studies
Episode: Jessica Marie Falcone, "Battling the Buddha of Love: A Cultural Biography of the Greatest Statue Never Built" (Cornell UP, 2018)
Description: What can we learn from the anthropological study of projects that are never realized, or of dreams that are never fulfilled? In her new book Battling the Buddha of Love: A Cultural Biography of the Greatest Statue Never Built(Cornell University Press, 2018), Dr. Jessica Marie Falcone takes her readers on a transnational journey to explore the history of a giant Maitreya Buddha statue that the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition (FPMT) planned to build in Kushinagar, India. As the title of the book suggests, that statue was never built, as the project became mired in controversy...