This dissertation explores Buddhist architecture in America from the nineteenth century through the present day. It examines significant examples of Buddhist architecture with respect to the spiritual beliefs of the practitioners who created them. Its goal is to understand these structures from the point of view of human experience. Given the large number of Buddhist structures that exist in the U.S., the narrative navigates the major contours of its development. It follows in isometric fashion the parallel history of Buddhism’s emergence in America that started with the California Gold Rush and its influence on the New England Transcendentalists. Proceeding chronologically through the twentieth and early twenty-first-centuries, the historical sweep of Buddhism’s architectural presence in America is articulated by exploring important structures in depth with respect to Buddhist belief, human emotion, socio-political contexts, and religious faith. A number of hermeneutic binaries are employed throughout the history presented here. Space and Place, East and West, Interior and Exterior, and Spirit and Matter are the major motifs implemented to explicate the buildings and environments under investigation. The overwhelming feeling pervading the discourse and design of Buddhist architecture and its co-extensive belief system is that of the heart. The human proclivity to attach personal meaning and deep emotion to a space or a place is at the express core of the Buddhist structures that house Buddhist practices. As a result, the study’s methodology is inspired by Yi-Fu Tuan’s humanistic geography, whose work explores the relationship between environment and human subjective experience. The study finds that ritual, lineage, and heritage work in tandem with heart, home, and the human body in the construction, understanding and experience of Buddhist architecture. It argues that traditional forms and practices derived from each community’s home culture infused a sense of shelter and protection onto these buildings. Buddhist belief and its associated architecture assuaged the new and sometimes hostile setting of the United States. As the first study of its kind, this dissertation opens the field of Buddhist architecture in America as a distinct branch of scholarly inquiry.

Objets très communs dans l’aire de culture tibétaine, les tsha tsha, fabriqués à l’aide de moules, sont des images en argile figurant des stūpa, des divinités bouddhiques, des personnages historiques, ainsi que des inscriptions. Leur fabrication est avant tout considérée comme une pratique religieuse visant à générer des mérites mais aussi à purifier les actions négatives. Réalisés en masse, ils constituent des témoignages fidèles et mésestimés des développements iconographiques et stylistiques qui ont marqués l’art bouddhique tibétain au fil des siècles. En l’absence d’études antérieures, un travail de recensement systématique des matériaux relatifs aux tsha tsha a fait apparaître une richesse documentaire insoupçonnée susceptible d’éclairer non seulement l’histoire de l’art tibétain, mais également certains aspects relevant de l’anthropologie religieuse, de la philologie, ou encore de la paléographie. Dans le cadre de notre thèse, nous avons privilégié une démarche globalisante prenant en considération l’ensemble des données disponibles en procédant conjointement à l’étude d’un très large corpus de pièces sélectionnées, à celle de la littérature afférente, et aux observations de terrain. Dans cette perspective, nous avons envisagé l’étude des tsha tsha sous divers angles: l’origine et l’histoire de la diffusion de cette pratique au Tibet, la terminologie relative à ces objets, les techniques de fabrication, les usages, l’iconographie, les styles et enfin les inscriptions présentes à leur surface ou introduites. Cette approche nous a permis de révéler finement l’ampleur et les développements que cette pratique bouddhique d’origine indienne a connu dans le monde tibétain. / Very commonplace in the Tibetan world, tsha tshas are clay impressions produced from a mould depicting, either in relief or moulded in the round, stūpas, Buddhist deities, historical figures and inscriptions. Making them is essentially considered to be a religious practice intended to generate and accumulate merit but also to purify negative deeds and obscurations. Produced in mass and generally preserved inside sealed edifices, tsha tshas are true yet underrated evidence of the iconographic and stylistic developments that have marked Tibetan Buddhist art over the centuries. In the absence of any previous studies, the task of establishing a systematic inventory of sources related to tsha tshas revealed an unsuspected wealth of material for elucidating not only the history of Tibetan art, but also some aspects of religious anthropology, philology, or paleography. In this doctoral research, we favored a globalizing approach that takes into account all the available data by studying a very large corpus of selected pieces, of the literature related to the tsha tshas, as well as field observations. In this context, we considered the study of tsha tshas from different angles: the origin and history of how this practice spread through Tibet, the terminology for these objects, the techniques for making them, their uses, iconography, styles and finally the inscriptions that are found on their surface or inside them. This approach has allowed us to explain more accurately the true extent of this Buddhist practice of Indian origin and the developments it has undergone in the Tibetan world since its introduction in about the 8th-9th centuries to the present day.