"The author’s own engagement with the monastic and lay communities gives the work a notable depth in the ethnography of ritual and meaning. This remains an important but controversial book: important for the beautiful, detailed ethnographic account of ritual and belief in a village community that it provides, and controversial for the unbridgeable separation…between "village" and "elite" Buddhism." - Joanna Cook, Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia, Vol. 28, No. 3,