Papers
RSS FeedPapers are short-to-medium length pieces of writing that were published in an edited volume collecting works by many authors. For self-published papers, see essays. For papers published in academic journals, see articles. For papers published in a collection by a single author, see excerpts.
By the turn of the century, at least in Sri Lanka, the Buddhists no longer welcomed the white man who sought to speak on their behalf. They could speak for themselves, in English.
Whenever anyone bodybuilds, he or she is always trying to understand and control the physical in the face of death. No wonder bodybuilding is centered around failure.
Featured in the course, " Buddhism as a Religion"
although the Buddha took over some of the terminology of Brahmanical Hinduism, he gave it a new Buddhist sense. The change of meaning is almost always a result of the fact that the Brahmanical terms were used in a framework of ritualism, while the Buddha invested them with a moral and ethical sense.
If the fragmenting forces of late modernity have shattered the illusion of a fixed self, anātman provides a way of rethinking subjectivity in its absence.
Featured in the course, " An Introduction to Buddhist Philosophy"
Despite being cultural aliens, the nomads were aware of the superior literary and cultural tradition of the Chinese with whom they came into contact. Accepting the Confucian tradition and Chinese ways, however, would have meant subsuming their military superiority to and separateness from those they conquered. Instead, most nomadic rulers chose to adopt Buddhism as an alternative cultural policy.
Humans have cooperative sentiments usually assumed to be absent in rational choice theories. On the other hand, the slow rate at which cooperative institutions evolve suggests that considerable friction will afflict our ability to grow up commons management institutions where they do not already exist and to readapt existing institutions to rapid technological and economic change.
… when the Japanese kept insisting that Buddhism was a specific religion that originated in north India, westerners were puzzled. There was no cult of Buddha in India, and northern India in particular was largely Muslim.
Rather than “total prohibition”, [the Tongan word “taboo”’s] original denotation had to do with sacredness and uniqueness.
… the Buddhist tale of the impure, disgusting, and violent female body and the suffering of the fetus within the womb, so seemingly negative toward women, in fact operated discursively and affectively to support premodern female Buddhist monasticism by helping to generate a moral-social imaginary in which female fertility and sexuality cannot be the highest good of womanhood.
We may begin with one simple list, but the structure of early Buddhist thought and literature dictates that we end up with an intricate pattern of lists within lists
Linguistically, China remained China even after this massive import of Indian culture. Nevertheless, there are some non-negligible aspects of Indian Buddhist language that contributed [to] the Chinese language.
Featured in the course, " Buddhism as a Religion"
The Vinaya has outlasted Hammurabi and Justinian because it is a set of spiritual exercises rather than a legal system.
This meaning, the author holds, might best be characterized as “lucid awareness.” He questions the common explanation of mindfulness as “bare attention,” pointing out problems that lurk behind both words in this expression.