What started as a reasoned debate on funding turned, halfway through the 1890s, into something more conspiratorial.

Some reputations – notably those of Alois Führer, Vincent Smith, and Rhys Davids – need radical revision. Yet let us strive to look on the bright side. The Royal Asiatic Society (RAS) Council proved capable of purging one, at least, of the wrong-doers, and of preventing any more archaeological lies being disseminated in its name.

The wild story of how the British Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) actually went down.

It is often overlooked that in Buddhism fact is interwoven with value, while in science they are still further apart. This makes the claims about the compatibility of the two systems somewhat naive, and explains why recently the “dialogue” takes the form of neuroscientific research of meditation: work that hardly changes or challenges the foundations of science.

This article presents an overview of what Buddhism is contributing to neuroscience and a word on what Buddhism might further contribute.

The discourse concerning Buddhist modernism has carried with it a subtle claim that so-called “modern” Buddhists are not really “Buddhists” at all; they are tainted by Western culture, philosophy, and religion, and as such are peripheral to the study of the “authentic Buddhism” that resides in a more “traditional” Asia.

… Buddhists of all stripes, are reduced to stereotypes of “traditional” and “modern” that fail to capture the multifaceted nature of their religious traditions, beliefs, and practices […] condemning those who fail to live up to the standard of a non-Westernized “traditional” Buddhism that [Western scholars themselves] created as a mirror to the modern West.

This article presents a powerful response to Western scholars like Donald Lopez Jr. who dismiss modern Buddhists, explaining how “Buddhist Studies continues at times to employ Orientalizing strategies even as it seeks to distance itself from” claims of Orientalism.

We provide our audience, in fact, with a variety of mirrors. This is the service of scholarship.

No one among us can predict, much less legislate, the future of appropriate or meaningful language—to do so would be to claim individual property rights over something that is useful and valuable only because it cannot be owned by individuals. Like the single true text, the single appropriate expression is only a fiction, a fantasy created by our desire to control the authority of the sacred word.

We would be well advised, therefore, to open the field to alternative models, but to do so with constant watchfulness. There is no single alternative method that will solve our problems.

More common among contemporary scholars is the role of the anti-priest: the guardian of “secular authority.” I do not refer here to the common iconoclasm directed at the consecrated work of other scholars, rather, I refer to the scholar’s interest in undermining the authority of the tradition he or she studies. Seldom is this role part of the scholars public role. The motives remain a mystery to me, but it is clear that it is polite to pretend that scholarship is perfectly neutral. We would advance considerably if we stopped once and for all the pretense that our scholarship is never inimical to Buddhist belief and practice.

On the one hand, the scholar denies his roles as literary creator and craftsman, on the other hand he or she claims to be “original.” On the one hand, the scholar elevates his role to that of the primary creator (devaluating the standpoint of the voices he is claiming to report), on the other, he or she skirts the responsibilities that come with usurping the primary voice.

Humanistic scholarship stands in a no-man’s land between tradition and criticism, between community and individual preferences. It cannot seek and cannot lead to agreement. The greatest mistake we can make is to try to be the fabled “last man” who has “the last word”. Our role vis a vis community is not one of deciding the issues once and for all but one of keeping more than one voice alive.

Many of the communities in which anthropologists work are hierarchically organized, and the people who live in them often describe this arrangement in positive terms. Nevertheless, anthropologists rarely paint hierarchy in a favorable light.

we explore those aspects of Western thought that make it difficult for anthropologists to take hierarchy seriously. In addition, we develop an interpretive approach that treats hierarchy both as a relational form and as a theoretical model

Buddhists scholar-practitioners have two major responsibilities vis-à-vis our students: 1) encourage students to “sympathetically understand” the tradition and 2) develop some critical perspective on a tradition with its lengthy history, multiplicity of sectarian forms, and great diversity of ways in which the religion has had and continues to have impact on culture, art, politics, and so forth.

It is possible that Hilditch asked Chinese residents in Manchester to assist him with the services but had been rejected, but their omission is more likely down to the fact he wanted to cement his status as the authority of the temple. By donning Chinese robes, Hilditch added a heightened sense of reality to the display than would have been created if he had worn English clothes, while simultaneously increasing his supposed authority; he played both museum guide and Buddhist Priest.

Hilditch’s understanding of China seems to parallel that of the Protestant missionaries who saw Buddhist rituals as ‘a kind of absurd theatre, in which a nation of actors engaged in stylized fictions full of sounds and fury but signifying nothing’ Given Hilditch’s slippery relationship with the truth, it is difficult to discern whether even he believed in his temple’s accuracy. However, his sense of entitlement to construct the temple and claim its authenticity does suggest that he had interiorized the British sense of authority over Chinese culture.

…all claims for the compatibility of Buddhism and science are nonsense…

Lopez correctly points out that many of the elements of modern Buddhism trace back to debates with European colonizers, whose logic the Buddhists then partially adopted. He then claims that this adoption of foreign elements by Buddhists represents not an evolution but a “degeneration” of the tradition:

It is clear that the Buddhism that is compatible with science must jettison much of what Buddhism has been in order to claim that compatibility. That loss evokes for me the classical Buddhist doctrine of the degeneration of the dharma

Lopez thus presents Buddhism with a double bind: if the religion doesn’t adapt, it’s incompatible with science and modernity. But if it does, it’s degenerate and inauthentic.

In defining authenticity by privileging certain historical texts and their interpretation by Western scholars such as himself over the words and deeds of contemporary Buddhist leaders such as the Dalai Lama (whom he calls a “spokesperson”), Lopez risks perpetuating the same Colonial logic he so eloquently describes.

For a fuller post-colonial critique of this essentializing sentimentality (which we call “Orientalism”), see “Western Self, Asian Other” by Natalie Quli.

Using human evaluation of 100,000 words spread across 24 corpora in 10 languages diverse in origin and culture, we present evidence of a deep imprint of human sociality in language, observing that (i) the words of natural human language possess a universal positivity bias, (ii) the estimated emotional content of words is consistent between languages under translation, and (iii) this positivity bias is strongly independent of frequency of word use.

The first part of the paper examines the role of the Buddhist canon in research and in teaching, the trend towards non-canonical sources, and the current affection for contemporary practice. As a textual scholar who works with canonical texts, I intend to point to some risks that are, in my view, inherent in that general trend.

Lamotte’s argument led to various debates that gave rise to a wide array of hypotheses on who the author of Dà Zhìdù Lùn could have been. The theory that Dà Zhìdù Lùn could have been a text not (or not only) written by Nāgārjuna reached Chinese Buddhist monks and scholars as well, including the monk Yìnshùn (1906-2005). This paper will show the impact of Western scholarship on East Asian Buddhism, highlight the (pluri)directionality of knowledge.

For many scholars who found themselves disenchanted with the romantisized and/or rationalized versions of Buddhism that once dominated the field, the discovery of relic and image worship was the smoking gun that provided irrefutable evidence that Buddhists are not bourgeois rationalists after all. The worship of relics exemplified the newfound otherness of Buddhism, for it would seem to involve the sanctification of that which is utterly profane and loathsome—the corporeal remains of the dead.

The allure of Buddhist relics is not limited to the faithful but extends also to Western academics with their own beliefs to demonstrate.

The paper argues for the suitability, or at least acceptability, of a translation style which I call jolie laide, i.e. a rendering which is not necessarily exquisite in its aesthetic quality but is as faithful as possible to the original and perfectly intelligible in the target language. This is not a mechanical process, and in order to meet these standards, the translator should allow for flexibility and make full use of the critical apparatus. I do not rule out, however, other rendering strategies, and the last part of my contribution illustrates the possibility of having jolies laides side by side with free translations. The article also contains an appendix on Dao’an’s‘five [points of permissible] deviation from the original and three [points which should remain] unchanged’ and Xuanzang’s‘five types [of Indic words which should] not be translated’.

Imagination itself is a socially creative process

Across two studies, we find that co-imagining a shared future with a novel partner cultivates feelings of social connection, to a greater degree than individually imagining a shared future or engaging in a collaborative or shared experience in general.

As a primary focus, “Historical” appeared in every answer, but in only three cases was it listed as the sole focus (10%). It was found in combination most often with “Textual” (61%) and “Anthropological” (42%). “Contemporary” appeared only eleven times (36%) and “linguistic” seven (23%).

The results of a small, online survey of Anglophone Buddhist Studies departments.

Insider input through home nurture, teaching materials, teacher expertise, insider input and pedagogy had already been applied to good effect in the classroom. However, in the areas of the Agreed Syllabuses for Religious Education, school ethos and national representation input was found lacking or skewed toward ‘convert’ Buddhist expectations, while the voice of the more numerous ‘migrant’ Buddhist community remained relatively unheard.

One could, of course, dismiss this as a misunderstanding of what real Buddhism is, but then one would probably have to jettison most of the history of Buddhism in Japan as wrongheaded delusion as well. The cost is considerable.

The piece is organized into three sections, in which I comment on misrepresentations of what I have tried to do; on “silences” in the history of morality, or, alternately, on what constitutes evidence in studies of that history; and on gender-specificity as it relates to these questions.

the present article discusses the difficulties of defining mindfulness, delineates the proper scope of research into mindfulness practices, and explicates crucial methodological issues for interpreting results from investigations of mindfulness.

For doing so, the authors draw on their diverse areas of expertise to review the present state of mindfulness research, comprehensively summarizing what we do and do not know, while providing a prescriptive agenda for contemplative science, with a particular focus on assessment, mindfulness training, possible adverse effects, and intersection with brain imaging.

A manifesto of sorts for the major current trend in Western mindfulness research which accepts the therapeutic potential of meditation and now seaks to understand it on medicine’s terms: dose, side-effects, and mechanism of action.

Through my relationship with a tomboi in West Sumatra, I learned some of the ways in which my concept of “lesbian” was not the same as my partner’s, even though we were both, I thought, women-loving women. This article explores how tombois in West Sumatra both shape their identities from and resist local, national, and transnational narratives of gender and sexuality.

This description of 1990 West Sumatra shows something of how gender and sexuality are understood across Southeast Asia. The article presents identity as a negotiation between others’ expectations and an individual’s complex (socially-conditioned!) desires.

Holmes Welch (1921–1981) is a towering figure in the study of Buddhism whose [1960s] trilogy on modern Chinese Buddhism stood as the definitive work on the topic for decades and remains a touchstone today. In many ways, Welch appears ahead of its time. Yet an investigation of Welch’s papers makes clear that his work can only be fully understood in the context of the Cold War, for it was not only shaped by but also served the American struggle against Communism.

This article explores how Buddhist Studies as a discipline serves the objectives of Western empires through the case study of one particular mid-century scholar.

In the cases of Ven. Hạt and Ven. Thuần Tịnh, they certainly meet the criteria above. They have seemingly achieved [feminist scholar Rita] Gross’ agenda for androgynous Buddhism without openly adopting a feminist identity.

The article begins by reviewing the literature on museums and the sacred. It discusses the lack of concern historically for religion in museums, noting how sacred objects have tended to be ‘secularized’ in exhibitionary contexts. It then examines the Buddhism display at the World Museum Liverpool, part of the permanent World Cultures gallery which opened in 2005, with its reconstructions of a shrine, an altar and a protective chapel — this is a museological environment which deliberately evokes the atmosphere of a temple.

Whatever happened to “Engaged Buddhism”? Twenty years after a flurry of publication placing this global movement firmly on the map, enthusiasm for the term itself appears to have evaporated. I attempt to reconstruct what happened: scholars turned away from the concept for its reproducing colonialist understandings of traditional Buddhism as essentially world-rejecting, and they developed alternate discourses for describing Buddhist actors’ multifarious social and political engagements, especially in contemporary Asia.

I describe the specific rise and fall of the term in Anglophone scholarship, in order for scholars to better grasp the evolution of contemporary Western, Anglophone Buddhisms, to better understand what Buddhists in Asia are in fact doing with the term, and to better think through what it might mean politically for us as scholars to deploy the term at all. In particular, I identify “Academic Engaged Buddhism” (1988–2009) as one hegemonic form of Engaged Buddhism, a Western Buddhist practitioner-facing anthological project of Euro-American scholars with potentially powerful but unevenly distributed effects on Buddhist thought and practice around the world.

Some academic scholars of Buddhism, who also practice Buddhism, are exploring new ways to serve both the critical interests of the modern academy and the constructive needs of their Buddhist communities…

… within and outside Tibet, popular expressions of Tibetan identity rely on religious symbolism. In Tibet, religious idioms are reappearing in completely new contexts, as political expressions of opposition to Chinese rule. In India, Tibetan refugee elites reinterpret these idioms in their own terms while redefining Tibetan identity and culture for the outside world and for refugees themselves.

Unlike in modern Europe, where Christianity was an insufficient basis for national identity, religion in Tibet (and in Asia more broadly) has been an important part of justifying the state. This article explains the role of Buddhism in the Tibetan independence movement both within and outside the PRC and uses it to question the Western assumption that nationalism is a secular ideology.

In olden day’s mariners, artisans, traders, Buddhist monks and religious leaders used to set sail together and this trend continued till the advent of modern shipping. The representation of art on the walls of the caves, stupas and temples enlighten us regarding their joint ventures, experiences and problems faced during the sea voyages. The finding of varieties of pottery, punch marked and Roman coins, Brahmi and Kharoshti inscriptions along the ports, trade centres and Buddhist settlements suggest the role played by them in maritime trade during the early historical period and later.

This paper presents the archeological evidence for Buddhism’s spread across maritime trade networks between Sri Lanka, Southeast Asia and north and south India since likely before the Ashokan missions and continuing regularly ever since.

This paper examines the extent to which the construction of these Big Buddhas represents the appropriation of Buddhist RCR (Rock-Cut Religious) sites by non-local political and religious elites as a form of social control, and it is herein proposed that these social and religious elites commissioned and maintained such projects to reinforce authority and integrate local religious practices into institutional Buddhism. Since the construction of Big Buddhas required vast resources, labour and coordination, this paper examines those Big Buddhas which were left unfinished in order to understand the criteria for both success and failure, while also considering how these sculptures, as acts of social appropriation, mediated between the mundane and the divine, the imperial periphery and the centre, functioning as both spiritual symbols and political instruments.

This study evaluated the effectiveness of a Mahayana Buddhist teaching- and group-based intervention, the Awareness Training Program (ATP), which is textually aligned to a Mahayana Sūtra so that its theory and practice are coherent. The ATP aims to alleviate stress by enhancing participant’s compassion and wisdom of nonattachment. Middle-aged working adults (n = 122) in Hong Kong participated in this randomized waiting-list controlled trial. Self-reported psychological questionnaires were used to assess the participants’ level of stress (PSS), sense of coherence (SOC), psychological well-being (GHQ), and nonattachment (NAS) at pretest, posttest, and 3 months later. The data showed significant improvements in the intervention group over the controls for all outcome measures at posttest and 3 months later. A mediation analysis demonstrated that nonattachment mediated both the treatment and the maintenance effects for all outcome variables.

When explicit (self-report) measures are used, attitudes toward and beliefs about the same social group are often related to each other but can also be dissociated. The present work used three approaches (correlational, experimental, and archival) to conduct a systematic investigation of the relationship between implicit intergroup attitudes and beliefs. […] Overall, these studies provide convergent evidence for tight connections between implicit attitudes and beliefs, suggesting that the dissociations observed using explicit measures may arise uniquely from deliberate judgment processes.

Even though conscious reflection can disentangle stereotypes from judgements, stereotypes still carry positive or negative valences which affect subconscious attitudes about the target groups.

Our review uncovers a convergence toward identifying higher complexity during the meditative state when compared to waking, rest, or mind-wandering and decreased baseline complexity as a trait following regular meditation practice.

In 1775, during the process of collecting books for the Sìkù qúanshū (四庫全書) project, an empire-wide literary inquisition was imposed on the deceased monk Jīnshì Dánguī (今釋澹歸) (1614–80).

The Qianlong Emperor and his officials went to extraordinary lengths to posthumously prosecute a Ming-official-turned-monk for his unflattering writings about the early Qing, showing the limits of monastic withdrawal and the importance of historical memory.

While mindfulness meditation improves pain and depression symptoms and quality of life, additional well-designed, rigorous, and large-scale RCTs are needed to decisively provide estimates of [its] efficacy

This literature review synthesises the negative consequences of automobility, or car harm, which we have grouped into four categories: violence, ill health, social injustice, and environmental damage.

Currently, 1 in 34 deaths are caused by automobility. Cars have exacerbated social inequities and damaged ecosystems in every global region, including in remote car-free places. While some people benefit from automobility, nearly everyone—whether or not they drive—is harmed by it. Slowing automobility’s violence and pollution will be impracticable without the replacement of policies that encourage car harm with policies that reduce it. To that end, the paper briefly summarises interventions that are ready for implementation.

For a video walking through this paper and its conclusions, see Not Just Bikes

Situated amidst a rural hinterland comprising non-Buddhist populations, the Lumbini Sacred Garden master plan covers an area of about 4.5 km². It has a special “monastic zone” for the construction of 39 international monasteries of which 13 have been built (notable are the Thai, Japanese, Burmese, Sri Lankan, Chinese, Bhutanese, Korean, and European monasteries). […In] practical terms, it is perceived as “imported Buddhism” [and] the limited opportunities for interpretation of this co-created heritage reinforces a sense of alienation for the local community, and poses challenges for the sustainability of tourism and the vitality of Lumbini as a Heritage Site.

From small-scale shrines to handheld icons and votive tablets, portability has long factored into the design and reception of Buddhist art.

The article first examines the circulation of miniature icons that served as diplomatic gifts in the sixth and seventh centuries. It then turns to figurative plaques from Tang-dynasty China (618–907) that were modified for votive and architectural uses in early Japan. Lastly, the article examines the reasons underlying the enduring popularity of portable shrines in the [Japanese] archipelago.

Using language model-based word sense induction methods, we identify different senses of each word, and then model the prevalence of each of these word senses as a function of time and speaker age. We find that most words show a small but statistically significant effect of speaker age; across almost 140 y of Congress, older speakers typically take longer than younger speakers to follow changes in word usage, but nevertheless do so within a few years.

Old people do adopt new terminology.

Drawing on ethnographic research, this paper examines how the material and corporeal aspects of Buddhist ritual contribute to the distinctive religious sense of place that reinforce the memory of the Buddha’s life and Buddhism’s historical ties to the Indian subcontinent. It is found that at most Buddhist sites, pilgrim groups mostly travel with their own monks, nuns, and guides from their respective countries who facilitate devotion and reside in the monasteries and guest houses affiliated with their national community. Despite the differences across national, cultural–linguistic, and sectarian lines, the ritual practices associated with pilgrimage speak to certain patterns of religious motivation and behavior that contribute to a sense of shared identity that plays an important role in how Buddhists imagine themselves as part of a translocal religion in a globalizing age.

The article outlines some of the ways in which professional musicians and music virtuosos among the aristocracy conceptualized gagaku and bugaku instrumental music in Buddhist terms between the eleventh and the sixteenth centuries. In addition to providing doctrinal justifications for artistic endeavors, they also contributed to the development of new ritual forms, such as bugaku hōyō and kangen kōshiki. This article explores influential Buddhist canonical ideas about music and shows how they were developed by musicians in medieval Japan.

Tathagata Buddha songs, which this paper studies, has been specifically enabling for Dalit women as it gives them not only a sense of religiosity but it also opens them to the possibility of rationalizing their beliefs and practices. The paper will bring up an ethnographic account of some of these Dalit women singers and look into some of their composition and songs that have a specific invocation to Gautam Buddha and of political icons like Babasaheb Ambedkar, whom they revere.

Buddhist art, if there is such a thing, is perhaps too important to be left to art historians

The Western category of “Art” asks us to appreciate the craftsmanship and aesthetic beauty of religious artifacts, but in doing so it deemphasizes their intended meanings and uses. In this essay, Bernard Fauré encourages us to look beyond the “art” (or even “anthropology”) of “Buddhist art” to see, if we can, its “aura.”

An unprecedented number of multilevel pagodas were built in China from the tenth through the thirteenth century. This growing emphasis on verticality, in contrast to the usual horizontal sprawl of China’s building tradition, raises questions about what “height” meant in the history of Chinese architecture. This essay argues that the height of the multilevel pagoda was necessarily performative: not so much because the pagoda served as a means of ascending to that height, but because it drew the attention of the faithful.

Where earlier stupas were icons and indexes of the Buddha encased within indexes of his presence, later stupas were symbols of the Buddha and Buddhist theology. This change in the material practice of Buddhism reduced stupas ’ emotional immediacy in favor of greater intellectual detachment. In the end, this shift in the meaning ascribed to stupas created the preconditions from which the Buddhist image cult and Mahayana Buddhism emerged in the first through fifth centuries A.D. The development of Mahayana Buddhism and Buddha images signified a return to iconic worship of the Buddha.

Because of the war, the mission of the Shōjuin bell swung drastically…

During the Asia-Pacific War, as metals grew scarce, temple bells became a material resource for munition production. Why were temples and shrines convinced to give up their bells that embodied the hopes and vows of past donors? What was the process of transformation from a religious instrument used to comfort the dead into an object that would destroy life?

Miracle tales from medieval China recorded the ability of Buddhist statues to walk, speak, emit light, and even feel pain. Consecration ceremonies, however, emphasized the sense of vision and the agency of the ritual practitioner over the agency of the statue. This essay argues that by underscoring the corporeal agency of animated sculptures, which was manifested both in their extraordinary qualities and in their vulnerability to damage, the circulation of miracle tales enabled a participatory practice in which devotees, monks and laypeople alike, were able to engage in the performative act of writing statues into life.

Ritual theories almost always assume that ritual is a kind of human action, which makes it impossible to explain ritual spaces or objects that were designed to enact the ritual without human participation. The relic depository of Chaoyang North Pagoda was a completely sealed stone box that was clearly designed as a ritual space for chanting the Uṣṇīṣavijayā dhāraṇī. This ritual space—occluded from human access—contradicts contemporary understandings of ritual. By illuminating the relic depository from the emic perspective of medieval Buddhists and applying anthropological theories, this paper offers theoretical explanations for conditions in which religious rituals were primarily enacted through non-human agency.

chimerically constructed commodities should be considered neither irrelevant nor an outrage—two common responses. Rather, they are important elements for understanding the development of any religious movement, including Buddhism in America (and maybe especially Buddhism in America).

An analysis of the meditation cushion industry in America and what it says about American Buddhism.

This article addresses an issue of growing political importance: the global rise of civilizational populism. From Western Europe to India and Pakistan, and from Indonesia to the Americas, populists are increasingly linking social belonging with civilizational identity—and at times to the belief that the world is divided into religion-based civilizations, some of which are doomed to clash with one another.

This study employs ethnographic field data to trace a dialogue between the self‐psychological concept of the self object and experiences regarding the concept of “interbeing” at a Vietnamese Buddhist monastery in the United States. The dialogue develops an understanding of human experiences with the nonhuman natural world which are tensive, liminal, and nondual. From the dialogue I find that the self object concept, when applied to this form of Buddhism, must be inclusive enough to embrace relationships with animals, stones, and other natural forms.

Buddhism was here deployed in the service of a pre-existing narrative of conflict between conservatives and liberals and, by making appeals to secular scholars to define Buddhism, Buddhist voices were obscured or ignored. Finally, despite having their own media outlets, U.S. Buddhists were unable to effectively counter such representations either by perpetuating pre-existing media narratives nor by ignoring them altogether.

This ceremony centres on the recitation—usually by Buddhist monks—of extracts fron the Pali Canon, collected in a text called the Gatubhāṇavārapāli, Paritta or in Siahala Piruvānāpotvahanse. Its objective is to ward off danger, ensure protection and bless the sponsors. It is prevalent in other Theravada Buddhist countries such as Burma and Thailand as well, but this work is confined to a study of the tradition preserved in Sri Lanka.

Describing their experiences participating in PoC group sits and activities, a recurring sentiment was the embodied feeling of being relaxed, and feeling safe and comfortable.

Drawing upon ethnographic research conducted in California with BIPOC practitioners of mindfulness, this article examines their efforts to create “safe spaces” to collectively experience and process painful embodied emotions around racialized trauma. These collective spaces, I argue, help meditators move from experiencing painful emotions as internal to their personal experience as individuals, and instead help relate their difficult emotions with those experienced and shared by other racialized minorities.

Empirical data indicate that the so-called “Buddhism of yellow color” that is predominantly associated with Japanese “immigrant” Buddhism, is constantly in decline in terms of “explicit” adherents. After some methodological observations, this article gives an overview of the relevant statistical data.

Meditators’ brains responded to the coupling of death and self-stimuli in a manner indicating acceptance rather than denial, corresponding to increased self-reported well-being. Additionally, degree of death acceptance predicted positively valenced meditation-induced self-dissolution experiences, thus shedding light on possible mechanisms underlying wholesome vs pathological disruptions to self-consciousness. The findings provide empirical support for the hypothesis that the neural mechanisms underlying the human tendency to avoid death are not hard-wired but are amenable to mental training, one which is linked with meditating on the experience of the embodied self’s impermanence. The results also highlight the importance of assessing and addressing mortality concerns when implementing psychopharmacological or contemplative interventions with the potential of inducing radical disruptions to self-consciousness.

The present study extrapolates six distinct themes related to the experiences of racialized inclusion and exclusion [by eleven participants of color]. These themes are: 1) Interpersonal Barriers to Full Participation, 2) Institutional Barriers to Full Participation, 3) Strategies for Coping with Racialized Exclusion, 4) Failures of Leadership Support for People of Color, 5) Range of POC Experiences, and 6) Promoting Equity and Inclusion. Following the explication of themes, the authors offer recommendations for primarily white meditation communities to help guide their efforts toward greater inclusion

Given the growing dilution of Buddhist identity and its tendency toward syncretism in Brazil, this paper works with the heuristic concept of a ‘Buddhism in Syncretic Shape.’ Since this concept is useful for better understanding some groups in Brazil, it is suggested that it can also provide interesting insights for the study of Buddhism in the West. This concept will be developed through a detailed description of Shingon in Brazil, which has undergone a religious synthesis with Catholicism and Afro-Brazilian religions.

Drawing from interviews, participant observation, and online research, I examine two interconnected issues. First, how temple food practices—offering alms to monks and operating newly invented temple food courts—sustain temples spiritually and financially. Second, how temple food, which is consistently integrated into various events and rituals, enables Thai Americans and a diverse assortment of other participants to connect and work together.

In their open-minded attitudes toward a wide range of Buddhist practices and multivalent interpretations of various Buddhist beliefs, these young adults challenge simplistic representations of Asian American Buddhists and present an inclusive vision of Buddhism that embraces nuance, ambiguity, and change.

By attending to the ways in which young “heritage” Buddhists approach religion in ways similar to “converts,” this article further erodes the “two Buddhisms” explanation of Buddhism in America.

Ministers in the Buddhist Churches of America (BCA) began performing same-sex marriages approximately forty years ago. These were among the first clergy-led religious ceremonies for same-sex couples performed in the modern era, and were apparently the first such marriages conducted in the history of Buddhism. In this article, I seek to explain why Jodo Shinshu Buddhists in America widely and easily affirmed same-sex weddings in the later 20th and early 21st centuries. My argument is that there are three factors in particular—institutional, historical, and theological elements of American Shin Buddhism—that must be attended to as contributing reasons why ministers were supportive of same-sex marriage.

We examine the extent to which domestic political developments can be understood through a US–China great power lens. Are politically progressive Thais more likely to be pro-US, and more politically conservative Thais likely to favor China? While we find some relationship between liberal domestic political leanings and sympathy for the United States, we also show that conservative domestic political leanings do not automatically translate into support for China.

The mp3 linked above is to a Talking Thai Politics conversation between the article’s first two co-authors discussing their paper and its implications.

1. South Asian Drumming Beyond Tala: The Problem with “Meter” in Buddhist Sri Lanka
2. On the Sonic Materialization of Buddhist History: Drum Speech in Southern Sri Lanka
3. along with numerous Audio and Video examples.

In this way, we should view Sri Lankan Buddhist drumming not as a simple application of pre-Buddhist rites to a nominally Buddhist context but rather as a unique, and uniquely Buddhist, art form in its own right.

Born in 1957, Rurui 如瑞, the abbess of Pushou Monastery 普寿寺 on Mount Wutai, in Shanxi province, belongs to the generation of Buddhists that became monastics after the opening up of China in the 1980s and came to leadership afterwards. She has been building Pushou Monastery, and the Mount Wutai Buddhist Institute for Nuns (中国五台山尼众佛学院) that it hosts, since 1991, as part of the institutionalised system, and negotiating with both the political authorities and the laity.

Buddhist Geeks is an online Buddhist media company and community that launched in 2007. It consists of a weekly audio podcast and a digital magazine component and since 2011, has hosted an annual conference. I will discuss the main characteristics and concerns of the Buddhist Geeks community and explore how it can be situated both in relationship to traditional Buddhism and Buddhist modernism. In conclusion, I reflect on whether Buddhist Geeks signals the emergence of a new, distinctly postmodern stage in the wider assimilation of Buddhism in America.

While often associated with a liberal demographic, the increasing online visibility of rhetoric such as “snowflakes,” “politically correct,” “postmodern identity politics,” and “cultural Marxism” demonstrates the presence of right-wing sentiments and populations in American convert Buddhism.

We chart this backlash across a broad right-wing spectrum that spans from “reactionary centrism” to the “alt-right.” We illuminate the ways in which participants both de-legitimate “Diversity Equity and Inclusion” as political rather than Buddhist and naturalize their own position as Buddhist rather than political. We show how American convert Buddhist lineages have become a site of the “culture wars”…

These universities provide education in liberal arts and professional fields, while employing the time-tested methods of traditional Buddhist pedagogy. Because these universities are generally unknown to the public, I have provided information about their history, academic programs, and the educational success created on their campuses.

In each country to which it historically spread, Buddhism created schools, universities, and various centers for learning, meditation, and moral practicea. In the USA, a great variety of Buddhist-based institutions of learning were created during the last half of the 20th century. These include, but are not limited to kindergartens, elementary and secondary schools, institutes for vocational training, and universities granting professional degrees. In this article, we will investigate one particular type of Buddhist educational institution, which we refer to as a “Buddhist University.”

Theravada as practiced by most converts in the West is distinguished by the absence of monasticism, its dominant institution. Nevertheless, Thai Forest monasticism has managed to gain a foothold in the convert West, thanks to the efforts of convert monastics trained in Thailand. This article analyzes the missionary project to “monasticize” Western lay converts through the history of Birken Forest Monastery in British Columbia, Canada, founded in 1994.

To establish a monastery in Birken’s isolated, non-Buddhist environs, the abbot, Ajahn Sona in effect created a lay village to attract converts to and to teach them their role in orthodox Thai Forest monasticism. The all-consuming nature of the monasticization project among laypeople has cut short the training of a homegrown Sangha at Birken, demonstrating the challenges of establishing a domestic convert monasticism and the continuing dominance of the laity in North American Theravada.

Taking as its focus twentieth- and twenty-first-century semiautobiographical writings by black American Buddhists, this article explores how black American Buddhists engage with Buddhist teachings to understand themselves as racialized subjects on local, national, and transnational levels.

They portray the Buddha as a social reformer enlightened to the operation of racial, gender, and sexual inequalities. This portrayal of the Buddha allows black Buddhists to articulate a counter-narrative to hegemonic Western authority while paradoxically constructing their own romantic vision of Asia as the “Other” to the West.

This essay focuses on Albert J. Edmunds, a British-American Buddhist sympathizer, and it considers the ways that Western occult traditions, especially Swedenborgianism, moved back and forth across the Pacific and shaped the work of D. T. Suzuki.

Ultimately, then, religions derive their power from the depth of their spirituality. The power of Zen, for example, flows out of Tokusan’s “Thirty Blows” or Rinzai’s “Katsu!!!” or Jōshū’s “Mu” (“Emptiness”). The power of Jodo Shinshu also originates from one single point of absolute depth: from the nembutsu.

Unno examines how religious power and influence emerge from deep inner spirituality rather than external institutions, illustrated through historical figures in Zen and Jōdo Shinshū Buddhism.

Subjective feelings are a central feature of human life, yet their relative organization has remained elusive. We mapped the “human feeling space” for 100 core feelings ranging from cognitive and affective processes to somatic sensations; in the analysis, we combined basic dimension rating, similarity mapping, bodily sensation mapping, and neuroimaging meta-analysis.

Feelings formed five groups: positive emotions, negative emotions, cognitive processes, somatic states, and homeostatic states. Feeling space was best explained by emotionality, mental experience, and bodily sensation topographies.

In response, Buddhist leaders divided traditional Buddhist cosmology and practices into the newly constructed categories ‘superstition’ and ‘religion.’ Superstition was deemed ‘not really Buddhism’ and purged, while the remainder of Buddhism was made to accord with Westernized ideas of ‘religion.’

Although he is highly critical of a hybrid culture in which Westernized values are on the ascendant and traditional Asian/Thai values wane, he is by no means hostile to the building of a hybrid culture of resistance where Buddhism and Christianity join hands in confronting injustice.

The founder of Fo Guang Shan is one of the most influential Buddhist monks in Taiwan and around the world. This study examines the biographies of Hsing Yun as depicted in Fo Guang Shan’s popular media to elucidate the uses and significance of Buddhist hagiography in contemporary Taiwan. I argue that unlike the Buddhist hagiographies of earlier times in which eminent monks were depicted as transcendental beings with superhuman powers and spiritual attainments, the informal and intimate portrayals of Hsing Yun in popular media seek to portray the monk as a worldling bodhisattva

Orientalist tropes are pervasive in current tibetological work published in China, including articles in purportedly scholarly journals. This work is closely connected with government propaganda, and it is often explicitly directed by members of the government to further agendas of suppression.

Equally importantly, the article examines the ways in which Tibetans are presented with a version of their religion that bears little or no resemblance to how they traditionally have understood it; but it is also an image that Tibetans are increasingly being coerced to endorse.

Within the context of Ravanisation—by which I mean the current revitalisation of Ravana among Sinhalese Buddhists in Sri Lanka—multiple conceptualizations of Ravana are constructed. This article concentrates on two different Ravana conceptualizations: Ravana as a warrior king and Ravana as a healer.

At the Sri Devram Maha Viharaya, a recently constructed Buddhist complex in Colombo, Ravana has become the object of devotion. In addition to erecting a Ravana statue in a shrine of his own, two annual rituals for Ravana are organized by this temple. In these rituals we can clearly discern the two previously mentioned conceptualizations: the Ravana perahera (procession) mainly concentrates on Ravana’s martial side by exalting Ravana as warrior king, and in the maha Ravana nanumura mangalyaya, a ritual which focusses on healing, his benevolent side as a healer is stressed.

The focus on ritual invention in this article not only directs our attention to the creativity within the rituals but also to the wider context of these developments: the glorification of an ancient civilization as part of increased nationalistic sentiments and an increased assertiveness among the Sinhalese Buddhist majority in post-war Sri Lanka.

Founded in Taiwan in 1989, the Modern Chan Society was a community of lay Buddhists that challenged monks’ religious privileges and put forward the idea of equality between monks and lay believers. It asserted an independent authority from that of the monasteries in managing “salvation goods” and accordingly recruited its own clergy.

In tracing the history of the Modern Chan Society, this article assesses modern Chinese Buddhism: the role of the prophet in symbolic power, the conditions governing the emergence of a prophet, the legitimisation of religious reforms in modern practice and the paradox of institutionalisation.

It examines how the fascination with marble, which is vernacularly categorized as ‘white jade’ in Chinese, motivated such endeavors and how these icons shaped the perception of a developing Buddhist cosmopolis among Chinese Buddhists by helping them locate Burma in the Buddhist world in a spiritually and materially meaningful way.

Shinnyo-en’s founders and their successors envisioned a particular strategy for being Buddhist in modernity, one which aligns with some, but not all, scholarly characterizations of Buddhist modernism. As a result, Shinnyo-en and other lay organizations have largely remained on the margins of Buddhist studies despite their apparent popularity and proliferation. This article offers a new category for theorizing and positioning such organizations as contramodern—connected with, but divergent from mainstream forms of Buddhist modernism.

This study examines the early career of the renowned Buddhologist Lü Cheng as an aspiring revolutionary. My findings reveal that Lü’s rhetoric of “aesthetic revolution” both catapulted him into the center of the New Culture Movement and popularized a Buddhist idealism—Yogācāra—among thinkers who sought alternative social theories.

Buddhist soteriology supplied powerful tools for theorizing the social: The doctrine of no-self refuted philosophical solipsism and curtailed individualism; dependent-origination refashioned social evolution as collective spiritual progress.

The importance of Abhidhamma (higher doctrine) in Myanmar Buddhist society is well known. However, it is only within the last century that this doctrine has become more accessible to the laity, and specifically to women devotees.

During the colonial era, a considerable number of literate women were part of a “growing reading public,” and I argue that Burmese laywomen created a “demand” for learning Buddhist doctrine, with monks then creating a “supply”.

This article examines how modern Chinese Buddhism has been influenced by Christianity. For our purposes ‘modern Chinese Buddhism’ refers to a form of what has become known in the West as ‘Engaged Buddhism’, but in Chinese is known by titles which can be translated ‘Humanistic Buddhism’ or ‘Buddhism for Human Life’.

We differentiate between conscious imitation and analogous development due to similar social circumstances, and show how Protestant Christianity and Roman Catholicism have had different effects. In Part four, we examine Fo Guang Shan as a missionary religion.

Even the remote mountain monasteries have broadened their access to lay visitors. Nowadays monastic and lay Buddhists have more occasions to meet than before and the current intensification of their relationships brings important redefinitions of their respective identities.

I focus on a one-week retreat for laity in a Buddhist monastery dedicated to meditation. This case study examines the ambiguous goal of this retreat programme that combined two aims: initiating lay practitioners to the monastic lifestyle and the practice of kanhwa son meditation; and establishing a group of lay supporters affiliated to the temple. This temporary monastic experience was directed towards an intense socialisation of the participants to the norms and values of an ascetic lifestyle, blurring some aspects of the border between lay and monastic practices of Buddhism. However, this paper suggests that this transitory rapprochement contributed to both challenge and strengthen the distinction between the renouncers (ch’ulga) and the householders (chaega).

Using complementary analyses, we show that representations of pain and orgasm are distinct in each culture. We also show that pain is represented with similar face movements across cultures, whereas orgasm shows differences. Our findings therefore inform understanding of the possible communicative role of facial expressions of pain and orgasm, and how culture could shape their representation.

Scholars have observed that Korean Buddhist nuns have a relatively high social status compared to nuns of other Asian countries, much like their sisters in Taiwan. It is a source of great pride for many Korean bhikṣuṇīs that their community operates with a high degree of autonomy, bringing them to an almost equal standing with their male counterparts. However, this claim of equal status is challenged once the nuns step outside their own communities and into the hierarchical system of the Order, an institution dominated by male monastics.

This paper aims to report on the gender disparity between male monastics and Buddhist women, both nuns and laywomen alike. I will first explore Korean Buddhist nuns’ experiences of gender discrimination imposed by the current institutional and cultural practices of the Buddhist Order, and their battles to challenge the legitimacy of this power structure. Next, I will introduce various episodes, including the Buddhist administration’s conflict with progressive women’s groups, to showcase the gender dynamics and current status of women in Korean Buddhism.

This article examines the education and ordination that a laywoman undergoes in order to join the Buddhist monastic life in Korea.

Care typically emerges in the context of close personal relationships, and it is not well suited to either utilitarian or Kantian accounts of morality, or to “social contract” accounts of cooperation. Markets and states both have difficulty providing and supporting care, and as a result, care is overlooked and undervalued. I sketch alternative ways of thinking about the morality and politics of care and present alternative policies that could help support carers and those they care for.

Translators of short Buddhist chants in Southeast Asia, including Hộ Tông and his Siamese and Khmer predecessors, tend to follow three unstated principles:

1. the translation may be longer than its source, but rarely vice versa
2. even when translated into the vernacular, the Pali source ought to be retained, and
3. the resulting bilingual Pali-vernacular chant should bring its performance practices—gestures, melodies, and rhythms—into harmony.

These principles are crucial for understanding the historical processes that made the transmission of Theravada Buddhism across Southeast Asia possible.

To give a precise account of how the living complexity of Pali unfolds, the findings in this article are based on the phonetic transcription and analysis of fifteen multimedia recordings of Pali liturgical chants in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Cambodia. The range of major and minor variations in Pali pronunciation witnessed during this period, and the contentious debates behind these divergencies, open new paths for understanding the past and present of Pali as a Buddhist language.

Participants were more aware of Present Moment Experience (PME) when they had an activated intention to be mindful and when they felt good, and not very busy or hurried, and were not involved in social interaction. They were more reactive to PME when they experienced unpleasant affect, and when they were hurried or tired.

A scientific study confirms that the hindrances are indeed hindrances.

On the basis of a large set of diverse stylistic markers, this paper argues that the Ekottarikāgama T 125 was translated by Zhu Fonian, and not by Saṃghadeva. The paper also considers implications of its findings for the broader corpus of texts ascribed to Zhu Fonian, and for methods in assessing ascriptions of Chinese Buddhist texts on the basis of internal evidence.

The Other Translation of Saṃyuktāgama 別譯雜阿含經 exists in two versions. The version preserved as text no. 100 in the Taishō edition of the Chinese canon is divided into sixteen fascicles, a format carried over from the Korean edition on which the compilers of the Taishō mainly relied. The other version, found in most editions produced in China itself, is instead divided into twenty fascicles. These two versions contain almost the same collection of sūtras, but differ in their arrangement. As regards the grouping into Saṃyuktas, the twenty-fascicle version is in good order while the sixteen-fascicle version is in disarray. This article examines the proposition by Anesaki (1908) that the sixteen-fascicle version resulted from accidental disarrangement of a text that closely resembled the twenty-fascicle version, and seeks to identify how and when this could have come about.

Despite heterogeneity of outcomes across studies, there is evidence that brief MBIs can impact numerous health-related outcomes after only one session and with interventions as brief as 5 min.

This meta-analysis of 85 meditation interventions shows that even a small amount of meditation is beneficial.

Some scholars connect the verbs ujjhāyati, khīyati, and vipāceti to negative emotional states (especially irritation and anger). Others connect the verbs to judgmental appraisal and the spreading of ill-fame. I show how both interpretations are valid.

The cockfight (tetadjen; sabungan) is a means of expression; its function is neither to assuage social passions nor to heighten them, but, in a medium of feathers, blood, crowds, and money, to display them. […] Attending cockfights and participating in them is, for the Balinese, a kind of sentimental education.

Societies, like lives, contain their own interpretations.

… a critical assessment of naturalism and a reevaluation of the most recent forms of Buddhist modernism, including the extraordinary success of Mindfulness. It argues for a more balanced and encompassing approach that would extol the richness of the Buddhist tradition.

This article focuses on the relationship between Buddhism and science illustrated by 一行 Yīxíng’s (683–727) participation in [Chinese] calendar formulation.

A shinbyu is a religious donation in the full sense of the term, crucial in the lives of the Buddhist Burmese. While the shinbyu has been studied for its symbolic and ritual aspects by various anthropologists, this article proposes to analyse it through the social scenes in which different types of transfers intertwine with the religious donation. It focuses especially on “The Plate Scene”, an ambiguous moment where uncertainty about the meaning of the staging reveals the political work at play in interpreting transfers when an elderly lady refuses to be caught in the game.

An anthropological analysis of a single gesture at a community meal offering.

Correlational analyses showed that emotional intelligence was positively related to emoji use

In the Northern and Southern Dynasties, there were many types of Buddhist scripture-interpretation literature, including xuányì 玄義, xuánlun 玄論, yìshū 義疏, yìzhāng 義章, etc. These exegetical forms are related to Chinese traditional literary style, but mainly inherit the tradition of Indian Buddhist hermeneutics. In this paper, all such types would be summarized as yì (義, exegesis), lun (論, treatise) and shū (疏, commentaries), which are described as follows…

During the Chosŏn period (1392–1910), the discussion of precepts all but disappeared from the religious discourse in Korean Buddhism. Not only were the precepts left unstudied, but even the performance of official ordination ceremonies for new monks based on the precepts ceased.

This article examines the challenges the modern Chogye Order of Korea faces in applying traditional monastic discipline. It shows how modernization has led the Order to modify or abandon key Vinaya principles, increasingly turning to secular rules and norms instead.

Government has become something that happens to us in service of the economy rather than a vehicle driven by us to realize what we can achieve together. To save the planet and live meaningful lives, we need to start seeing one another not as competitors but as collaborators working toward shared interests.

The belief that one’s religion trumps other faiths precipitates the stance that it trumps science too. This psychological process is most likely to operate in regions or countries with low religious heterogeneity.

How a lack of religious diversity in a place engenders fundamentalism.

Therefore, in Wŏnhyo’s One Mind philosophy, enlightenment is the act of returning to the One Mind. This can be achieved through the practice of the six paramitas—generosity, discipline, patience, diligence, meditative concentration, and wisdom—or by chanting to Amitābha with faith in the One Mind and the three Buddhist treasures.

This encyclopedic introduction to Korean Buddhism shows how Buddhism entered the Korean peninsula from China in the 3rd to 6th centuries and then developed uniquely through doctrines like Hwaŏm and Sŏn, becoming deeply embedded in Korean cultural, political, and philosophical life.

The stand-alone practice of memorization of dhāraṇīs appears to have increased in recent years, as evidenced by the mass production of small inexpensive books and series of books for copying and chanting dhāraṇīs and mantras.

This essay explores the contemporary use of dhāraṇīs and mantras in South Korean Buddhism, particularly among lay practitioners, through literature and ritual materials. Since the early 2000s, interest in dhāraṇīs has grown alongside the revival of apotropaic practices, with laypeople employing them in devotionals, merit-making, rituals for worldly benefits.

Templestay has become popular among Koreans struggling to cope with an ever more competitive and precarious social and economic environment.

Drawing on ethnographic research and an examination of the history, statistics, marketing, and program content of Templestay, this article challenges the polarized view that posits socially engaged Buddhism as the opposite of traditional monastic Buddhism and suggests that Templestay facilitates Buddhism’s engagement with the prevailing psychological predicament of society.

Our novel findings provide preliminary evidence that self-compassionate people are less likely to engage in bedtime procrastination, due in part to their use of healthy emotion regulation strategies that downregulate negative mood.

Multiple mediation analysis in study 1 revealed the expected indirect effects of self-compassion on less bedtime procrastination through lower negative affect but not higher positive affect. Path analysis in study 2 replicated these findings and further demonstrated that cognitive reappraisal explained the lower negative affect linked to self-compassion. The direct effect of self-compassion on less bedtime procrastination remained significant.

[This article discusses…] the perceptions of Tibetan identity within and outside of the Tibetan community, the influence of sponsorship programs in India that are based on identification, the importance of marriage, political engagement, and whether it is important to be Buddhist or not. Lastly, the role of the Dalai Lama in the eyes of the research subjects is also explored.

To gather information about the association of second-generation Tibetans with their parent’s home country, interviews with Tibetans in Switzerland and India provided valuable insights. The interviews were supplemented with data acquired from experts who were involved with the Tibetan diasporic community while the research was being conducted.

Common difficulties included finding time to practice formally and falling asleep during formal practice. Content analysis revealed “practical resources,” “time/routine,” “support from others,” and “attitudes and beliefs,” which were supportive factors for maintaining mindfulness practice. Informal mindfulness practice was related to positive wellbeing and psychological flexibility. Frequency (but not duration) of formal mindfulness practice was associated with positive wellbeing.

There was a significant improvement on the Digit Letter Substitution Test, the Perceived Stress Scale, and three subscales of the Emotional Competencies Scale. Analysis of non-normal data on the Wilcoxon sign-ranked test revealed significant improvement in the Adequate Depth of Feeling subscale of Emotional Competence and all subscales of the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire.

Some philosophers have pushed against such reductive approaches and argued for a framework that recognises the complexity and multidimensionality of persons.

Early texts, like the Vimalaprabhā or the Lam yig of Man luṅ pa, do not describe Śambhala as a paradise on earth. They rather stress the spiritual qualities of the country and its inhabitants. Later works, especially the smon lam, the most popular texts on Śambhala among the Tibetan and Mongolian Buddhist lay people, concentrate on the paradisiac nature of the hidden kingdom.

The paper explores how the Tibetan Buddhist vision of Śambhala functions as both a utopian ideal and political symbolism. It traces the myth’s evolution from spiritual paradise to political metaphor, compares it with European utopian traditions, and cites key Tibetan and Mongolian sources.

Science and scientists can learn much from religion when it comes to how to deal with scientific fundamentalism.

Contrary to popular assumption, the thought world of the Pali discourses is well populated with gods and spirits, demons and ghosts, as picturesque as the imagination of a reader of Tolkien’s novels could wish for.

On how the Pāḷi Suttas embrace Brahmā, and not.

Students who are well-trained in Mindfulness cope with dukkha in a very different fashion from the rest of us whose minds are still at the “drunken monkey” stage.

Dr. Ashby explores how human suffering (dukkha) is not merely an external condition but is compounded by our internal responses, such as clinging, aversion, and self‑identification. She argues that by understanding and transforming these reactions, one can see suffering clearly and move toward its cessation.

Tantra is an important part of the path to liberation in the Geluk tradition. It is a path to liberation that is held to involve distinct, esoteric methods, but without diverging from the philosophical view of emptiness, which is indispensable.

Known for its rigorous academic approach, the Gelukpa school integrates philosophy, ethics, meditation, and tantric practices according to the 14th century principles outlined by Je Tsongkhapa.

This encyclopedia entry gives a brief overview of the school with a special focus on putting its philosophical stances into context.

Another interesting source of ‘slavery’ in Buddhist temples in historic Sri Lanka was donating oneself voluntarily as a slave to gain merit attached to the deed…

Temples in medieval Sri Lanka had a range of laborers from volunteers to serfs to prisoners of war who laborered under conditions that ranged from the purely symbolic to the truly harsh.

These commentaries, known as sūtra sannayas, and/or as sūtra vistara sannayas, were composed in large numbers beginning in the middle of the eighteenth century. In what follows, I present the historical context for this change in Buddhist textual practices…

The revival of the Bhikkhu Saṅgha in eighteenth century Sri Lanka was accompanied by a renewed focus on study of the Pāli Suttas and Vinaya. This necessitated (and, eventually, facilitated) the creation of a large corpus of vernacular commentaries aimed at educating novice monks.

This paper is critical of any Buddhist environmentalism that fails to give due attention to both dimensions, and it emphasizes that both the relational and developmental dimensions must be held in balance in order for a genuine Buddhist environmentalism to be possible.

Scholars of Chinese Buddhism have given much attention to vilified foodstuffs such as meat and pungent vegetables and less attention to celebrated foods. While proscriptions are important for their role in constructing boundaries used in group identification, we should not overlook the celebration of particular foods such as congee (zhōu 粥).

Socioecological models for agriculture provide an opportunity to explore feedbacks, trade-offs, and synergies that can optimize and strengthen emerging connections between farming and society. With the right incentives, innovative research, and political will, a sustainable agriculture is within our reach.

Taking the verses in the Dasanipata of the Theragatha as examples, this article focuses on the stylistic interplay of rhythmic uniformity and change in the expression of core messages in a Pali poem. It aims to unveil the poets’ strategies in the use of various types of metres and prosodic elements to create the narrative style of each poem and draw the audiences’ attention to the Buddha’s key teachings in the verses.

… because I have discerned the teachings by perceiving my own mind, I feel respect for the tradition that bases itself on mind [i.e., Chan]. Moreover, because I have understood the cultivation of mind by discerning the teachings, I have reverent regard for the meaning of the teachings.

This paper provides a close reading of a few lines from the beginning of Zongmi’s Comprehensive Preface to the Collected Writings on the Source of Chan (Chányuán zhūquánjí dūxù 禪源諸詮集都序), written in 833.

This passage is of special interest because in it Zongmi gives an account of what might be called an ‘enlightenment experience’ that he had, which provides the basis on which he claims unique authority to be able to resolve the central problem that the text addresses: to bridge the gap between textualists and meditators so as to make the tradition whole again.

Orientations of temples at Ayutthaya seem to have been determined by magnetic compass

By correlating the exact orientations of different historical temples in Thailand and their construction dates to the known drift of the magnetic north pole, scientists have been able to confirm that Thais had the compass centuries earlier than previously thought.

The present note is concerned primarily with the translation and interpretation of the final summary paragraph, both in the sutta and its commentary

An exploration of the somewhat unusual summary at the end of MN 136.

This article examines a poem in the Kaludayittherapadanavannana which expands on the poem attributed to Kaludayitthera in the Theragatha; the poem in the Kaludayittherapadanavannana did not make it into the final canon. The hypothesis of this paper is that the poem may be a popular Dravidian song adapted to Buddhist use and translated into Pali, and this is the primary reason it was excluded from the canon.

This conclusion is based on several factors. 1) The author of the Pali poem was not well versed in the Pali language and made constant mistakes in translation. 2) Gratuitous repetition; the poem itself is not very good poetry, containing the kind of needless repetition one associates with a popular song. 3) 13.4% of the words in the poem are direct lifts from Dravidian words; this compares to only 3.9% of the words in the Theragatha poem itself, of which this poem is an extension. While this does not prove that the source was a Dravidian poem, it raises the probability quite significantly. In addition, this kind of literature—making lists of biota in the natural world for comparison, personification and poetic effect— is common in Dravidian Sangam literature. 4) The poem contains wrong or awkward phrases in Pali which can be better understood as Dravidian imports, and 5) an extensive and growing body of linguistic evidence shows that the adoption of Dravidian terminology into Buddhist thought and practice was not an uncommon occurrence.

Conflating religious practice with ethnic culture is considered to carry the risk of breeding “splittism” – especially in Tibet and Xinjiang. While in the post-Mao era the outright hostility against religion has given way to a religious revival, keeping religion and politics separate has remained a major concern for the Chinese Communist Party. Religion is supposed to be a private matter that does not interfere with politics. Against this backdrop, a recent phenomenon in the Tibet Autonomous Region is all the more remarkable: the (re-)fusion of ethnicity and religion under the label of cultural heritage and its protection.

I argue that endorsing religion as an attribute of Tibetan heritage corresponds to the concept of defining public spaces and events in which religious practice is legitimate and expected. Simultaneously, religious practices outside these dedicated spaces and events become even more problematic, leading to everyday Buddhist practices, such as circumambulation, being seen as (and performed as) political acts.

Many rural crime sprees punctuated the last two decades of King Chulalongkorn’s reign, but one of the worst broke out in early 1903. A violent gang of robbers repeatedly made off with herds of water buffaloes, consistently eluding the newly established provincial police force…

The interrogation of this group of robbers yielded such a wealth of information about bandit practices that Damrong concluded that it ought to be written down and distributed to the kingdom’s administrators so that they would be better informed in dealing with rural crime.

A Thai prince’s manual on how crime worked in rural Thailand, written in an elevated question-and-answer style no doubt inspired by the Theravāda exegetical tradition.

In this article, after focusing on one particularly radical group, whose beliefs consisted of worshipping one’s own future Buddha (法身) residing within oneself (the Dilun school 地論宗), I show that all three schools born of the northern region—the Huayan (華嚴), Chan (禪) and the Three Stages Movement (三階教)—succeeded the radical group…

I compare the Treatise on the Two Entrances and Four Practices (二入四行論), considered the most prestigious early Chan text, with various texts from the Three Stages Movement, and demonstrate that there are some common elements. Both Schools were heavily influenced by the Mahāyāna Mahāparinirvāṇasūtra (涅槃經), which emphasized the importance of perceiving the Buddha-nature, and the Three Stages Movement practiced the same method of contemplation. The Huayan school of Zhixiang Monastery (至相寺), located next to the holy ground of the Three Stages Movement, propagated the theory of “originally achieved Buddhahood” (舊來成佛) and criticized both Chan Buddhism and the Three Stages Movement.

This article presents research on one traditionalist group, Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition (FPMT). It describes FPMT’s engagement, identifies its motivations, objectives, and activities, and examines the possibility that it represents a type of engagement that can be called “traditionalist.”

This article builds on Beyond Queen and King’s theoretical work by considering one such under-studied “traditionalist, engaged” Buddhist organization.

Being intentional with your interpersonal contact and maintaining a variety of conversation partners are crucial to supporting a healthy social life.

After many years of observation I begin to perceive in Siamese religion a wise and generous pattern that accommodates the teachings of the Sage together with Hindu state-craft, and the fertility concerns of rice farmers, without doing violence to any one of them. It is a system that works, and has worked for many centuries, but today it is threatened by a new generation of thinkers, reformers, well-intentioned and well-educated, who have forgotten how symbolism works.

A brief word on how to view Thai religious “syncretism.”

We found a large number of different categories that go beyond those identified in previous research. Reasons changed with increasing meditation practice, although spiritual goals tended to become more important only for practitioners with a spiritual background.

Perhaps to the ordinary believer the very idea of upholding the precepts themselves promised safety as much as moral improvement…

In 1240, Köten famously summoned the Central Tibetan Buddhist polymath Sakya Pandita, by then already an old man, to his court at Liangzhou. Examining Tibetan and Mongolian accounts about their meeting from the last seven centuries, this study shows that it was neither compelling philosophy nor some turn of faith that converted the Mongols. It was, rather, Sakya Pandita’s violent therapeutic intervention into the space of Köten’s ill body that wrenched the Mongol body politic into the Dharmic fold.

MBCT was associated with decreased emotional reactivity to social stress, specifically during the recovery (post-stressor)

when the thread of the warp is stretched out
And the weft is woven through, back and forth
In the end the thread runs out:
Like this is the life of mortals.

In Sarvāstivādin and Mūlasarvāstivādin circles the Udānavarga was as popular as is the Dhamma-pada in Theravādin circles, and it circulated widely in South and Central Asia.

Monks, it is herein that consciousness comes, that it goes, that it stands, that it departs, that it grows, that it increases, that it flourishes.

Although Jeantel, a close friend of Trayvon Martin, was an ear-witness (by cell phone) to all but the final minutes of Zimmerman’s interaction with Trayvon, and testified for nearly six hours about it, her testimony was disregarded in jury deliberations. Through a linguistic analysis of Jeantel’s speech, comments from a juror, and a broader contextualization of stigmatized speech forms and linguistic styles, we argue that the lack of acknowledgment of dialectal variation has harmful social and legal consequences for speakers of stigmatized dialects.

Monks, I shall teach identity, the arising of identity, the cessation of identity and the path leading to cessation of identity. Listen and bear in mind what I shall expound…

Monks, one who meditates and develops patient acceptance with regard to this dharma with limited wisdom is called a ‘faith-follower’…

Paralleling the reinvention of Christmas in the modern period, Buddhists reconfigured the Buddha’s birthday as a symbol of their religious identity and power. The Buddha’s Birthday festival should be understood in the context of increasing contact and exchange among Buddhists in the East and the West. The festival’s prominence was the result of complex negotiation and collaboration between Korean and Japanese Buddhists who both hoped the festival would advance their overlapping visions of Buddhism. The festival was not so much an imposition of the colonizer on a native culture as it was a dynamic, creative feature of modern Korean Buddhism in a colonial context.

A total of 536 Hong Kong university students completed questionnaires measuring their experiences of compassion from others, self-compassion, resilience, psychological distress, flourishing, and meaning in life. Serial mediation analyses showed that compassion from others was associated positively with self-compassion, which was, in turn, linked to greater resilience and consequently lower levels of psychological distress and higher levels of flourishing and meaning in life.

Collectively, the 12 eligible studies suggest that incorporating the Buddhist wisdom practices of contemplating interdependence, emptiness, and perspective-taking on self and others may enhance prosocial behaviour through various mechanisms, such as (i) developing a sense of interdependence and common humanity, (ii) fostering the altruistic desire to help others, and (iii) experiencing a state of oneness. However, concerns were raised about the overuse and reliability of self-report measures for accurately assessing prosocial behaviour

正坐端然如泰山、
巍巍不要守空閑。
You should sit properly and uprightly, like Mt. Tai,
Imposing and solitary, without dwelling in vacuous quiescence.

the ritual texts and proselytizing efforts of Jōkei 貞慶 (1155–1213), a prominent monk in the Hossō 法相 school of the early medieval era in Japan. I will seek to interpret his personal devotion and evangelism in the context of broader ideological clashes taking place. More specifically, this study will ask how we should make sense of Jōkei’s gradually evolving devotional allegiance to Kan-non 観音 in the last ten or so years of his life. I will contend that Kannon served as the perfect symbolic foil for Jōkei to counter the popular senju nenbutsu 専修 念仏 (exclusive practice of the nenbutsu) teachings expounded by Hōnen 法然 (1133–1212) and the threat it represented to established Buddhism in Japan.

Our search identified 19 relevant studies of adolescents (10–19 years; N = 7049) for inclusion. A large effect size was found for an inverse relationship between self-compassion and psychological distress indexed by anxiety, depression, and stress.

After articulating the array of “the practice of the same” that dictates every corner of our civilization, this paper proposes to turn to gong’an (Jp. kōan) to dismantle that dysfunctional habit of repetition. The soteriological practice aiming at realizing one’s Buddha nature provides a way to think about what I call “critical Chan liminality,” which deconditions us from the practice of the same.

The Jataka may have been deliberately hidden to prevent them from being permanently lost in the year 2000 of the Buddhist Era.

Early Buddhism, as embodied in the Pali Nikāyas and the Chinese Āgamas, is radically different from all these schools, at least as far as their philosophical content is concerned.

A brief overview of the development of Buddhist metaphysics from the Early Texts to the Mādhyamikas.

This paper investigates the impacts worldviews have on the nature and trajectory of meditation-related challenges, as well as how worldviews change or are impacted by such challenges. […] We identify and discuss the various impacts that religious and scientific worldviews have on meditation practitioners and meditation teachers who navigate periods of challenge associated with the practice.

if we consider the Buddha’s hagiography, romantic love proves to be a significant feature of the story.

Although she is abandoned by the Bodhisatta as he makes his Great Departure, the Yasodhara of South Asian hagiography cannot be defined by her abandonment. She is regularly represented as a powerful character with a voice of her own — one who challenges, cries, speaks, and commands. But above all else, the Yasodhara of many of these sources is regularly described as the Buddha’s match.

The notion of chunghwa 中華, an ideology that points to China as the place of cultural origin, was commonly adopted by both the Confucian scholar-officials and Buddhist monks during Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910).

Paekgok’s composition [the Taegak Tŭnggye jip 대각등계집] is a further example of how no division between Korean and Chinese history was perceived.

It was after the Sino-Japanese war of 1894 that such conceptions of China were shattered, leading the Koreans to be more open to western influences.

The Theragāthā of the Khuddakanikāya has only ten stanzas (vv. 527–536) uttered by the Elder Kāḷudāyī. However, the Madhuratthavilāsinī (Bv-a) preserves 64 stanzas ascribed to the Elder while the Visuddhajanavilāsinī (Ap-a) quotes a different series consisting of 48 stanzas ascribed to him.

The underlying idea of improving and extending through time (xiū 修) linked renovations and rituals. Managers viewed both as ways to renew the temple community, to protect temple buildings, and to pass liturgical and craft knowledge to future generations.

At all those locations stood former temples/shrines that gods and ghosts used to occupy but were demolished to make way for urban infrastructure. Despite repeated banning and purging of deities and temples, worshippers burn incense and paper money, make offerings, and become possessed in those places. The gods’ agency seems to be exercised even after their temples and bodies are destroyed.

There is sincerity here.

The two communities discussed in this paper are very different—the Buddha Center, a cybersangha, only exists in a virtual world, while the other, Daifukuji, is a hundred-year-old actual life temple with increasing digital engagement. Still, they both offer opportunities for community members to participate in online meditative ritual, prayer, and memorialization.

deathbed practices in nineteenth-century Siam were structured to flow seamlessly from chanting for the dying to chanting for the dead, a sequence reflected in the physical layout of the manuscripts themselves.

a multicriteria assessment of 24 meat and milk alternatives that integrates nutritional, health, environmental, and cost analyses with a focus on high-income countries.

Our findings suggest that a range of food products exist that when replacing meat and dairy in current diets would have multiple benefits, including reductions in nutritional imbalances, dietary risks and mortality, environmental resource use and pollution, and when choosing unprocessed foods over processed ones also diet costs.

A denominative verb is one that is usually formed from a synchronically occuring noun (or an adjective) to which verbal endings are appended. Denominative verbs, in a way, can be seen as nouns (or adjectives) which have metamorphosed into verbs formally and semantically.

Etymological, lexical, commentarial, and philological notes on 162 Pāḷi verbs.

I will concentrate on the intellectual exchange between Buddhism and Chinese culture and outline the major issues from the historical perspective.

A basic introduction to Buddhism’s introduction into China.

Venerable P’ŏpt’a 法舵 (b. 1945), AKA ‘the Bodhisattva of Reunification,’ maintains that it is imperative to keep engaging North Korean Buddhists as they are, and to keep providing material help to Northerners—especially food—through Buddhist channels. Doing otherwise would not only be counter to the spirit of universal compassion which typifies Mahāyāna Buddhism, but also leave Southern Buddhists unprepared in the case of unexpected political changes in P’yŏngyang.

48.5 percent of children in the countries surveyed have blood lead levels above 5 µg/dL.

High lead exposure reduces measured intelligence substantially.

An increase in the concentration of particulate matter (PM10) by 10 μg/m³ reduces the vote share of incumbent parties by two percentage points

The most striking rock formation at Phū Phra Bāt is locally known as Uṣā’s Tower, named after the stone chamber where the beautiful princess would have been forced to live in isolation. It is a natural rock formation, restructured into a chamber with one door and two side windows standing in the centre of an open space and marked with a circular ring of vertical stones.

Some odd rock formations in Udon Thani have been the focal point of religious practices from prehistory through to modern times.

when you use the law and science to change the mind, it can change tomorrow. But when you change the heart, it is forever. In the midst of the ongoing climate and COVID-19 crises, I believe that we can change the story of the world if we change the storyline. “The seeds of goodness live in the soil of appreciation for goodness.”

Results indicate smartphone involvement (a compulsive pattern of use and cognitive preoccupation with one’s smartphone) to be significantly associated with lower trait mindfulness.

Interestingly, time spent on the phone did not correlate with decreased mindfulness when controlling for compulsion.

In elaborating the character of contemporary sūtra worship, the study considers the organisational structure of the worshippers of the sūtras, the sūtras’ popular significance in Nepal, and the manner in which their power is conceived of as related to the presence of life in the manuscripts, after which the practices of display (darśan yāyegu) and recitation (pā thyākegu) are explained.

Depending on the context, they could be perceived as annoying, filthy, or useful. They were associated with improper behavior, seen as helpful or even indispensable, or viewed as the innocent victims of human misbehavior. Yet, all these considerations were overshadowed by the Buddhist proscription against harming or killing any sentient being.

Monks, just as a large floating lump of foam is carried along by the current of the river Ganges…

Objectives of state redaction as set forth by Muriel Rukeyser’s redacted file:

1. Render information illegible to make the reader aware of her/his position as one who will never access a truth that does, by state accounts, exist
2. Isolate text in time and instance
3. …

We find that verbal conflict initiated by governments not only failed to deter ISIS but in fact increased the frequency of ISIS’s attacks on civilians.

In an effort to solidify their reputations, extremists engage in further violence toward civilians, thus leading to worse humanitarian consequences.

In the evening I crossed the river and started for home. Then I saw the corpse running on the other side of the river. It was completely naked, but carried its belt in one hand and its boots in the other. Then I saw a wolf coming after it, felling it to the ground.

Four stories from the Ro-langs narrative tradition explore the Tibetan belief in reanimated corpses—Ro-langs—brought back through sorcery or spirit possession, embodying the intersection of Tibetan folklore and religious beliefs of death and the supernatural.

Historical meditation practice (accumulated lifetime hours) was significantly associated with favorable psychological outcomes.

retrospective cross-sectional design precludes our ability to make causal inferences about the impact of meditation on psychological outcomes. So, while meditation practice may lead to improved psychological outcomes, it is also possible that people with better mental health may be more likely to engage in meditation, and/or sustain a meditation practice over a relatively long time duration

How did a packaging company get into the publishing business — into the containment and distribution of information? How were geographic imaginations changed in the process?

An exploration of the history of paper as a container for both goods and advertising.

An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the Transporting Images conference in 2023 and can watched on YouTube here.

the evidence about the causal influences of identification on pain highlights a self-related factor of relevance in pain experiences that can be modulated by mindfulness.

A scientific attempt at investigating the Buddhist theory of pain which unfortunately suffers from several methodological flaws: foremost among them that the participants likely understood the point of the study and thus had an incentive to produce self-reports showing the desired correlations.

And, even worse, the paper used violin plots.

body scan led to the greatest state increase in interoceptive awareness and the greatest decrease in thought content, loving-kindness meditation led to the greatest increase in feelings of warmth and positive thoughts about others, and observing-thought meditation led to the greatest increase in meta-cognitive awareness.

Participants in the concentration condition benefitted more if they had a high motivation to develop certain skills and a low motivation to seek spiritual experiences. Participants practicing humming showed greater treatment gains if they had a motivation to [relax]. In contrast, participants practicing observing thoughts benefitted more if they sought spiritual experiences and less if they aimed for relaxation or reduced stress. Finally, participants in the walking meditation condition experienced significantly better treatment effects if they were motivated to reduce stress, but benefitted less if they wanted to reduce suffering or sought spiritual experiences.

This study of 42 novice meditators also found that the extraverts did best with walking meditation but that walking meditation was not effective for those with a high degree of agreeableness.

The most frequently co-occurring keywords were meditation, depression, stress, and anxiety. Co-citation analysis of the early period (1966–2015) revealed how scholarly work on spiritual themes inspired early mindfulness research. Recent trends (2016–2021) revealed a rising interest in mechanisms and moderators, long-term meditators, neuroscientific studies, and smartphone/online delivery of interventions.

The prospect of embodied divinity was not uncommon in Tibetan discourse and practice in general. The point is that this choice of terms forces the issue. To assert a human god’s ongoing karmic dependency is to define divinity and mortality in terms that are direct inversions of one another.

In this final part of a two-part study the 5th Dalai Lama’s divine kingship, the author explores how the concept of residual karma explains the Dalai Lama’s mortality despite his spiritual perfection. Drawing on scriptural sources and the writings of the Desi—a secular regent in Tibetan governance—the essay shows how this concept helped reconcile divine kingship with the human realities of suffering and death.

Part one of this study can be found here

The fifth Dalai Lama was figured as the state’s absolute ruler on the basis of a power in excess of his own person. In technical terms, he was the latest in a rebirth line of Avalokiteśvara, here assuming the novel identity of a “renunciate king” or vow-bound sovereign.

In the first part of his two-part study, Ian MacCormack examines the theological foundations of the Dalai Lama’s divine kingship as articulated by the Desi Sangyé Gyatso (1653–1705), the 5th Dalai Lama’s regent. This nuanced depiction underscores the complex interplay between ultimate truth and conventional reality in Tibetan political theology.

Part two of this study can be found here

The influence of สิ่งแวดล้อม¹ are directed out from the individual to his environment; the influence of สิ่งแวดล้อม² are directed inward from the environment to the individual.

If you have no merit there will be no wind. But either way, if you do not open the window you will get no breeze.

To the villager, a person is shaped—he does not shape himself—and, therefore, relating properly to one’s environment is of the first importance. You cannot think or will yourself into being a particular kind of person; you can only select and relate wisely to the influences impinging upon you. This implies a sort of limited free will; one can choose among available alternatives, but cannot create new alternatives.

¹: This first sense of sing waetlom (“environment”) is as the resources that one has around.
²: This second sense of “environment” is as our context—that which holds and shapes us.

Among the nature-deities the tale under discussion depicts as confronting Padmasambhava, two (see below) are among the nine deities known as bod kyi srid pa chags pa’i lha, meaning the original deities of Tibet, whose function is to protect the land and people of Tibet.

This paper analyzes the depiction of nature-deities in the 14th-century Padma bka’thang, focusing on the supernatural conflict between Padmasambhava and Tibetan deities resisting his arrival. It interprets this confrontation as a reflection of deeper cultural and religious dynamics during Tibet’s early Buddhist era.

The data presented here seems to support the theory that first generation migrants generally occupy the lower strata of the community while second generation migrants find the opportunity to move up the social scale.

Some experts think Beijing wants to bring Buddhist holy sites, like Tawang, under its control to cement its authority over Tibet. When the current Dalai Lama fled to India in 1959, he reached Tawang first after crossing mountains by foot.

Tawang, home to India’s largest Buddhist monastery, has been claimed by China as part of its ‘Southern Tibet.’ The region remains a hotspot for India-China tensions, with recent clashes near the Line of Actual Control (LAC) underscoring ongoing border disputes

Despite its successful Buddhist polemics, Sōtō’s Buddhist teachings in Korea were basically political propaganda viable only within the framework of Japanese colonial imperialism.

This article first examines three interrelated aspects of Korean monastics: (1) the stigmatization imposed on monastics during the Neo-Confucian Joseon dynasty, (2) the persistence of these stigmas in the minds of Koreans, and (3) their internalization among Korean monastics themselves. The article then draws out the impact of these three aspects on the late and limited emergence of lay leadership.

The following discourses were attempts to deal with the problems faced by the Buddhist community during modernization: the discourse on secularity and social participation, the discourse on modernity centering on the issue of modifying precepts, and the discourse on identity contemplating the originality of Korean Buddhism.

The paintings are considered neither neutral nor representational media but rather places of uncanny presence and sources of inspiration for the mansin, which may be experienced with greater or lesser intensity and clarity depending on the current state of favor an individual mansin enjoys with her personal deities.

The transformation of god pictures into collectable, marketable folk art has required both overcoming a fear of objects believed to hold souls, or “ghosts,” and a renegotiation of the ways that god pictures were traditionally disposed of.

Han wrestled with the task of bridging the gap between institutional Buddhism and lay Buddhism, which had resulted in the deterioration of the Buddhist ideal. In an attempt to find a middle ground that could connect these two extremes, Han’s strategy was to focus on both the Buddhist notion of expediency and the caring spirit of bodhisattva. He was not particularly successful.

According to the Jogye Order’s 2018 periodic report, the average age of monks is increasing and the number of monks is decreasing. In order to offer solutions to these problems, the report presents and analyzes by dividing those themes into six sub-topics, namely: decrease of births; decrease of postulants; aging of postulants; rapidly changing educational environment; teaching aptitude of educators; education budget.

This article critically scrutinizes the Jogye Order’s latest report to identify and correct some data misinterpretations and offer new insights that the authors believe would help our leaders come up with better solutions.

This article will survey the issues and events surrounding three protests: the 2003 samboilbae, or ‘three-steps-one-bow’, march led by Venerable Sukyong against the Saemangeum Reclamation Project, Venerable Jiyul’s Anti-Mt. Chonsong tunnel hunger-strike campaign between 2002 and 2006, and lastly Venerable Munsu’s self-immolation protesting the Four Rivers Project in 2010.

Behind this marriage of the court and Buddhism, however, were the outstanding Buddhist monks who offered the ideology for it.

From 1982 through 2016, Korean media outlets have reported over 120 instances of vandalism, arson and harassment targeting Buddhist temples and facilities in South Korea. An extension of on-going tensions between South Korea’s Buddhist and Evangelical Protestant communities, this one-sided wave of violence and harassment has caused the destruction of numerous temple buildings and priceless historical artifacts, millions of USD in damages, and one death.

[This article] examines the responses from South Korea’s Buddhist and Evangelical communities and various government agencies, as well as the effects of these responses, before investigating the relationship between these incidents and the mainstream Evangelical doctrines of religious exclusivism, dominionism and spiritual warfare.

One of Alak’s disciples, a 73-year-old ngakpa, explained in an interview the traditional (and previously pervasive) view about caterpillar fungus. He stated that the problem with collecting caterpillar fungus, from the Buddhist point of view, is that one cannot be sure when digging whether the caterpillar is actually dead or not. By killing the caterpillar, a collector may entail a breach of his or her vow to not kill any sentient being.

Tibetan villagers in Amdo balance their tantric Buddhist commitments—particularly the vow against taking animal life—with livelihood practices like caterpillar fungus collection that often involve killing insects. Through fieldwork and interviews, the author highlights the villagers’ religious lives, especially of women, and the moral negotiations they navigate in their daily survival.

One of the distinguishing features of Himalayan Buddhism is that it has accommodated within itself a good number of elements and traits of the pre-Buddhist indigenous religions and folk traditions.

This paper explores how practices from Tibetan indigenous religions, particularly the use of spirit mediums and oracles, have been incorporated into Himalayan Buddhism. It argues that these pre-Buddhist elements continue to exist within Tibetan Buddhist institutions, highlighting a syncretism between the two.

old altars are increasingly encountered as surplus goods by those who lack the space, ritual expertise, or inclination to care for them. Like other forms of sacred waste (like human corpses), disposal is complicated for practical and moral reasons, and often requires the performance of special rites (供養 kuyō).

Some gods are bad and some devils are good. There are, in fact, almost as many kinds of good and bad phi as there are of men…

An overview of Thai ghosts.

‘The wheel and axle’ revolutionized human technological history by transforming linear to rotary motion and causing parts of devices to move. While its ancient origins are commonly associated with the appearance of carts during the Bronze Age, we focus on much earlier wheel-shaped find: an exceptional assemblage of over a hundred perforated pebbles from the 12,000-year-old Natufian village of Nahal Ein-Gev II, Israel. We analyze the assemblage using 3D methodologies, incorporating novel study applications to both the pebbles and their perforations and explore the functional implications. We conclude that these items could have served as spindle whorls to spin fibres. In a cumulative evolutionary trend, they manifest early phases of the development of rotational technologies by laying the mechanical principle of the wheel and axle.

A ruler had no power to enact law. He was born to maintain order and peace and to protect his subjects from dangers…

The fascinating history of the law: first as it was understood in ancient India, then as it was practiced in medieval Burma, and finally how it was enacted in modern Thailand.

Gelugpas, on the other hand, were antagonistic to other-emptiness, and in their Mahamudra system, the emptiness of mind that must be discovered through insight meditation is a negation pure and simple, without any implication that mind’s ultimate nature includes positive qualities, not even luminosity

Roger R. Jackson explores how Dzogchen and Mahamudra, two prominent Tibetan Buddhist traditions, approach the nature of mind. Both traditions emphasize the recognition of the mind’s inherent qualities—emptiness, purity, luminosity, and awareness—as essential for spiritual liberation. While Dzogchen focuses on direct recognition of the primordial mind, Mahamudra offers a more gradual path, blending meditative practices with philosophical insights. Despite differences in methodology, both traditions ultimately aim to uncover the same underlying reality, highlighting a profound unity within Tibetan Buddhism.

No one visiting a Siamese monastery, popularly known as a ‘wat’, would fail to notice a certain structure, pyramidal in form with a slender tapering spire at the top…

A few pages on Thai Stupas and Cetiya.

The Angkor Borei images of Buddha indicate that after the late seventh century, there is a hiatus of nearly 400 years before Buddhist imagery re-appears in the late twelfth to thirteenth century.

In Buddhist traditions, mindfulness is not limited to meditation; it applies to the entire path. Moreover, mindfulness cannot be regarded as something purely instrumental…

Mindfulness functions as a foundational ethical practice in Patrul Rinpoche’s Words of My Perfect Teacher. Sustained mindfulness, meta-awareness, and self-examination are essential to cultivating moral agency and embodying the ethos of the Great Perfection, ultimately leading to the realization of Dzogchen’s “instantaneous awareness.”

There are no deliberate austerities or penances associated with such journeys; over-crowded buses or trucks seemingly without springs are common modes of transport in Northeastern Thailand. One informant stated that if people took a journey solely to make merit somewhere, then the trip would be no fun. However, if people went traveling purely for their own pleasure, with no planned stops at holy shrines, then merit would not be obtained.

An ethnographic investigation of pilgrimage in Thailand focusing on the Wat Phrathat Phanom Stupa in Isaan.

The paper explains how the hierarchy emerged historically out of the attempts by the Siamese government to exercise control over the monasteries and how its rigid hierarchy is tempered by the Thai sense of “suitability” leading to an organization that balances central goals against local concerns. Each level of the hierarchy and the parallel system of royally-bestowed honorifics are explained in detail, including their qualifications and responsibilities.

The khwan may therefore be described as something in the nature of a principle of life, vital to the welfare of man and animals.

An exploration of the Thai belief in animating spirits (ขวัญ) and the various rituals and ritual implements that attend them, including a thorough description of the บายศรี offering.

Called เล่นแชร์ (“Sharing Games”) in Thai, a group of neighbors or family members take turns bidding on a communal pot. The resulting game facilitates efficient peer-to-peer loans without bookkeeping or needing to predict when money will be needed, allowing those living on the margins of society to easily pool their risks and navigate precarity together.

Spirits, ghosts, fairies, demons, or speaking collectively, ‘pi’ (ผี) may be divided into three classes: ‘Pi’ which are the ghosts of the dead or living; ‘pi’ which exist on their own account, and do not originate from human beings; and thirdly ‘pi’ belonging to other worlds…

Some field notes on Thai ghost beliefs and related rituals at the turn of the twentieth century.

For ผี beliefs in Thailand half a century later, see Rajathon, 1954.

In this situation, the king had two alternatives: either to confiscate all religious lands where the evidence for the original endowment was weak, and thereby increase the royal treasury, or to maintain the status quo…

An overview of the history of the Theravāda Saṅgha and its relationship with the state from the medieval period through the 19th century.

Decommissioning of karmically volatile materiality reveals the fragility of Buddhist care structures and highlights growing concerns about how religious activity generates waste. The management of religious materiality in the world’s fastest ageing society has extensive spiritual, moral, and practical implications.

This article examines how inherited Buddhist objects in rural Japan, such as altars and tombs, become burdensome due to depopulation and fragmented kinship. It highlights how temples like Fudōin in Hiroshima Prefecture serve as custodians for these spiritually charged items, navigating the moral and practical challenges of preserving cultural heritage amidst demographic decline.​

This surprising fact shows that the abbot was likely more interested in courtly trends than in Buddhist piety and was perhaps appointed for political reasons: a trend all too common in places where the state is entangled with the monastic Saṅgha. These panels also demonstrate how trends in non-Buddhist art and fashion can come to influence Buddhist temple art proper.

the embedding can be leveraged to quantify changes in stereotypes and attitudes toward women and ethnic minorities in the 20th and 21st centuries in the United States. We integrate word embeddings trained on 100 years of text data with the U.S. Census to show that changes in the embedding track closely with demographic and occupation shifts over time.

In Tibet sounds can heal, make ill, protect, challenge, appease, defile, purify, seduce or even liberate from worldly attachments. Sounds of the natural environment merge with human-made music and chanting in soundscapes that are intimately interconnected. While the spiritual features and healing powers of Buddhist ritual music have been often described, what is perhaps less known is the kaleidoscope of natural and human sounds against which it has been developed and performed for centuries. In this portfolio we explore some of these sacred soundscapes, their history and impacts.

Tibetan Buddhism has long argued for the sanctity of life, condemning the killing of humans and animals alike. For just as long, however, meat has been a staple of the Tibetan diet. Individual religious leaders have dealt with this tension in different ways, but few have done so as revealingly as the eighteenth century master Jigmé Lingpa (‘jigs med gling pa, 1730-1798).

In his religious and autobiographical writings, Jigmé Lingpa draws on Buddhist ideals promoting compassion towards all beings and his own unusually strong love of animals to praise vegetarianism and condemn the killing of animals for meat. Jigmé Lingpa also recognizes, however, that vegetarianism is a difficult ideal. Rather than insisting on vegetarianism, therefore, he offers his students a variety of means through which to moderate the negativity of eating meat without fully abandoning it.

we show that long-term memory is capable of storing a massive number of objects with details from the image. Participants viewed pictures of 2,500 objects over the course of 5.5 h. Afterward, they were shown pairs of images and indicated which of the two they had seen.

The previously viewed item could be paired with either an object from a novel category, an object of the same basic-level category, or the same object in a different state or pose. Performance in each of these conditions was remarkably high (92%, 88%, and 87%, respectively), suggesting that participants successfully maintained detailed representations of thousands of images.

To this day it is not unusual in Japan for the scholar to be a fine calligrapher and an accomplished poet in addition to possessing the pertinent intellectual abilities.

​This encyclopedia entry explores Japanese aesthetics, highlighting concepts such as mono no aware (the pathos of things), wabi (subdued, austere beauty), and sabi (rustic patina), which reflect a deep appreciation for impermanence and nature. It also examines the integration of art and self-cultivation in Japanese culture, emphasizing that artistic practices are often seen as paths to spiritual and personal development.

On the one hand, it stands squarely upon a Mahayana Buddhist conception of enlightened wisdom as radically nondichotomous and nondual with reality. On the other hand, it directly confronts the nature of human existence in its ineluctable finitude: karmically conditioned, discriminative and reifying in awareness, and given to the afflicting passions…

From its origins in the Buddha Fields of the early Mahāyāna, to Hōnen’s twelfth century Nembutsu teachings, to Shin’s twentieth century engagements with Christian philosophy, this encyclopedia entry gives an overview of the history of Pure Land thought in Japan.

To strike the right balance of a benign enough violation without offending your audience requires some brains. Funny people are indeed smart

The free, bilateral movement between “not one” and “not two” characterizes Zen’s achievement of a personhood with a third perspective that cannot be confined to either dualism or non-dualism

A lengthy introduction to Zen Buddhist practice and thought in Japan with a particular focus on their view of enlightenment.

On the basis of initial observations [at Sera Jey Monastic University], we propose that successful debating requires skills that include reasoning and critical thinking, attentional focus, working memory, emotion regulation, confidence in your own reasoning skills, and social connectedness.

We want the clarification, we want the instruction, but we want it without the discomfort, but it doesn’t work that way. The discomfort is the source of the clarification and the instruction.

In Ulan-Ude, the multi-ethnic, multi-religious capital of Buryatia, most laypeople make use of “Buddhist counseling” (Rus. priyom u lamy ), or various ritual, medical and other services that ameliorate illness and misfortune. Laypeople consult lamas about a range of issues from economic to familial matters, from imp attacks to joblessness. Such Buddhist counseling is one of the most common kind of interactions with Buddhist institutions and practices in Buryatia. At the same time, it is a deeply contested practice, as local critiques refer to the rise of “consumerist”, “commercialized”, “utilitarian” or “bad” Buddhism.

female renunciation is a form of resistance to the norm which is household life, and a celibate jomo represents renunciation better than typically non-celibate Kinnauri male lamas do.

Hirakawa and Matsunami think that a moribund Buddhism can be revived by understanding traditional doctrines. Akizuki’s new Māhāyana turns out to be nothing but the old Zen. Endō is a harsh critic with no particular plan for reform. Fujii and Sasaki recognize that Buddhism must undergo rebirth, but suggest that current forms will suffice.

A scathing review of several recent books on the state of Buddhism in Japan by traditional Buddhists, suggesting that the “New Religious Movements” in Japan are where the real reforms are happening.

Even as Vajirayan criticized the supernaturalism of indigenous Siamese religious forms, certain ideas and practices were left intact. In particular was a focus on karma or merit and morality…

The Western-style murals adorning the walls at Wat Bovorn Niwet reflect Prince Mongut’s vision for a reformed Thai Buddhism that would adopt the rationalism and advances of the West but still place the Buddha at its center.

Over three repeated interviews, participants developed false memories of the suggested events under minimally suggestive conditions (27%) and even more so using massive suggestion (56%). We then used two techniques to reduce false memory endorsement, source sensitization and false memory sensitization. This reversed the false memory build-up over the first three interviews, returning false memory rates in both suggestion conditions to the baseline levels of the first interview.

Merely informing people about the possibility of having false memories implanted was enough to get them to second guess their false memories.

Our results provide firm evidence that implicit and explicit memory have distinct functional neuroanatomies, and that strategic control of retrieval engages brain structures distinct from those involved in both implicit and explicit memory. They have critical implications for theories of memory and consciousness, which often equate consciousness with control.

Because official monks were bureaucrats, they did not need to form orders that included secular believers. In contrast, reclusive monks needed to establish orders that included secular believers because they were not supported by the government. Because they were no longer official monks, they were freed from certain restrictions. They could pray for the salvation of women and lepers, conduct funerals, and collect contributions, all of which had previously been regarded as involving impurity.

In the Kamakura Era, several new forms of Buddhism emerged in Japan which broke with the existing schools. Kuroda Toshio’s “exoteric-esoteric” model understood these new schools as rejecting the esoteric ritual system which bound the old schools together. This paper sees the new schools’ rejection of the ritual system as a rejection of entanglement with the state and as a desire to return Buddhist monasticism to its ascetic ideals. By focusing on their relationship with the laity, these “new schools” survived the later withdrawal of government support and are the schools we now think of as constituting “Japanese Buddhism”: Zen, Pure Land, and Nichiren.

We demonstrate that exertion of self-control for as little as 45 min can lead to an increased propensity for engaging in aggressive acts in the context of socially relevant choices, as measured by a set of economic games. Also, we show that such behavioral changes are associated with increased sleep-like (delta) activity within frontal brain areas related to decision-making and impulse control.

Focusing on public hearings held in 2006 in which temple wives (jizoku) aired their grievances, the article examines the unique challenges that Japanese Zen must confront since the Meiji Reforms eliminated celibacy from the priesthood.

In 2025, in 1812, in 2000 BC, the death of a young child is the worst thing that could happen to any parent.

What happens to the meaning of Buddhist rituals in military spaces? Do the military confines and the political context alter the meaning of “non-violent” rituals? Can they become “violent” rituals?

During the Sri Lankan civil war, some extremist Buddhist monks espoused an explicitly violent “just war” ideology. While the majority of Sinhala monks did not go that far, they still demonstrated their support indirectly, through e.g. the chanting of pirits before major battles.

Buddhism in Burma is involved in a continuing and intense struggle against a repressive military regime.

While much continues to unfold, the struggle between the Burmese military and its Buddhist subjects has, regrettably, only deepened in the decades since this article was first published.

a concise history of amulets and an overview of amulet culture in Thailand.

The general introduction to the Siam Society’s special issue all about the topic.

I examine a corpus of documents belonging to the Dhammakāya text genre and its different functions, revealing how a single genre can, in fact, fulfil functions from meditation, on the one hand, to consecrations and protective chanting on the other. I then conclude that the disappearance of the Dhammakāya text genre from Central Thai practice is further evidence for the suppression of Siam’s “boran”, or pre-reform, Buddhism in response to modernist concerns about canonicity and textual authenticity.

Utilizing Norbert Elias’s figurational sociology, this article analyses how postcolonial states have built a national habitus that plays a decisive role in the politicization of religion. It focuses on examples from Islam and Buddhism and discusses how hegemonic types of politicised religions have negative impacts on democracy.

By using original documents this article shows the evolution of the Zen denominations within the larger context of the legal framework that shaped all Buddhist denominations, and depicts how the divisions between sects and branches were reshuffled several times before stabilizing in their present form.

Someone who experiences a kaicho as a child will have attained full status as an adult by the time of the next kaicho, and will have become an elder member of the community by the time of the one after that. […] The emotional significance of this time frame is not immediately obvious, but becomes clear through conversations with residents of Yokkamachi…

Perceiving is the process by which evanescent sensations are linked to environmental cause and made enduring and coherent through the assignment of meaning, utility, and value.

The essay asks what an enlightened moral sensitivity might require, and concludes in challenging the Zen tradition to consider reengaging the Mahayana Buddhist practices of reflection out of which Zen originated in order to assess the possible role of morality in its thought and practice

This essay responds to Brian Victoria’s critique of Zen social ethics by attempting to answer his question about Japanese Zen masters before and during the Second World War: how could they seemingly act without moral conviction in confronting the crisis of their time? How could Zen manifest itself in anything less than morally admirable actions? By assessing the role of morality in Zen tradition, the paper considers how the Zen tradition might extend itself in response to the moral impasse that these questions bring to light.

contemporary Buddhist women actively work through ritual to create meaningful relationships with one another.

When explaining their reasons for using such peculiar statues at their temples, the abbots state that these images brighten the atmosphere…

Jizō is a savior of beings suffering in the world without buddhas

The Zainichi tried to establish their own identity in Japan through their mortuary rituals, and thus to reorganize the Korean diaspora in Japan. Their ancestral rituals have been changed from a Confucian style to a Buddhist style.

Saliva, sweat, semen and body odours are among the strongest disgust elicitors. This results in the intriguing question of how people succeed in having pleasurable sex at all.

Scientific evidence that subha and asubha perceptions are indeed antagonistic.

For most of the history of Buddhism, “devotional” practices like prayer, invocation, and offerings have not been at odds or even very distinctly separated from “contempla- tive” practices such as meditation, sutra copying, and sutra recitation.

Only in one area was Tokugawa Buddhism innovative and successful: the development of a complete liturgical system for funeral services and remembrance of ancestors. For better or for worse, this feature henceforth became central in popular Buddhist piety.

A history of Japanese Buddhism, explaining how the Kamakura reforms (by such extraordinary individuals as Honen, Shinran, Dogen, and Nichiren) led, eventually, to the practices we see in Japan today.

Women bundled together and stitched their hair into the most sacred parts of the image—the deity’s hair or robes and Sanskrit seed-syllables—as a means to accrue merit for themselves or for a loved one.

This paper focuses on a set of embroidered Japanese Buddhist images said to incorporate the hair of Chūjōhime (753–781), a legendary aristocratic woman credited with attaining rebirth in Amida’s Pure Land. Chūjōhime’s hair embroideries served to show that women’s bodies could be transformed into miraculous materiality through corporeal devotional practices and served as evidence that women were capable of achieving enlightenment.

Through a study of three monks, Tōjū Reisō, Tairyū Bun’i, and Seishū Shusetsu, strategies employed to preserve Rinzai Zen spiritual legacy in the face of the turmoil of Meiji are highlighted. These monks did their best to continue their eremetic existence and to pick up the pieces left by the widespread destruction of Buddhist temples and monasteries in early Meiji Japan.

This [Meiji Era] movement resulted in the destruction of tens of thousands of Buddhist temples throughout the country together with their statuary, the forced laicization of large numbers of Buddhist priests and widespread attacks on Buddhist doctrine and praxis, among other repressive measures. In short, Buddhism was attacked as a superstitious, foreign religion that had no place in a Japan modernizing at breakneck speed.

This is the second part of an article concerning the ethical and doctrinal changes to Japanese Buddhism that occurred as a result of its centuries long, syncretistic connection to the indigenous religion of Shintō. The first part of this article, entitled “Counting the Cost of Buddhist Syncretism”, may be read here. While reading the first article is not required, its contents will nevertheless provide a helpful context for the events described in this article.

Experiment and have fun with it.

Rituals can be an artistic process, a meditation, a communal celebration, or a simple act of observation, according to Kate Southworth, a London-based artist whose works are rooted in ritual. “Rituals often have an intention,” Southworth said. “I think the framing of that intention to be as important as its enactment.”

The article explains that rituals—unlike productivity-driven routines—help people instill a sense of calm and sustain mindfulness by imbuing ordinary actions with intention and meaning. In this way, rituals can stabilize life and foster connection in an otherwise distracted, fast-paced world.

Despite the decimation of traditional culture during the Khmer Rouge period (1975–1979), Dharma songs remain an integral facet of Buddhist life among Khmers in Cambodia and in diaspora.

This article examines the role of Dharma songs in contemporary Cambodia, highlighting how their texts, melodies, and performances evoke the aesthetic experiences of saṃvega and pasāda, central to Buddhist art and practice. It emphasizes the significance of music in expressing and living Buddhism within the Khmer tradition.

Homeownership, as it has evolved in the United States, often turns its beneficiaries against progress and change.

How economic incentives drive the political emotions of American homeowners.

Feminine-named hurricanes cause significantly more deaths, apparently because they lead to lower perceived risk and consequently less preparedness.

“We’re on the way to enlightenment”, he said. “And on this way, what should we do?”

This article presents the phenomenon of TikTok monks in Cambodia and the question of whether it’s appropriate to use social media to preach the dharma.

The new digital resource will not only help preserve a priceless record of Cambodian society and history, but it will also provide modern readers access to a trove of Cambodian Buddhist literature, and bring the texts to the world by making new translations possible.

This article describes the history of Wat Phum Thmei Serey Mongkol’s library, which houses thousands of manuscripts of Buddhist scripture. The article further details the temple’s recent work in preserving and digitizing these valuable materials, making them accessible to the whole world.

Reciting the “Hero’s March Spell” every day causes goblins, demons, and strange ghosts to be sincere and refrain from harming people.

The Léngyán Zhòu (楞嚴咒), or Śūraṅgama Mantra, is a protective dhāraṇī that has long been chanted by East Asian Buddhists. This article explores the Śūraṅgama’s history and enduring appeal as well as the distinction between exoteric and esoteric magic.

Reported emotional states occupy a complex, high-dimensional categorical space.

Their interactive map of the emotional space can be explored online here.

happiness reports were construed as an emotional reactivity to recent rewards and expectations.

exposure to a stereotype, regardless of whether one agrees with it, can shape how one experiences and learns from interactions with members of the stereotyped group, such that it induces individual-level prejudice

Computational modeling revealed that this preference was due to stereotype effects on priors regarding group members’ behavior as well as the learning rates through which reward associations were updated in response to player feedback. We then show that these stereotype-induced preferences, once formed, spread unwittingly to others who observe these interactions, illustrating a pathway through which stereotypes may be transmitted and propagated between society and individuals.

As farmers pump out water to irrigate crops, ground water levels drop and massive sinkholes can form…

For many Mongolians, severing the nature-human relationship is seen as a source of disharmony and an abandonment of obligation, rather than a potential solution to any environmental issue.

The discourse quotations in the Abhidharmakośopāyikā-ṭīkā stem from a Mūlasarvāstivāda lineage of transmission closely related to that of the Saṃyukta-āgama, though not identical to it. This article, before turning to the translation of the quotations counterpart to the Chinese Saṃyukta-āgama discourses, first introduces the Abhidharmakośopāyikā-ṭīkā as a primary source

Lecturers in the experimental condition added a transcript of their names in Arabic. Our findings revealed a substantial and positive impact on Palestinian student’s sense of belonging, class participation, and overall grades.

Our intervention demonstrates that small institutional changes when carefully crafted can have a significant impact

Notable to me in the study was that even the Jewish kids in the experiment saw a slight improvement in their GPA from the increased inclusivity of their virtual classroom, despite disliking it.

Despite the fact that over 80% of parents reported teaching their children how to use chopsticks, a mere 9.7% of children exhibited correct chopstick-holding technique.

While chopstick education is predominantly conducted within Japanese households, the increasing prevalence of nuclear families and dual-income households suggests a decline in intergenerational transmission of chopstick education.

While we do find that reputation inspires punish-ment that is sometimes unreflective, we also find that people correctly believe that engaging with opposing perspectives will be perceived positively by others. Thus, by giving people opportunities to broadcast their engagement with other viewpoints, it may actually be possible to leverage reputation to motivate more careful deliberation.

In the course of the ritual, pardon is asked of the earth goddess, Nāng Thōranī, for despoil­ing her both in the collection of sand for the ceremony and during the agricultural season.

A discussion of the long history (and enduring present) of nature-focused ceremonies in Theravāda Buddhist traditions.

Standing on the top of Mount Everest, a person can literally look at places where plants and animals happily grow and live and reproduce, yet no species has established a permanent self-sustaining population on the upper slopes of Everest.

Relative to controls, participants restricting digital media reported a variety of benefits, including higher life satisfaction, mindfulness, autonomy, competence, and self-esteem, and reduced loneliness and stress.

This essay explores the image-text relationship between the ca. 12-century monumental Maitreya bodhisattva sculpture within a narrow tower in the village of Mangyu and passages from the Gaṇḍavyūha Sūtra.

a comprehensive list of meditation techniques.

Body-centered techniques stood out in being of exceptional importance to all meditators.

Nuosu manifest potency by writing it into religious scriptures and handwrought effigies, piercing it into embroidered clothing and tattooed bodies, shaping it into public statues, and taming it into animals, all of which bring animate powers and presences to life.

On the mystical power of writing.

Women overestimated the facial femininity that men prefer in a partner and men overestimated the facial masculinity that women prefer in a partner.

These results indicate misperception of opposite-sex facial preferences and that mistaken perceptions may contribute to dissatisfaction with [one’s] own appearance.

Yang Yi’s advocacy of Chan as ‘a separate practice outside the teaching’ in the Chuandeng lu coincided with a literary model that distinguished Song civilization from its predecessors.

Neither Buddhism, a practice of transforming oneself with love, compassion, and wisdom, nor the Buddha, an ideal description of man enjoying life without harming oneself or others, helped me appeal to those monks who had the author- ity to imprison me. I came to know deeply that these monks did not truly understand that Buddhism is about the practice of love, compassion, and wisdom, even though they all said that they understood.

In this article, the author describes her experiences as a mendicant nun (both as thilashin and bhikkhuni), facing discrimination against women in the Burmese Buddhist community. While giving an insight into the everyday life of a monastic, she highlights the deeply entrenched gender biases and the struggle for equal rights within the monastic system.

Dorogawa became the place where male travelers made last-minute preparations for the climb and afterwards availed themselves of worldly pleasures at the many inns and teahouses

How Japan’s sacred mountains are selectively remembered.

one can speak of a mature philosophical system only when a coherent edifice of demonstration and argumentation has been perfected. In this sense, Buddhism has reached its maturity.

Even after leaving the forest, one man explained, Khmer tradition held that if one failed to make an offering of thanks, the spirits would seize and kill the ungrateful person.

Who can be held accountable for violence if everyone is, at once, perpetrator and victim? Given this mode of being-in-the-world, how do people find resilience in the face of past trauma?

This critique, most commonly expressed as criticism of “rich” temples and monks, juxtaposes an idealised Buddhist monastery against the increasing influence of political groups and [wealthy] individuals within local wats.

the inscriptions of the past refer often to a corpus of women as “nuns”. What are we to make of this?

The Theravada modification is a hundred years prior to the conventional 16th century estimation and is not associated with renewed use of Angkor. Instead it relates to the Ayutthayan occupation of Angkor in the 1430s and 40s during a major period of climatic instability.

Through the perspective of an elephant, the narrative reflects on the challenges of staying mindful and the impact of ego and attachment, drawing a comparison between the physical act of walking and the deeper lessons of inner peace and letting go of suffering. The author also recounts past memories, including moments of attachment, disappointment, and the eventual realization of the transient nature of these emotions.

Drawing on the ideas of 19th-century naturalist John Arthur Thomson, Story suggests that animals primarily repay karmic debts by following their inherent nature. However, through interactions with humans, they do have the ability to learn higher behaviors.

Once a person understands the rise and fall of all phenomena, then experiencing the worst that human life can give does not make one tremble.

Ajahn Brahm explains the meaning of emptiness, or nothingness, as he puts it, as the self-less and impermenant nature of all phenomena. After this detailed explanation, the Ajahn points out that not realizing this emptiness causes most people’s suffering; therefore, one should strive “to still the mind and see the most beautiful jewel there could ever be—nothingness.”

Why should Buddhists have been considered socially inactive, either by themselves or by others? And what is new about today’s “engaged” Buddhism that has not been characteristic of Buddhism in the past?

As Zen aspirants beat a path to Suzuki’s door, he seemed to embrace his new role as Zen’s champion [in the West]. By then his earlier goals of rehabilitating Buddhism in Japan and legitimating Mahayana were largely accomplished.

A fairly thorough biography of one of modern Buddhism’s most influential thinkers.

A religion’s power lies in its symbols, and those symbols are by their very nature not reducible to a set of propositions, or a body of doctrines

Among the general public and behavioral scientists alike, the Implicit Association Test (IAT) is the best known and most widely used tool for demonstrating implicit bias: the unintentional impact of social group information on behavior.

The idea that racial bias exists in places more so than in people can be a disorienting idea for many of us born and raised within cultures that predominantly treat places as neutral and passive while prioritizing the importance of individual actors and their internal states and motivations. In general, when most of us think about a concept like sexism, we think about people (like misogynists). We are unlikely to think about spaces causing people to be sexist.

The Pure Land was often very concretely present in the Chinese landscape or made present through ritual practice, but it was not owned by a single religious tradition.

Compare to the Pāli version.

We found that participants tended to have more similar self-views post-conversation than pre-conversation, an effect we term “inter-self alignment.” Further, the more two partners’ self-views aligned, the more they enjoyed their conversation and were inclined to interact again. This effect depended on both conversation partners becoming aligned. These findings suggest that the way we see ourselves is coauthored in the act of dialogue

In a large cross-national statistical study of risk factors for democratic erosion, we establish that economic inequality is one of the strongest predictors of where and when democracy erodes.

While for Huisong, China was indeed a center of Buddhist studies as opposed to the ‘barbaric’ Gaochang, Xuanzang and Puguang most likely regarded China as a Buddhist borderland as opposed to India.

We found that high-power individuals and men generally display higher agency, lower communion, more positive self-evaluations, and similar cognitive processes. Overall, 71% of the sex/gender differences were consistent with the effects of experimental power differences, whereas only 8% were opposite

Men act differently because of their privilege.

This paper introduces and critically discusses the earliest dated biography of an East Asian Buddhist nun that is known to us, and also provides a complete annotated translation of said biography. The text in question is the entombed biography and eulogy of Shi Sengzhi (釋僧芝 d. 516 CE).

the neurophysiological correlates of religious chanting are different from those of meditation and prayer

[The] regional increase in endogenous generation of delta oscillations [is] not due to peripheral cardiac or respiratory activity, nor due to implicit language processing, and is associated with feelings of transcendental bliss and decreased self-oriented cognition.

we found both positive and negative cultural biases as well as a general preference for languages perceived as familiar, confirming the crucial role of sociolinguistic factors and the exposure effect. Beyond that, however, there was little agreement between listeners about what languages or phonetic features they found attractive.

But there did appear to be some agreement that Chechen is the ugliest language.

… integration rather than segregation is the typical outcome. However, the tendency toward adaptation and integration can be impeded when economic frictions in the form of income inequality and housing cost are present.

Neither behavioral nor imaging analyses supported the hypothesis that altruists’ reduced social discounting reflects effortfully overcoming selfishness. Instead, group differences emerged in [brain regions corresponding to] the subjective valuation of others’ welfare

Loving Kindness Meditation training did not result in more generous behavioral or neural patterns, but only greater perceived difficulty during social discounting. Our results indicate extraordinary altruists’ generosity results from the way regions involved in social decision-making encode the subjective value of others’ welfare.

One of the ironies of the bhikkhuni controversy in Sri Lanka is that both sides seem to believe that the very integrity of Theravāda Buddhism is at stake in the bhikkhuni revival.

Despite controversy over its legitimacy, the bhikkhuni order in Sri Lanka has grown with increasing support from laypeople and even some monks, though challenges remain including the lack of formal recognition and tensions with the traditional dasasil nuns.

Preregistered analyses reveal a notable increase in biological stress levels among both LGBTIQ+ individuals as well as those close to them during the campaign.

These effects were, however, moderated by exposure to the campaign for marriage equality (i.e., yes-campaign), indicating the powerful buffering effects of the yes-campaign on the impact of discrimination on individuals’ health.

the significance of the Japanese Buddhist cartography of Xuanzang’s Great Tang Record of the Western Regions for the origins of the academic study of Buddhism in Europe.

Organized flaking techniques to obtain predetermined stone tools have been traced back to the early Acheulean in Africa and are seen as indicative of the emergence of advanced technical abilities and in-depth planning skills among early humans. Here, we report one of the earliest known examples of prepared core technology in the archaeological record, at the Cenjiawan site in the Nihewan basin of China, dated 1.1 Mya.

Evidence that Homo Erectus was intentionally crafting stone tools over a million years ago in China.

There is a contradiction between the spiritual worthiness felt by thilá-shin themselves and the mundane degradation to which they are subject.

We find strong evidence that indigenous territories with secure tenure not only reduce deforestation inside their lands but also lead to higher secondary forest growth on previously deforested areas.

Nonverbal signals of racial biases are abundant in children’s everyday social environments. Studies show that preschool children acquire social group biases when they observe other people’s social interactions and nonverbal behaviors.

Despite their seeming reluctance to engage in the politics of the now, historians have a crucial role to play as witnesses to climate change and its attendant social injustices.

Field-based observations on the young charismatic Phu Taki and his community, as well as on the practice of pagoda worship called Duwae

The purpose is threefold: first, to give ethnographic details of the hybrid nature of religious practices among Buddhist Pwo Karen, thereby demonstrating how sacred space and power are contested, despite the strong hand of the state; second, to challenge the assumed equation between non-Buddhist minorities on the one hand, and Buddhists as a lowland majority aligned to the state on the other; and third, to raise an alternative understanding to predominantly state-centered perspectives on Theravada Buddhism.

Known in Burmese as the weikza-lam or ‘Path of Esoteric Knowledge,’ this tradition has as its goal not the termination of saṃsāric life as an arahant, but rather its indefinite prolongation through the attainment of virtual immortality

On a unique, Burmese hybrid of Buddhism and Daoism.

Across groups of different sizes and interaction constraints, describers produced increasingly efficient utterances and matchers made increasingly accurate selections. Critically, however, we found that smaller groups and groups with less-constrained interaction structures (“thick channels”) showed stronger convergence to group-specific conventions than large groups with constrained interaction structures (“thin channels”), which struggled with convention formation.

The religious courts that try these cases have the backing of state law enforcement agencies: failure to comply with their judgements is punishable by imprisonment. A guilty verdict has been passed in all seventeen cases to date. There is no opportunity of appeal.

Just as a pulley system transforms minimal muscular strength into significant lifting capability, institutions act as cooperative pulleys, transforming weak reputational incentives into powerful drivers of cooperative behavior.

These arguments and cultural practices point to complexities of concepts on authorship in Thai Buddhism and strongly invite an analysis and deconstruction of ideas of ‘authorship’ as a clear-cut category.

individuals’ facial appearance develops over time to resemble the social stereotypes associated with given names.

heart rate synchrony predicted the probability of groups reaching the correct consensus decision with >70% cross-validation accuracy–significantly higher than that predicted by the duration of discussions, subjective assessment of team function or baseline heart rates alone.

We argue that the study of collective behavior must rise to a “crisis discipline” just as medicine, conservation, and climate science have, with a focus on providing actionable insight to policymakers and regulators for the stewardship of social systems.

In an attempt to counterbalance the plethora of data demonstrating the relaxing and hypoarousing effects of Buddhist meditation, this interdisciplinary review aims to provide evidence of meditation’s arousing or wake-promoting effects by drawing both from Buddhist textual sources and from scientific studies, including subjective, behavioral, and neuroimaging studies during wakefulness, meditation, and sleep.

The course of meditative progress suggests a nonlinear multiphasic trajectory, such that early phases that are more effortful may produce more fatigue and sleep propensity, while later stages produce greater wakefulness as a result of neuroplastic changes and more efficient processing.

Yuishin, however, chooses to present Rāhula’s six-year gestation period as a “miraculous sign” (霊瑞), a decision that is in keeping with the kōshiki’s broader goal of praising Rāhula as a divine being.

How a thirteenth-century Japanese sect sought to revive “original Buddhism” as they understood it.

… when Oscar Wilde announced ‘Nobody of any real culture talks about the beauty of a sunset. Sunsets are quite old-fashioned,’ sunsets reeled under the blow, then recovered. Les beaux-arts, when summoned to a similar call to be up-to-date, did not. The subtraction of beauty as a standard for art hardly signals a decline of the authority of beauty. Rather, it testifies to a decline in the belief that there is something called art.

With illustrations from the contemporary Thai religious landscape, we can observe how various forms of relational karma intuitively account for spirits and material objects as an agency of relations.

To be spiritually and superstitiously effective, sak yant tattoos traditionally require their bearer to follow a certain lifestyle.

A collection of beautiful images from inside Wat Bang Phra, a temple known for giving the traditional Thai tattoos which feature sacred geometry, mantras, animals, and deities to deliver protection to the wearer.

That women cannot be bodhisattas was not a carefully considered doctrine designed to exclude women. It did, however, result in a great inequality, despite widespread recognition that women were capable of achieving arahatship. If one’s sex is no obstacle to arahatship, and this is the mainstream goal of Theravāda, does it even matter that a tradition developed declaring women unable to be bodhisattas?

By exposing the ways that different societies have reacted to crises over their lifetime, this framework can help identify the factors and complex social-ecological interactions that either bolster or undermine resilience to contemporary climate shocks.

We Buddhists must recognize the complexity of contemporary issues and call on our compatriots to resist simplistic and emotional responses to events and situations. It means we must call on our leaders to consider issues in their full context and not seek politically expedient solutions.

The lack of the capacity to understand and act on [legal] justice problems plays a key role in creating [social] inequalities.

the Western tradition of virtue ethics and an introductory sketch of how it might provide a foundation for ecology in Buddhism

In 2023, only 407 people donated a kidney to a stranger. The End Kidney Deaths Act would aim to increase that number nearly thirtyfold.

Also read part two here responding to a few, common counterarguments.

Across the Buddhist world, we find not only that our relationships are constituted by karmic affinities, but also that in many contexts those relationships are seen as the media through which karma unfolds.

These understandings not only provide frameworks for interpreting relationships but underwrite ritual technologies through which people can form, maintain, or disperse these affinities.

Justin Ritzinger shares what he learned about the nature of karma after attending the “Lived Karma” conference at Dartmouth in 2022. To read more papers from the conference, see the Journal of Global Buddhism Vol. 24 No. 2.

This is a preliminary research note on the cluster concepts of collective karma in Chinese Canonical sources.

Why is there not more public outcry in the face of rising income inequality? Although public choice models predict that rising inequality will spur public demand for redistribution, evidence often fails to support this view.

rising inequality can activate the very processes that stifle outcry, causing people to be blind to the true extent of inequality, to legitimize rising disparities, and to reject redistribution

By virtue of both the so-called “mystical” experiences that frequently arise during PAP, and the long-term shifts to outlooks, values, and priorities that can follow treatment, the processes of decision-making that are normatively expected of patients run aground. If this framing is correct, then prospective patients cannot meet the requirement of understanding that is one of the principal analytic components of informed consent.

In a daily study of 80 couples across 14 days ( N = 1,798 observations), people experienced lower life satisfaction, greater negative emotions, and fewer positive emotions on days when they reported lower than their average relationship satisfaction, but this association was attenuated for people high in mindfulness.

For early Buddhism, I mediate between two polarized views: one promoting the idea of ‘eco-dharma’ as a reflection of Buddhism’s alignment with non-violence (ahiṃsā), and the alleviation of suffering (dukkha); a second arguing that early Buddhist traditions have been misappropriated by western environmentalism. I argue that the latter view subscribes to canonical models of passive monks removed from worldly concerns, despite archaeological evidence for socially-engaged monastic landlordism from the late centuries BCE. Others cite this evidence only to negate Buddhism’s eco-credentials, overlooking the human:non-human entanglement theme

Case studies include examples of Buddhist land and water management in central India, set within discussions of human v. non-human-centric frameworks of well-being and suffering, purity and pollution, and broader Indic medico-ecological epistemologies, as possible models for collective responses to environmental stress.

Nature is understood as a process of life, of which human beings are an immanent part. Returning to nature and remembering that we are nature is essential for health and wellbeing.

A better translation can be found here.

This article will use the case study of nuns’ training programs to examine the revival of the sangha in Sri Lanka and the role of exchange among devotees of different traditions in Asia. By cross-tradition I am referring to different traditions such as, in this case, the Theravāda tradition in Sri Lanka and the Mahayana Chinese tradition in Taiwan.

This paper explores some of the reasons behind the general reticence concerning higher ordination felt by many of the silmātas interviewed, and focuses specifically on some of the socio-economic factors that may be affecting their decision-making

Ideally, a Buddhist temple must have certain symbols and facilities. These include a shrine room with a Buddha statue and statues of Buddha’s main disciples, a bo tree and a small shrine, a pagoda with relics, living quarters for the monks, a preaching hall, and a compound for people to gather and offer flowers. It is also customary to have a small deity shrine within the temple premises.

A matter-of-fact, anthropological description of a typical Sri Lankan temple.

The same scanning procedure can be employed for the next body contemplation, which instead takes up the four elements as basic constituents of matter in general and the human body in particular. These four are earth, water, fi re, and wind, which represent the qualities of solidity or hardness, cohesion or wetness, temperature, and motion.

A brief introduction to the Four Satipaṭṭhānas.

This paper presents an annotated English translation of the story of the nun Dharmadinnā, translated here for the first time from the Tibetan translation of the Kṣudrakavastu of the Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya. The protagonist is not able to enter the religious life because of her prenatal engagement and is finally ordained by an exceptional style of ordination ceremony performed through a messenger.

The story ends with the Buddha telling of her past life as a nun and teacher under the Buddha Kāśyapa.

The modern idea of religion as divorced from power succeeded in dislodging the influence that Buddhism had over Sri Lankan politics, but only for a short time…

The Sinhalese Sangha refused to be “privatized” by the British government, or overpowered by the Sri Lankan elites. Using its immense historical knowledge, the Buddhist Sangha took its totalizing vision of Sri Lankan society public with pamphlets and preaching, leading up to the 1940’s Colombo college-monks’ movement…

The symbolic ordination of trees as monks in Thailand is widely perceived in Western scholarship to be proof of the power of Buddhism to spur ecological thought. However, a closer analysis of tree ordination demonstrates that it is not primarily about Buddhist teaching, but rather is an invented tradition based on the sanctity of Thai Buddhist symbols as well as those of spirit worship and the monarchy. Tree ordinations performed by non-Buddhist minorities in Thailand do not demonstrate a religious commitment but rather a political one.

the religious life and work of Khunying Yai Damrongthammasan, who appears to have produced one of the first significant Buddhist treatises ever authored by a Thai woman.

Four monks’ life narratives, two from the Vipassana group and two from the Vidayagom group, are used as case studies. The study reveals that the narratives of these monks follow the structure of the Buddha’s life due to the Buddhist tradition of using the Buddha’s life as a paradigm to compose religious persons’ stories. However, the miraculous power of each monk is highlighted in his narrative. There is both miraculous power as found in the Buddhist canon and as influenced by Thai cultural beliefs and practices.

In the past, the temple was the center for learning, where elders taught their grandchildren how to chant and pay respect to monks. But in contemporary Thailand, this system is quickly losing influence. Because of this, a number of strategies have recently developed to communicate Buddhist teachings to Thai youth. This paper investigates two significant strategies: private schools with Buddhist-inspired curricula and media targeted towards Thai youth.

youth initiatives have remained a popular vehicle for support and recruitment despite numerous criticisms and scandals over the past decades.

The millennial statements in the Bun Phra Wet, acted out by the people, make manifest their aspirations within the Thai state. The festival creates an imaginary, a way for Isaners to conceptualize a political system in which they fully participate.

Stateless people do not elect officials, enjoy diplomatic representation, or possess the lucre of a corporate lobby. Without political rights they can exert only so much pressure; activist groups, charities, and NGOs are their main source of support. This makes people without a citizenship uniquely vulnerable to exploitation

In a lecture which he gave in his monastery on the 12th of June 1971, Buddhadāsa criticised this Three Lifetimes Theory with sharp words. He compared this presentation of paṭiccasamuppāda with ‘cancer, an incurable tumour of Buddhist scholarship’.

A major challenge in the historical study of female monasticism in Thailand is the paucity of texts written by or about Thai Buddhist female practitioners prior to 1950…

the link between Sinhala nationalism and Buddhist religion based on the conceptual framework of “Geopiety.”

Mae chee, while debarred from the alms round, both receive alms from the laity and donate alms to monks.

On the ambiguous station of the mae chee in Thai Buddhism

This study focuses on the life and death of Uchiyama Gudō (1874–1911), a disrobed Sōtō Zen priest, who had his priestly status posthumously restored to him on April 13, 1993, eighty-two years after his execution by the Japanese government

Findings suggest a relationship between socio-cultural-religious values and prosocial behavior in that Thai-Buddhist-affiliative society appears more altruistically-oriented than the American

We very much doubt that most Thai Buddhists would be bothered by any need to distinguish a “miraculous” category. Their traditional religion teaches that at the highest level of enlightenment all forms are illusions; thus the whole world and everything in it can be interpreted as metaphors or “names” ultimately. Nothing in such a world can, in essence, ever be real or unreal, illogical or logical in the Western Aristotelian sense.

The murals are an assertion of certain core values expressed in ancient Buddhist symbols as a defense of the totality of the religious system against perceived threats from competing modern values.

[These] murals help to make Buddhist ideas concrete

Premodern rice farming could plausibly create strong social norms because paddy rice relied on irrigation networks. Rice farmers coordinated their water use and kept track of each person’s labor contributions. Rice villages also established strong norms of reciprocity to cope with labor demands that were twice as high as dryland crops like wheat. In line with this theory, China’s historically rice-farming areas had tighter social norms than wheat-farming areas, even beyond differences in development and urbanization.

Policy-makers often mistakenly view host state security and refugee security as unrelated–or even opposing–factors. In reality, refugee protection and state stability are linked together; undermining one factor weakens the other. Policies to protect refugees, both physically and legally, reduce potential threats from the crisis and bolster state security. In general, risks of conflict are higher when refugees live in oppressive settings, lack legal income-generation options, and are denied education for their youth.

For most of the women who became foremost leading disciples, or etadagga sāvikā, of the Buddha Gotama, it was not only their meeting with a past buddha, but also their seeing the Buddha together with an awakened woman, a leading bhikkhunī disciple of the Buddha, that truly stimulated their inspiration and galvanized their aspiration.

This article explores the mental and emotional states of awakened women disciples of the Buddha, as recorded in the Therī Apadāna. It examines words expressing their aspiration to awakening, the resolve supporting it, and the intention’s character, drawing parallels with the Pali Canon’s equivalent of bodhicitta development.

Visiting the caves of Ajanta in October 1969, I had the pleasure to identify another artistic representation of the Sudhana story.

Once upon a time the country of Pāñcāla was divided into two kingdoms. The king of North Pāñcāla was righteous, while the king of South Pāñcāla was wicked. …

Despite its richness as a source for one of the lost schools of Indian Buddhism (the Sarvāstivāda), and its potential contributions to our understanding of the development of narrative and ideology in early Buddhism more generally, the Avadānaśataka has never been fully translated into English.

Surveying pre-Gupta inscriptions, it becomes clear that the aspiration for nirvana has one recurring feature attached to it; the aspiration of the donor for the attainment of nirvana occurs when the donation is connected in some way or another to the relics or figural or non-figural representations of the historical Buddha.

The same ideas can be seen emerging in the later canonical Pali Apadana, and connect to developments in the emergence of Mahayana.

Their presence in an avadāna collection forces us to reflect upon what it might mean to be both a jātaka and an avadāna.

On the presence of stories about the Buddha’s past lives (jātakas) inside the Avadāna collections.

I here present a translation of the fourth decade (stories 31-40) of the Avadānaśataka, using Speyer’s 1906-1909 edition as my base text.

While the jātakas of the second decade focus upon karmic backstories for positive events in the Buddha’s final life, in the fourth decade we find a stronger focus on the character of the Buddha-to-be as he practices the many virtues required for the attainment of Buddhahood. In that sense the stories are much closer to the jātakas of the Pāli tradition, and indeed several of the stories are also found in the Jātakatthavaṇṇanā as well as other early Buddhist narrative collections.

The Mekong region presents a record incidence of cholangiocarcinoma (bile duct cancer). Scientists identify correlations between the development of this aggressive disease and the consumption of raw fish in local dishes. While made aware of these correlations by comprehensive health campaigns, some villagers in Thailand’s notoriously neglected Northeast refuse to cook the fish before consumption

Based on ethnographic data, this paper suggests that practices surrounding the consumption of raw food in the area have become taboo. Rather than disappearing, they now play a key role in bonding rituals where rural masculinities are expressed via spectacles of risk taking that transgress normative ideals of manhood as epitomised by urban men and Buddhist monks.

The more people used Facebook at one time point, the worse they felt the next time we text-messaged them; the more they used Facebook over two-weeks, the more their life satisfaction levels declined over time.

On the surface, Facebook provides an invaluable resource for fulfilling the basic human need for social connection. Rather than enhancing well-being, however, these findings suggest that Facebook may undermine it.

like the Soka Gakkai cases, our respondents appear to be searching for miracles and spiritual fulfillment that they were not receiving by engaging solely in Christian practices. Although they might be considered “free riders” through a rational choice lens, Master Chu actually encourages this behavior

How a Vietnamese monk in Houston, Texas successfully attracted a Latino following.

Masahiro Mori is a well-known Japanese robotics scholar whose notion of Uncanny Valley is worldly famous. Mori is also a student of Buddhism and a practitioner of Zen.

We found that Russian speakers were faster to discriminate two colors when they fell into different linguistic categories in Russian than when they were from the same linguistic category. Moreover, this category advantage was eliminated by a verbal, but not a spatial, dual task.

These results demonstrate that (i) categories in language affect performance on simple perceptual color tasks and (ii) the effect of language is online (and can be disrupted by verbal interference).

One cannot arrive at a conception of good without “looking before and after”. It introduces the question of palliative or cure.

A Buddhist response to Western accusations of being insufficiently interested in social welfare.

Once upon a time, the Bodhisattva was born in a distinguished brahmin family…

A retelling of:

1. the Rsipañcaka Jātaka
2. the Sārthavāha Jātaka
3. the Sarvamdada Jātaka
4. the Matsaranand Āvadāna and
5. the Bhavalubdhak Āvadāna

from the Avadānasārasamuccaya and the Jātakmālāvadāna-sūtra.

Continuously enfolding the lives, activities, values and times of all its previous inhabitants, the landscape is simultaneously unfolding to its current inhabitant or observer as a corpus of heterogeneous narratives – myths, legends, historical accounts or individual life-histories attached to it. […] ‘Landscape is time materializing.’

East Asians and Westerners perceive the world and think about it in very different ways.

… this article explores how the early Buddhist teaching can challenge and enrich how we think of persons and bodies in relation to other beings and environments. Through a discussion of the powerful emotion of fear and the importance of vulnerability, the article develops thoughts on how Buddhist emotional practices as practices of care can inspire new approaches in today’s times of escalating ecological crisis and acute vulnerability in coexisting and intersecting human and nonhuman pluriworlds.

… in Huayan philosophy in particular the notion of interconnectedness or interdependence arose, according to which all phenomena relate to each other in one way or another. Despite its traction in the contemporary setting, this notion needs to be recognized as a later development that is by no means identical with the basic Buddhist teaching on dependent arising.

… meditation may have salutary effects on telomere length by reducing cognitive stress and stress arousal and increasing positive states of mind and hormonal factors that may promote telomere maintenance. Aspects of this model are currently being tested in ongoing trials of mindfulness meditation.

These scholarly nuns elevate the standards of their Buddhist academies and use their original academic specializations to expand the educational curriculum of their school. The role of scholarly nuns in contemporary Taiwan exemplifies that Buddhism provides educational resources for women, as educational resources enhance women’s engagement in Buddhism.

… how mothers deal with the political situation that is responsible for the early and violent deaths of their children

This article uses a Himalayan Buddhist lens to critically interrogate a fundamental premise of ‘the Anthropocene’—that the epoch commemorates a ‘newfound’ capacity of humans to mobilise Earth forces. Rather, Himalayan Buddhism has long held that humans wield geological agency, mobilised through relationships with territorial landscape deities, which inflict severe weather in retaliation for human moral infractions.

Offering an alternative model of anthropogenic climate change, Buddhist and Indigenous lifeworlds challenge Western convictions that ‘the Anthropocene’ is a novel planetary epoch. Since the term has gained a vibrant discursive life beyond geology, its cultural assumptions—rather than biophysical thresholds—are primarily evaluated, revealing an extension of Eurocentric colonial logic into this new planetary chapter. Alternatively, I suggest the Himalayan Buddhist term ‘kawa nyampa’ (degenerate era) better encapsulates our transition towards environmental breakdown. There was no need to ‘invent’ the Anthropocene as a new epoch of thought—it had long already existed.

Nepalese society is not friendly for the returnee women.

By examining abject preta bodies in accordance with their aesthetic description and function in relation to Buddhist understandings of karma and rebirth, we can observe two overlapping somatic discourses at work. The first speaks to the ultimately impermanent nature of the body, while the second depicts bodies as simultaneously ethical subjects and objects.

In this article, the author examines depictions of the abject bodies of disgusting pretas in early South Asian narratives. She explores what these abject bodies reveal about early, Indian Buddhist attitudes toward embodiment and difference.

striving for value-free science is both unattainable and undesirable

We show here, using quantitative methods on a large cross-linguistic corpus of 17 languages, that the coupling between information per syllable and speech rate properties results in languages encoding similar information rates (~39 bits/s) despite wide differences in each property individually.

…the Realized, Worthy and Perfectly Awakened One has proclaimed these six distinctive ways by which one finds open space in the crush…

… dependent origination in early Buddhism was transmuted from a causal chain binding beings to samsara—something to get free from—into contemporary interpretations of interdependence as a web of interconnected beings and events to celebrate, embrace, and become one with.

The early conception of dependent origination is first reframed in the Mahayana, through ideas such as interpenetration in the Avatamsaka Sutra and the reverence for the natural world in East Asia. The concept then picks up western influences from Romanticism, Transcendentalism, systems theory, deep ecology, and popular accounts of quantum physics. The recent synthesis of these elements is a hybrid concept of interdependence unique to contemporary Buddhism that combines cosmology and world-affirming wonder with ethical, political, and ecological imperatives.

Philosophically and normatively, this monastery embraces eco-centrism through notions of interconnectedness, instructions for meditation, environmental lifestyles, and non-violent ideals. In practice, however, the monastery displays a measure of anthropocentrism in terms of rhetoric which values humans more than the rest of the natural world, human-centered motivations for environmental lifestyles, and limits on non-violence which favor human lives.

In the early post-independence period in Burma, a large number of hierarchical, initiatory, and secretive esoteric congregations were founded by charismatic leaders in urban areas. These attracted many devotees, including representatives of the state. The relationship between the state and the esoteric congregations was tense, especially during the rule of the military governments, and the state sought to suppress the congregations in the early 1980s.

In this article, one esoteric congregation—the ariyā-weizzā organization—is taken as an example of these congregations:

1. First, the article demonstrates how the members of this congregation view themselves as performing the state, and shows what kind of power they perceive themselves to exercise.
2. Second, in socio-political terms, the article seeks to explain why tensions emerged between the state and the esoteric congregations, and it demonstrates how these congregations have contributed to performing the state.

Our findings could be laid out along a developmental continuum: portrayals were seen to range from unreflective voicing of a reified self, to more developed self-narratives in which mindful awareness (a meta-position) was portrayed in dialogue: bringing an inquisitive, present-focused, and compassionate awareness to habitual reactions. The telos of development, as seen from both [Dialogical Self Theory and Buddhist] perspectives, entails de-positioning: describing simple awareness of being. Our analyses display how the voice de-reifies self, and how that voice may be taken up by practitioners, to varying extents.

The debate that we staged among the monks in our very last activity session about whether to edit the human genome was outstanding, and demonstrated how effective the monks are as thinkers once I had presented the underlying science and issues involved. And despite the fact that when they come to the West, they often seem very quiet and serious, in the monastery, they are very boisterous and willing to try anything.

In June 2018, I traveled to India to teach in a Tibetan Buddhist monastery under the auspices of the Emory-Tibet Science Initiative, a program that brings aspects of science education to the three major Tibetan monastic universities in exile. My role was to teach developmental biology to the monks over a 9-day period, and I found zebrafish development to be an excellent vehicle for introducing them to both the wonder of embryonic development and to some of the most advanced findings in the field of developmental biology. I describe here my experiences, observations, and thoughts about how the monastic system will need to change if the monks are really to develop the ability to think like scientists.

This study explores the phenomenological structure of mystical experience among 139 Chinese Pure Land and Chan Buddhist monks and nuns. Semi-structured interviews, thematic coding, and statistical analyses demonstrated that Stace’s common facets of mysticism as measured by Hood’s Mysticism Scale successfully described Buddhist experience as modified by Buddhist doctrines.

These results lend strong support to the thesis that the phenomenology of mystical experience reveals a common experiential core that can be discerned across religious and spiritual traditions.

Value capture happens when your environment presents you with simplified versions of your values, and those simple versions come to dominate your practical reasoning. Value capture offers you a quick shortcut—an opportunity to take on prefabricated values. You do not have to go through the painful process of value deliberation if you can get your values off the shelf.

I want to focus on one particularly clear, and quite common, form of value capture: when an institution presents you with some metric, and then you internalize that metric.

I mean to exclude here from the category of value capture those cases where we use external values as proxies and heuristics under full reflective control—when we select, monitor, and adapt those heuristics in the light of our own richer values.

… we will flourish when we have the capacity to adjust and tailor our values in light of our rich experience of the world living under them. When we tailor our values to ourselves in light of those rich experiences, then our values will be better fit to promote our flourishing, as the very specific people we are.

Cambodia is strewn with places of national, local or, most frequently, village importance, considered as potent places, that is to say, places that are said to have agency and a positive or negative power of interaction with human beings. This paper emphasises the constituent principles of potency using case studies based on ethnographic research conducted between 2007 and 2015 in Pursat province, western Cambodia.

Beginning with the analysis of the sanctuary of a powerful land guardian spirit called Khleang Muang, the author progressively guides the reader to all the potent places that form a network which spatially tells the legend of the sixteenth-century Khmer King Ang Chan who passed by Pursat, coming from Angkor and settled in Lovek (south of Tonle Sap Lake). Violent death and sacrifices, rituals, spiritual energy called paramī, old buildings, monasteries, precious tableware kept in the soil, trees, stones, termite mounds … all those constituents of the potency of the places are analysed. The author’s discussion of the core of potency (pāramī) enables her to show how Buddhism and land guardian spirit cults are entangled in a single still hierarchical religious system.

It has been claimed that Indian Buddhism, as opposed to East Asian Chan/Zen traditions, was somehow against humour. In this paper I contend that humour is discernible in canonical Indian Buddhist texts, particularly in Indian Buddhist monastic law codes (Vinaya). I will attempt to establish that what we find in these texts sometimes is not only humourous but that it is intentionally so.

This paper offers a comparative study of a cluster of stories in which the Buddha-to-be makes a sacrifice – of flesh, family members or wealth – in exchange for a single verse of teaching. […] The paper argues that these tales reveal new perspectives on the oft-studied relationship between Buddha and Dharma, and between the Buddha’s physical body and his body of teachings

The formal study of human cultural evolution began in the 1970s and has matured to the point of deriving practical applications. We provide an overview of these developments and examples for the topic areas of complex systems science and engineering, economics and business, mental health and well-being, and global change efforts.

This article presents an overview of various ways in which Buddhists and Muslims have lived together in Indonesia since the arrival of Islam about 1200. It tells how Buddhism has slowly disappeared and become a religion for mainly the Chinese who, until the late 19th century, have often converted to Islam.

This article analyzes the role of three key figures in the recent government–supported revival of Buddhism. These figures are the Chinese–Indonesian monk Ashin Jinarakkhita, the Balinese lay devotee and government official Oka Diputhera, and the Chinese–Indonesian businesswoman Sri Hartati Murdaya. They have tried to accommodate Buddhism to the Muslim–dominated nationalism of modern Indonesia. The result of the past five decades is that Buddhism has obtained a modest but safe position in independent Indonesia.

… the belief that all engagement is Western-influenced seems to endure, so Buddhists who avoid doctrinal hybridization may be assumed to not engage. These assumptions persist because relatively few studies are done on Buddhists’ and especially traditionalists’ actual engagement; some studies mischaracterize engaged traditionalists as modernists; and little research on today’s traditionalists, engaged or not, is done because scholars of contemporary Buddhism gravitate toward modernists.

The article was followed up in the same journal with a practical example of such an organization: The FPMT.

an occasional series of notes on Buddhist vocabulary

1. Vemātrī / vemātṛ
2. Parikarati: a ghost word
3. Vajrāgni
4. Rǎnhuì 染穢 and associated vocabulary
5. Qīnmèi 親妹 and qīnzǐ 親姉
6. Parikarṣati Reconsidered

Results showed that this meditation practice produced increases over time in daily experiences of positive emotions, which, in turn, produced increases in a wide range of personal resources. In turn, these increments in personal resources predicted increased life satisfaction and reduced depressive symptoms.

Discussion centers on how positive emotions are the mechanism of change for the type of mind-training practice studied here and how loving-kindness meditation is an intervention strategy that produces positive emotions in a way that outpaces the hedonic treadmill effect.

In Kunming, meat has long been a sign of prosperity and status. Its accessibility marked the successes of the economic reforms. Yet Kunmingers were increasingly concerned about excessive meat consumption and about the safety and quality of the meat supply. Buddhist vegetarian restaurants provided spaces where people could share meat-free meals and discuss and develop their concerns about meat-eating.

While similar to and influenced by secular, Western vegetarianisms, the central role of Buddhism was reflected in discourses on karmic retribution for taking life and in a non-confrontational approach that sought to accommodate these discourses with the importance of meat in Chinese social life. Finally, the vegetarian restaurants spoke to middle-class projects of self-cultivation, and by doing so potentially challenged associations between meat-eating and social status.

When faced with the task of rendering the term Tathāgata into other languages, translators had to decide between taking it to imply tathā āgata, “thus come”, or tathā gata “thus gone”

The essay connects the field of Buddhist studies to a larger conversation in the field of global education, arguing that Buddhist studies travel courses must interrogate concepts of global citizenship, address the legacies of colonialism, and teach the principles of ethical travel, in addition to introducing students to the living traditions of global Buddhism.

In spite of these negative descriptions of the behaviour of single Buddhist monks, the impression is certainly not correct that all monks followed all sorts of occupations to assure their good life and to increase their riches. There is no reason to doubt that the vast majority of monks seriously pursued their spiritual goals, particularly those who criticised their fellow monks for such lax behaviour.

three sets of omen verses from the Śārdūlakarṇāvadāna, which offers the earliest account of Astral Science (jyotiḥśāstra) in Buddhist literature

What is interesting about Ajātaśatru is that he is not only a committer of an ānantarya crime, but also an eminent lay disciple of the Buddha. […] Given his transformation, the salvation of Ajātaśatru provides a convenient platform for Buddhist authors to express their ideas on how to balance the workings of karma…

Probably, the Abhisamācārikā Dharmāḥ originally formed a part of the Vinaya of the Mahāsāṃghika-Lokottaravādins.

The fact that the body of a deceased monk did not decompose had long been considered a sign of high spiritual attainment in many parts of Asia, including Buddhist China. There are numerous records of eminent Chinese monks whose bodies miraculously showed no trace of decay after death. For months or years following their decease their unembalmed bodies continued to bear a healthy and lifelike countenance and give off a sweet perfume.

… instances of this pattern are not examples of the ‘play of formulas’ proprosed by Shulman.

What should a practitioner or a teacher of meditation know about basic human anatomy and physiology?

In this paper I outline the physiological knowledge and particular insights I have found useful for enhancing a person’s understanding of how we breathe, how we regulate our heart rate, and how we control our metabolic rate in ‘control’ or non-meditative states and the kinds of changes we might expect in a meditating subject.

The narrative of Devadatta’s early monastic life should be understood as a literary device that shows him as fulfilling the prerequisites for being a schismatic.

We suggest that muscular performance capabilities declined during hominin evolution in response to selection for repetitive, low-cost contractile behavior.

… their perfect physiques proclaim their supreme attainments.

Western philosophers did not hand down a rich tradition of thinking about animal consciousness. But Eastern thinkers have long been haunted by its implications— especially the Jains…

The adept who mastered them could claim that he shared a spiritual experience similar to that of the Buddha and this entitled him to say that he was speaking by the Buddha’s might.

The Mahāyāna likely emerged as a monastic, meditation-oriented movement.

This study is the first to use empirical physiological observations to examine the well-publicized theoretical 35°C wet-bulb temperature limit for human to extreme environments. We find that uncompensable heat stress in humid environments occurs in young, healthy adults at wet-bulb temperatures significantly lower than 35°C.

The fact that narratives have the potential to be an “act of social imagination” and serve as the foundation for moral agency fits well into Shabkar’s own understandings of the functions of Buddhist life stories.

This essay explores how Shabkar’s autobiography makes an indirect case for vegetarianism and ethical treatment of animals. By portraying animals as important participants in his stories, Shabkar shifts the focus from a human-centered view to one of impartiality. This approach, an example of the “act of social imagination,”  subtly encourages a vegetarian lifestyle and stands out from other Tibetan Buddhist arguments for vegetarianism. Shabkar’s storytelling invites readers to imagine a more ethical way of living, which helps build the foundation for moral choices.

One sage among them who possessed the five kinds of supernatural knowledge came down to the border of village. The sage told them what had happened…

Ancient fragments of the story of the Buddha’s “Twin Miracle”.

For the full comparison with existing parallels and a more thorough analysis, see his thesis on this Sūtra.

Exercise is an effective treatment for depression, with walking or jogging, yoga, and strength training more effective than other exercises, particularly when intense. Yoga and strength training were well tolerated compared with other treatments. Exercise appeared equally effective for people with and without comorbidities and with different baseline levels of depression.

In the mixture with rags, strings and pegs together, well it was my image [rūpa].
So in the mixture with bone, flesh and sinews it is the individual rūpa of living beings.
If I divide the body parts apart, there is no individuality by name.
As my love was in rags, so it is in the body. Oh, blind passion!

A series of Jātaka stories and poems from Tocharian fragments.

fearing that the merchants would throw the Sūtras and Buddha’s portraits overboard, I concentrated with all my heart on Guanshiyin

Analysis of work practices in imaging units and hospitals demonstrates how each image intertwines aspects of a patient’s body, socio-technical features, and economic priorities in locally specific ways to constitute the body in medical practice and social life.

Despite the tendency of popular narratives to position MRI examinations as objective knowledge, these images are not neutral nor are they equivalent to the physical body.

In Jainism there is no equivalent path to the bodhisatt(v)a path; the karma that guarantees jinahood is bound a mere two births before that attainment, and the person who attracts that karma cannot do so willfully, nor is he aware of it being bound. There is therefore no Jain equivalent to the ubiquitous jātaka literature. In this paper I will explore what the absence of a jātaka genre in Jain traditions tells us about the genre’s role in Buddhism.

I begin with some general observations on the gender of the Buddha’s past lives as reported in jataka narratives, followed by a translation of the relevant section from the Ekottarikaagama. Then I compare this Ekottarika-agama version to three other versions of this tale preserved in Pali and Chinese, in particular in relation to the way they deal with the dictum that a woman cannot receive a prediction of future Buddhahood.

The Chinese translations are mirrors of Indian scriptures, whose languages had shifted from colloquial ones, including Gāndhārī, to Sanskrit. Many of these Chinese translations are dated or datable. Therefore, if we carefully put the translated and transliterated words in chronological order, we may be able to trace the change of the original Indian forms

I present here a preliminary report on selected engraved or inscribed objects, most of them recently found in Southeast Asia. Foremost among them are those indited with the single word apramāda: ‘careful’, ‘heedful’, ‘aware’.

A few Buddhist talismans used to ward off danger in medieval Southeast Asia.

The evidence points to a significant Buddhist presence with one or more structural reliquary stūpas dating to the early centuries BCE.

The defining characteristic of the Saṁsthāva as a monastic organization is taking the texts seriously and trying to put them into practice. They profess a strict adherence to the Pali canon and the Theravada commentarial literature.

A look at the conservative, forest tradition of Sri Lanka as conservators not only of ascetic orthodoxy, but of the forests themselves.

The author gives a brief introduction to the texts and the story, drawing on parelles of a similar story as found in the Avadāna-śataka. The article ends with a full presentation of the Chinese and Tibetan versions of the story and the author’s own translation.

… and he does all this by forcing us past our accustomed conceptual language to unaccustomed words, words that gain vividness and specificity by the contrast with that accustomed language.

Thirty one years after the publication of The Forest Monks of Sri Lanka, the author reflects on its public life and on the philosophical nature of anthropology books in general.

From the point of view of both language and contents, I conclude that the Pāli inscriptions of Burma and Siam give firm evidence for a Theravādin presence in the Irrawaddy and Chao Phraya basins, from about the fifth century CE onwards.

The Vessantara Jātaka is not only the most popular of all the Buddhist Jātaka tales, but is important in the tradition as a whole, generally considered by the Theravādin tradition to display the epitome of the Bodhisatta’s perfection of giving (dānapāramī). While most studies have focused on philological approaches, numerous questions as to the text’s structure and how to interpret individual parts within that structure have remained unresolved My study shall employ the theory of ‘chiasmus’ (inverted parallelism) to shed new light on both the key message of the story and also the sub-themes within it.

The suttas were intended to be heard; long suttas were, and often still are, performative, listened to over sometimes several hours, embedded in rituals designed to highlight their efficacy. This article shows that the recital of key repeat passages within the long suttas is linked to specific and often distinctive literary and meditative effects, particularly adapted for oral performance. It suggests that such passages should not be marginalized but rather seen as central indicators of meaning.

An analysis of the function of the repetitions in the Brahmajāla Sutta (DN 1) and the Mahāsamaya Sutta (DN 20) and the role of community, ritual, and meditation in the reading of Buddhist canonical texts.

The prince and his two wives, buddhas of the ten directions, gods and nāgas all shed tears, which collect to form a big lake. Lotus flowers bloom on the lake, and from them spring buddhas. The earth quakes, and rainbows and flowers rain down from the sky.

A couple, previously unidentified, Tibetan parallels to the Vessantara Jātaka.

Jātakas are often associated with specific locations, both within the land of Buddhism’s birth, and in other parts of Asia. There are records suggesting that such locations became early pilgrimage sites; contemporary sources also make reference to ‘local’ jātakas, which in many cases help to assimilate Buddhism into the local culture through its geography.

In this article I will argue that it is the structure of jātaka stories that allows this localisation to take place all over Asia. I contend that since the jātakas themselves are lacking in specific external referents they can easily be given a location, whilst their framing in the ‘present’ time of the Buddha’s teaching career grounds the stories in both time and place, without infringing on the flexibility of the individual stories. This ability to provide centrally legitimated relevance for each and all contributes greatly to the popularity and endurance of the jātaka genre.

Without vultures to consume them, there were more dead animals lying around, which sometimes ended up in rivers or other bodies of water, tainting local water supplies.

What humans get out of biodiversity.

Then, when King Brahmadatta had released the elephant, he said in verse:
‘You should now leave, O king of elephants!
Serve your parents and be filial (towards them)!’

Considered overall, what the verses of Thig record in different ways is just one central thing: the success of committed Buddhist soteriological endeavours.

Loy’s central thesis is that there are common “spiritual roots” to our ecological crisis and the Buddhist soteriological structure, when properly understood and applied from the individual to the collective case, holds the key to our way out.

Loy’s wish is not simply that we all “stop befoul[ing] our own nest” in the ways already mentioned, but that we all “awaken” to the true causes of environmental spoilage—our false belief in an ultimate “separation from other people and from the natural world” and our dysfunctional striving after “ever-increasing power and control” as a way of resolving our collective anxiety about what it means to be human. If these points weren’t proof enough of Loy’s unwillingness to play by any Maritainian or Rawlsian-inspired rules of compartmentalization, there is also his direct appeal to religions to change their internal lives: to “stop denying evolution and instead refocus their messages on its meaning.”

An article about Buddhist environmentalism and a critique thereof.

The article first identifies and assesses two different strategies used by advocates of Buddhist environmentalism in Thailand, one being textual and the other practical. Then, after laying out the deficiencies of the textual strategy, the article argues that the practical strategy offers a more meaningful basis for a discourse of Buddhist environmental concern.

So if Americans are to understand Buddhist forms of meditation and if Buddhism is to be transferred successfully to America, Americans must understand sati development correctly. Unfortunately, such understanding is difficult to attain because of the great differences in language, philosophy and “worldview”

An introduction to the Theravāda view of the mind.

Our observations demonstrate that ancient Indian artists of the Gandhara region had a basic knowledge of human anatomy, especially surface anatomy and musculoskeletal features. They also possessed knowledge of the approximate size and position of the bones, joints and muscles, including their approximate origin and insertion points. However, certain errors of anatomical knowledge including an extra number of ribs and a segmented sternum were noticed.

An anatomical review of a few Gandharan “Fasting” Buddha statues, including this one:

There are, in short, 89 types of consciousness. They are fourfold. How? (i) Moral, (ii) Immoral, (iii) Resultant and (iv) Functional in classification.

This is a translation of the circa 10th-century Ceylon Abhidhamma summary: the Nāmarūpasamāso, also known as the Khemappakaraṇa in Burma, where the text gained some popularity.

To ask whether Buddhism accepts the instrumental use of animals, whether human or otherwise is, again, to look for Western concepts and ideas, and perhaps even specifically modern ones, in an ancient, Asian tradition. I do not want to take sides on the issue at all; my concern, rather, is to identify any hidden assumptions that may prevent us from judging the tradition on its own terms.

This article defends Buddhism against Paul Waldau’s accusation of speciesism, arguing that Waldau incorrectly attributes certain Western moral concepts to Buddhism. It suggests that these concepts, such as intrinsic moral value based on specific traits and ethical treatment of humans, may not be inherent to Buddhism. Additionally, it highlights that Pāli texts do not seem to grant intrinsic value to any life form, suggesting that Buddhists should seek explanations within their own tradition for ecological concerns.

Lacking understanding, merely hearing the Dhamma may only grant a better rebirth, but even a better rebirth provides the condition for future enlightenment.

This article delves into the question of whether animals can benefit from hearing the Dharma. The author examines how animals might be influenced by the Dharma and explores broader questions related to the practice and impact of “hearing the Dharma.”

The modern appetite for bingeing on box sets and multi-episode podcasts makes it clear that we are not losing the ability to concentrate, merely directing it towards different media. We concentrate when we want to.

What the above-cited reports and the colophons indicate is, rather, a symbiosis of the Mahāsāṃghikas and the followers of Mahāyāna Buddhism (at least) in Pāṭaliputra. This symbiosis is illustrated clearly in the case of the aforementioned Master Mañjuśrī, who dwelt in the Devarāja Monastery, whose monks were Mahāsāṃghikas, and was revered by all the Mahāyāna monks in the country.

Taking seriously Faxian’s report of the monasteries in the Magadha capital circa 406 C.E.

Over the past decade, social media platforms have penetrated deeply into the mech­anics of everyday life, affecting people’s informal interactions, as well as institutional structures and professional routines. Far from being neutral platforms for everyone, social media have changed the conditions and rules of social interaction. In this article, we examine the intricate dynamic between social media platforms, mass media, users, and social institutions by calling attention to social media logic—the norms, strategies, mechanisms, and economies—underpin­ning its dynamics.

During the Syrian crisis, the media formed part of what officials describe as constant pressure from many actors to respond, which they say led to policy failures. Syria’s conflict is a cautionary tale.

It is often said that the increasing availability and applicability of remote sensing technologies has contributed to the rise of what can be called ‘satellite-based activism’ empowering non-state groups to challenge state practices of seeing and showing. In this article we argue that NGO activism is not challenging the sovereign gaze of the state but, on the contrary, actually reinforcing it.

We report evidence that posts about political opponents are substantially more likely to be shared on social media and that this out-group effect is much stronger than other established predictors of social media sharing, such as emotional language.

Why social media is particularly divisive as a medium.

In this article I argue that the jātakas are able to tell us interesting things about the capabilities of animals. By using stories of another key animal character—namely Devadatta, the Buddha’s nemesis—I explore what might be distinctive about the ability of animals to misbehave.

Since Devadatta appears 28 times as an animal and 46 as a human, he allows us to probe whether or not the text’s compilers saw a difference between human and animal capacities for evil. In the process, I raise questions about how we should view animal tales in the Jātakas more broadly, and highlight the productive tension between animals as unfortunate fellow travellers in the cycle of rebirth, and animals as literary devices that shed light on human behaviour.

Conversing with human-animal relationships within other Buddhist traditions, this article explores the resonances between the presence of animals and ideas of successful labour, both physical and contemplative, amongst Australian Buddhists in a time of ecological crises. In conversation with notions of ecological health and renewal, native animals are often seen as companions, tutelary beings, and as being indicative of successful practice.

… a translation of a small section of the first Bhāvanākramah (The Process of Meditation), a well-known Mahayana meditation manual written by Kamalasila (740-795 CE). This passage, appearing early in the text, allows us to gain a good sense of the context within which Mahayana concern for the well-being of animals arises.

Against the background of guidelines on non-killing and developing ideas on the release of captured or domesticated animals, this study focuses on how vinaya (disciplinary) texts deal with dangerous and/or annoying animals, such as snakes, mosquitoes, and flies. Are there any circumstances in which they may be killed, captured, or repelled? Or should they be endured and ignored, or even protected and cherished, at all times? This paper discusses the many guidelines relating to avoiding—and, if necessary, chasing away—dangerous and annoying animals.

All of these proposals call for meticulous care to reduce the risk of harming the creature. In this sense, animals, such as snakes and mosquitoes, seem to be assured a better life in comparison with domesticated or hunted animals. This distinction reflects the somewhat uncomfortable balance that Buddhist monastics must achieve between respecting the life of individual sentient beings, including all animals, and adhering to social conventions in order to safeguard their position in society.

He thinks and he feels, but—as far as I can tell—he does not speak, nor is he simply the previous animal rebirth of an eventual human being. There is something powerful, I contend, about the mute presence of such an animal—its noble silence, its freedom from the glibness of human language

On how Pali and other Indian literature used animals as both stand-ins for and foils of its human characters.

… analysis showed virtual reality meditation to be significantly more beneficial than video meditation.

… wearing only a saṃkakṣikā, because the latter appears not to cover the breasts completely, but only providing some support

A Gandharan stucco figurine of a female Buddhist monk in the Civico Museo Archeologico in Milan, likely from Hadda around the second century AD, providing rare evidence of female monastics in Gandhāra and their attire.

The monk Soreyya replies that his attachment is stronger for the sons of which he is the mother.

A (transgender?) parent and monk overcomes their attachments and gains enlightenment in a famous story that Dhammadinnā Bhikkhunī shows is not devaluing “motherly love” so much as “super-valuing” equanimity towards all.

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Zhu Fonian may have begun to produce new ‘scriptures’ without benefit of any Indian source-texts in an attempt to revive his own flagging fame.

How one Chinese Āgama translator came to write Chinese apocrypha.

Word got around. The family’s library of physical films and books became a kind of currency. Neighbors offered bottled water or jars of peanut butter for access. The 1989 Tom Hanks comedy The ’Burbs was an inexplicably valuable commodity…

On the continuing relevance of movie disks in the era of streaming.