The original text of the law is inscribed in “letters as big as a cow” on the boundary-wall of the universe, from which it is transcribed and transmitted to the human realm by [Manu], who magically retrieved the alien text during the reign of the first king Mahāsammata. In addition to its origins in outer space, accessible only to superhuman cosmonauts, dhamma-sattha texts are engaged in a complex relationship with Buddhist vinaya and sutra texts, which are frequently deployed, although sometimes with substantial changes…

A brief look at the actual legal history of Burma shows that the supposed constitutionality of dhammasattha treatises was always in negotiation with the proclamations of kings, showing how power and rhetorical authority were actually constituted in premodern, mainland Southeast Asia.

Shortly after the conclusion of the Korean War in 1953, the Buddhist monastic community in South Korea was beset by an internal schism concerning celibacy that turned into a power struggle for control of the Korean sangha. Aside from the temples themselves, the secular courts were the primary battleground in this dispute over monastic marriages and celibacy.

The secular courts had no legal basis under the post-1948 Constitution for deciding whether celibacy was required in order to maintain one’s status as a Buddhist monk. The cases focussed instead on the legality of revising the Chogye Order’s own Constitution (chonghŏn), or more specifically the meeting or gathering in which these changes were authorized.

This chapter presents two contrasting examples of Buddhist activists whose on-the-ground activities and institution-building efforts have been defined by concerns about divisions between religion and state stipulated by Japan’s 1947 Constitution. The first case introduces Buddhist clergy who mobilized following the March 11, 2011 disasters in northeast Japan. The second investigates the lay Buddhist organization Soka Gakkai and its affiliated political party Komeito.

… how Japanese Buddhist practitioners’ mimesis of the constitutional form, the legal structures that gird it, and practices of commemorating and promoting the national constitution produces forms of “constitutional Buddhism.”

This chapter explores the notion of the ‘scholar-practitioner’ of yoga. It investigates how scholars who take yoga as a subject of their academic work situate themselves with regard to its practice(s), and examines the degree to which their practice of yoga informs their scholarly work and vice versa.

The essay looks at the Buddhist Association of China (BAC), which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has promoted as an influential actor in Buddhist circles on the global stage, via one of its key instruments for influence in Chinese societies and abroad, the United Front Work Department (UFWD). This chapter argues that Buddhist actors who seek to shape the legal-political framework of their societies according to their values are facing increasing competition from a fellow influential Buddhist association that conveys the positions of its political mentor rather than shared religious values.

Gives a good history of the CCP’s relationship with Buddhism—from antagonism to co-option—and gives some thoughts about the relationship between Buddhism and the state across Asia.

The next stage of practice, then, combines awareness of the effective tone of experience with mindfulness directed to its ethical context expressed in terms of the distinction between worldly and unworldly feelings.

A brief overview of “the mindfulness of feelings” from the Early Buddhist perspective.

To sum up: the ‘sign’ ‘signals’ what is ‘significant’ enough to merit closer attention.

An excellent summary of what “nimitta” meant in the suttas and their commentaries.

Bhante Analayo was, however, mistaken in saying that:

With full awakening, all misleading notions and ‘signs’ of permanency are forever left behind.

The mistaken notion of permanency is overcome at Stream Entry. With full awakening, the illusion of a subject who does the perceiving is left behind.

A film appears to us as a reality that has its own existential value, one that is initiated from the existential value of the photographed being or object in the past. Yet, it remains a set of sense data, an assemblage of light and shadow that runs 24 frames per second.

This chapter discusses a little-known Buddhist scripture, the Sutra of the Questions by Druma, King of the Kinnara (Daiju kinnara-ō shomon-gyō), translated into Chinese by Kumārajīva in the early fifth century. This sutra is unique in that it proposes a powerful, and sympathetic, philosophy of music rooted in the Mahayana doctrines of emptiness; it also offers a template for Buddhist rituals involving music and dance that have been performed in Japan since the eighth century as part of the Gagaku and Bugaku repertory.

Secular mindfulness requires an ideology of white conquest that makes invisible the enduring efforts of Asian and Asian-American Buddhists in maintaining the legacy of mindfulness practices.

The bilingual character of Theravāda Buddhism is no accident. It emerges from deliberate cultivation by Buddhist intellectuals in these regions over the past two millennia. The Theravāda transmission of texts is notably bilingual; scriptures in Pāli are often accompanied by vernacular translations and Pāli-vernacular bilingual texts, or “bitexts.”

Unaffiliated with any particular school or doctrinal tradition, Wonhyo applied himself to the explication of all the major Mahāyāna source texts that were available at the time, and in doing so had a major impact on East Asian Buddhism.

This paper explores Wonhyo’s role in harmonizing Mahāyāna doctrines and his extensive commentarial work, while also discussing his hagiography—which likely reflects the folk hero he became rather than the historical thinker himself.

Kings and ministers thus boasted among themselves over their exclusive fidelity to orthodox Confucian values, even as they worked to assure that the Buddhist institution was aligned with the practical needs of the kingdom.

In this book chapter, Evon explores the enduring interplay between Buddhism and statecraft in Korea, tracing how Buddhist institutions and ideologies have been leveraged by rulers from ancient times through the modern era, emphasizing the adaptive nature of Korean Buddhism in legitimizing political authority.

The position of the family-priest is legitimated by the application of a fundamental [Tantric] Buddhist idea: the hierarchy of Disciples’ Way (śrāvakayāna), Great Way (mahāyāna) and Diamond Way (vajrayāna). Thus the family-priesthood in Newar Buddhism, exercised by the Vajrācāryas alone, is justified in terms of the images of bodhisattva (altruistic saint) and siddha (accomplished one), the ideals of Great Way and Diamond Way respectively. Vajrācāryas are monks, householders and priests all at once and the contradiction this seems to entail in modern eyes is avoided traditionally by viewing this sequence as a hierarchy.

Focusing on the shock (saṃvega) that may occur when one is reminded of things one has forgotten, the paper argues for the ethical significance not so much of remembering the past as of remembering that one has forgotten it. The colorful tales from the Divyāvadāna serve as brilliant and humorous reminders of the enormity of all we have forgotten.

These Buddhist traditions are often labeled as “Tibetan,” as they are believed to have originated historically from Tibet, to share narrative traditions with Tibetan Buddhism, and to use Classical Tibetan as the language of their recorded canons. The organization of these traditions into what we might call “orders” is, however, complex in the Tibetan cultural world.

Shakya Shri’s students and patrons chose to adopt and promote his lineage in the Himalayan region. It explores how new Buddhist lineages were integrated into existing religious frameworks without causing disruption, focusing on the cultural and ritual continuity that facilitated this process. these new transmissions were accepted smoothly because they utilized familiar Buddhist forms, rituals, and cosmological ideas, making them appear as extensions of established traditions.

Meet the people, the hoarders, not as bearers of mental illness but as differently-abled bodies that might have special sensory access to the call of things.

mGur (pronounced gur) denotes a specific type of religious poetry that has played an important role in the expression and transmission of Buddhism across the Tibetan cultural world. The term mgur is usually translated as ‘song’ and it has been used to refer to a wide variety of oral and literary creations.

Tibetan Buddhism has historically included non-monastic practitioners who used religious poetry (mGur) to share their spiritual teachings. Through the life and works of Milarepa and Tsangnyön Heruka, this work explores how wandering yogins revitalized Buddhism by presenting it in accessible, creative ways beyond traditional institutions.

Many modern Japanese women are bored with their lives and they use ‘organ language’ to express this frustration…

Medication and the small life-style modifications suggested by professionals for some women no doubt often help to ease the sense of oppression that patients experience. At the same time, medicalization can act as an ‘opiate,’ and can deflect attention away from the social origins of distress.

Bashō was a sensitive poet whose values were firmly founded in Buddhist, Confucian, and Daoist thought. Bashō, although having seriously studied Zen, was never a monk belonging to a monastery, but he often dressed as a priest and often stayed at temples and shrines.

Matsuo Bashō was a 17th-century, Edo poet and a true master of the Haiku form. His Oku no Hosomichi (The Narrow Road to the Interior) is one of the most celebrated, religious travelogues ever written.

Notice, in particular, the formal and ideological similarities to Thai Buddhism on display here.

social welfare activities conducted by nuns in Myanmar enhance their social and religious capital

I examine this change with the example of the Shwemyintzu nunnery founded in 1993 in the legacy of Daw Nyanacari.

The fifth-century philosopher Buddhaghosa influenced conceptions of the human throughout South and Southeast Asia for a millennium and a half, and continues to do so today.

I interpret the fin de Siècle through concepts and experiences of time and space that were reinterpreted in high culture, reworked by new communication and transportation technologies, and palpably manifest in everyday life.

Residents of oil-producing communities do more than merely consent to the operations of industry: they actively identify with the oil industry and perceive their interests and the industry’s interests as one and the same. This intense identification is manifest in community members’ vocal defence of the industry and in their adoption of industry-propagated frames of reference for understanding wider energy-related issues.

This essay examines consumption patterns in various regions in [sic] the world during the Fin De Siècle, with an organization by region.

National identity was frequently an important context of consumer culture in the 1870–1914 period.

The weaving together of first- and third-person narration in the JA allows the Buddha to identify himself with the story whilst simultaneously stepping back from it.

The first part, as is usual in votive texts, opens up a wide perspective on the Buddhist teaching and the value of sutras. It evokes the ephemeral nature of the world, including our fragile human existence. Rescue can only come through the knowledge of the correct texts that save and protect.

This book chapter details the archeological history of Stone Hymn, engraved Buddhist scriptures on Mount Tie (鐵山).

To see the image strictly as something to be seen is, in Skilling’s Buddhologist eyes, nothing less than to manifest ignorance…

This book chapter examines the concept of “icons” within Theravāda Buddhism, drawing on narrative depictions. It argues that debates in art history regarding insider (emic) and outsider (etic) interpretations are crucial for understanding Southeast Asian perspectives on the Buddha. These perspectives grapple with the Buddha as both a historical figure and a representation of transcendent ideals.

The vinaya canon, some major sutras and the writings of eminent vinaya exegete Daoxuan in China insisted that astrology was not to be practiced by a Buddhist monk or nun. Despite this fact, a tradition of Buddhist astrology nevertheless emerged in China from the eighth century and came to full maturity in the ninth century.

This article examines early Buddhist Vinaya rules on astrology in both India and China. The author shows that, though all varieties of astrology are forbidden in earlier texts, Buddhist monastics in China still developed and practiced it. The analysis delves into the motivations and justifications for this tradition and its significance for the evolution of Buddhism in East Asia.

Nagarjuna’s illocution seems an attempt to radicalize his difference from a developing Nyaya extensionalist theory of the pramanas, a theory in which the Buddhists and the Naiyayikas are closer than anywhere else.

Although the sūtra allows for war, it does so only under special conditions and with special restrictions on its conduct. In a graded series of skillful means, a king must first try to befriend, then to help, and then to intimidate his potential enemy before resorting to war.

Other kings have victories; he has dhamma victories. Other kings go on hunting expeditions; he gets much more pleasure out of dhamma expeditions, on which he makes gifts to brahmins and renouncers and senior citizens, tours the country and finds instruction in the dhamma. Other kings have officials; he has dhamma officials…

The Aśoka of his inscriptions and of the Theravāda texts compared.

Anyone who tries to emulate Buddhadasa, whichever life one has decided to lead, should first remember the authenticity in his life. Authenticity engenders humility because aspiring to any ideal can never be perfectly achieved.

A fascinating look at how Buddhadasa Bhikkhu responded to the challenges and opportunities of modernity in 20th century Thailand and provided an example able to inspire a new generation of Buddhists.

The question, then, is whether we desire and are able to organize society according to higher principles or whether we will surrender to the lowest common denominator approach of capitalism.

In Buddhist materials translated into Chinese, from the earliest times onwards, local magistrates are viewed in an extremely negative light. They are indeed most frequently grouped with bandits as a potential threat to property or worse…

medieval Pāli literary culture can be viewed as a form of qualified cosmopolitanism: one that advanced many of the cosmopolitan literary ideals of its time but also staunchly protected its exclusively Buddhist identity.

On how Pāli literature in medieval Sri Lanka responded to Sanskrit’s regional hegemony.

Starting with a brief summary of the recent discussion on the introduction of writing in India, the article examines the material contexts of the written texts produced during the reign of the Indian emperor Aśoka (r. 268-232 BCE). Even if these inscriptions on rocks and rock pillars may not have been the first written evidence, they represent the most extensive and diverse corpus of written texts from the early phase of writing in South Asia. Although this corpus only covers a period of less than twenty years, it shows a fairly quick development and improvement in various material aspects of writing, including writing materials, techniques, surfaces and text transmission.

Whenever anyone bodybuilds, he or she is always trying to understand and control the physical in the face of death. No wonder bodybuilding is centered around failure.

By the turn of the century, at least in Sri Lanka, the Buddhists no longer welcomed the white man who sought to speak on their behalf. They could speak for themselves, in English.

A snapshot of Buddhism in approximately the year 1900 of the Common Era (or 2444 After Nirvana).

His first essay, provocatively titled “The Doctrine of Tathāgata-garbha Is Not Buddhist,” leaves no doubt as to Matsumoto’s position or intent.

An overview of the writings of “Critical Buddhism.”

There are striking parallels between the Greek methods to train our mental responses to (bad) luck and the Buddhist analysis of unwholesome actions and corresponding advice to improve our karma. Both traditions are still helpful today in our attempts to secure happiness in the face of chance adversity.

True confidence only comes about once the teachings have led the disciple to personal verification of their efficacy.

Faith is a starting point for the realization of truth.

The paper also covers Dharmakīrti’s views on perception, inference, and scriptural authority as means of valid knowledge.

suññatā is a term pregnant with meaning and of central significance in all Buddhist traditions.

An introduction to the semantics, philosophy, and soteriology of “emptiness.”

If bhavaṅga is “unconsciousness”, then it certainly is not unconsciousness in the sense of a mental blank. In fact bhavaṅga is understood in the texts as in most respects sharing the same properties as other types of consciousness; bhavaṅga is not something different from consciousness, rather it is consciousness operating in a particular mode

This meaning, the author holds, might best be characterized as “lucid awareness.” He questions the common explanation of mindfulness as “bare attention,” pointing out problems that lurk behind both words in this expression.

You can also listen to Jonathan Nelson read the paper aloud on YouTube if you prefer.

Despite being cultural aliens, the nomads were aware of the superior literary and cultural tradition of the Chinese with whom they came into contact. Accepting the Confucian tradition and Chinese ways, however, would have meant subsuming their military superiority to and separateness from those they conquered. Instead, most nomadic rulers chose to adopt Buddhism as an alternative cultural policy.

Rather than “total prohibition”, [the Tongan word “taboo”’s] original denotation had to do with sacredness and uniqueness.

Many of [Hoi An’s new restaurants] specialized in fish and seafood, but others served expensive animal flesh attributed with virility, strength, and sexual potency, such as he-goat or wild animals. The virility and potency embedded in the flesh of these animals was further exacerbated by the hot, libido-enhancing spices such as chili, lemongrass, ginger, and rau răm. […] these venues were practically brothels.

There is one dharma that you ought to cultivate: mindfulness focussed on the body.

A Tibetan (and Sanskrit) parallel to the first section of DN 34 / DA 10.

The right view module enjoins adopting a correct basic attitude to karma, rebirth, as well as merit, giving and sacrifice that is informed by the Buddhist requalification strategy, so that it becomes integral to the Buddhist path and its emerging dāna ideology. The import of such an explicit promotion of a human recipient of worship or sacrifice can hardly be overestimated. This is a world apart from the ontological and cosmogonical yajña of the Ṛgveda

… the fourth meditative absorption, this is just like that tree gradually blooming.

A translation of a discourse from the Ekottarika-āgama which parallels the Pāricchattaka Sutta.

… the Buddha emphatically advised his disciples to become wise ones and “investigators”

Humans have cooperative sentiments usually assumed to be absent in rational choice theories. On the other hand, the slow rate at which cooperative institutions evolve suggests that considerable friction will afflict our ability to grow up commons management institutions where they do not already exist and to readapt existing institutions to rapid technological and economic change.

An answer to the question of how selfish genes produced cooperative people.

Everything is always at once a subject and object

A close reading of the medieval story of a boy raised by wolves and a wider meditation on man’s place in the world.

Let us now consider whether or not we, you and I, have prima facie obligations towards ecosystems, in particular, the obligation to avoid destroying them, apart from any human advantage that might be gained by their continued existence.

Rather than seeking to put forward a philosophical view about the nature of reality or knowledge, Nāgārjuna uses arguments for emptiness to purge Madhyamaka Buddhists of any view, thesis, or theory whatsoever, even views about emptiness itself.

For Venerable Analayo’s thoughts on how the śikṣādattaka emerged from earlier Vinaya practices, see Pārājika Does Not Necessarily Entail Expulsion.

While there is a growing recognition of the importance of asceticism in Buddhism among scholars, the view that Indian Buddhist monastic communities, on the whole, should be considered non-ascetic remains largely intact. It is the goal of this chapter to challenge this heavily ingrained attitude toward asceticism in the Indian Buddhist context.

in Rangjung Dorje’s poems, the environment is presented as a catalyst for seeing the enlightened “view”. This paper looks at the metaphorical landscape that Rangjung Dorje’s poems evoke, or, to incorporate a helpful term from contemporary literary studies, their “psychogeography”, their “sense of place”.

… the Buddhist tale of the impure, disgusting, and violent female body and the suffering of the fetus within the womb, so seemingly negative toward women, in fact operated discursively and affectively to support premodern female Buddhist monasticism by helping to generate a moral-social imaginary in which female fertility and sexuality cannot be the highest good of womanhood.

… the lives and thought of two rather different radical, Zen Buddhists of late Meiji Japan in order to discern whether and in what ways their progressive political ideals were influenced by Chan thought and practice.

Lanka’s pre-eminence was not a given, as by the early thirteenth century, the religious and intellectual centre began to shift towards Bagan in Myanmar. But the sudden decline of Bagan after the Mongol conquest at the end of the thirteenth century prevented the completion of Theravāda’s ‘great translocation’ to Southeast Asia.

… an outline of the Pāli cosmopolis during the second millennium of the Buddhist Era

In the early centuries AD the Sinhalese commentators and chroniclers assembled the data available to them and constructed a consistent chronology of the early history of Buddhism and of the kings of Magadha. The absolute chronology which they created has not proven acceptable

The Vinaya has outlasted Hammurabi and Justinian because it is a set of spiritual exercises rather than a legal system.

This chapter explores the sites of production of what consumers in Vietnam perceive to be clean and safe vegetables, that is, urban gardens in Hanoi and rural areas. Adhering to the historical continuity of home gardens, the chapter identifies a semantic shift of gardens from aesthetics to utility in the light of food anxiety.

… in sketching out what the councils were, I hope to indicate how they might be fruitfully studied

The one they chose was perfectly correct, but it was only part of the translation.

A post-script to Norman’s earlier paper on the evolution of the “Four Noble Truths” and a reflection on the difficulties in translating Pāli to English.

although the Buddha took over some of the terminology of Brahmanical Hinduism, he gave it a new Buddhist sense. The change of meaning is almost always a result of the fact that the Brahmanical terms were used in a framework of ritualism, while the Buddha invested them with a moral and ethical sense.

Hearing about the latest reality TV show with 20 beautiful women chasing after a rich bachelor, watching a commercial showing a woman getting excited about a kitchen cleaner, or even taking a class with a White instructor are all ways the environment can conspire to make us think about our social identities.

… care and skill provide blueprints for museums to manage the precarity, obsolescence and impermanence that inflect the techniques and technologies used to make many of their collections, as well as to support the discourses of preservation that underpin traditional definitions of heritage and conservation

… a brief survey of three modern day insight meditation traditions (I), followed by examining their common roots in the medieval scheme of insight knowledges (II), which in turn I trace back to the early discourses in the Pāli Nikāyas (III).

For a talk on this paper, see here.

The claim that Zen is the foundation of Japanese culture has the felicitous result of rendering the Japanese spiritual experience both unique and universal at the same time.

How globalization reshaped Zen.

… when the Japanese kept insisting that Buddhism was a specific religion that originated in north India, westerners were puzzled. There was no cult of Buddha in India, and northern India in particular was largely Muslim.

On the early modern encounters between Europeans and Japanese Buddhists and how they shaped each other’s understanding of Asia.

Linguistically, China remained China even after this massive import of Indian culture. Nevertheless, there are some non-negligible aspects of Indian Buddhist language that contributed [to] the Chinese language.

The ancient Indian gāthā – a proverbial, succinct type of single-stanza poetry, often collected in thematic sets – became a favoured form of expression among groups of ascetics from the middle to the end of the 1st millennium BCE.

Kamma is neither fatalism nor a doctrine of predetermination.

The task of meditation is to understand the nature of the mind and to use it effectively in daily life.

You should not evade self-responsibility for your own actions by blaming them on circumstances.

If the fragmenting forces of late modernity have shattered the illusion of a fixed self, anātman provides a way of rethinking subjectivity in its absence.

… the majority of philosophy is based on assumptions about the basic cognitive endowments of average individuals that totally disregard what is known about human development

A critique of the Western assumption of the rational citizen and a full-throated defense of education as activism.

We may begin with one simple list, but the structure of early Buddhist thought and literature dictates that we end up with an intricate pattern of lists within lists

I suggest that the original form of the ‘enlightenment’ set was the ‘basic’ set: idaṃ dukkhaṃ, ayaṃ dukkha-samudayo, ayaṃ dukkha-nirodho, ayaṃ dukkha-nirodha-gāminī paṭipadā When these items became known as “Truths”, they were [later] so designated: idaṃdukkha-saccaṃ, etc.

And for a short post-script to this on the translation of the ariya part, see Why “Noble?” (1990).

Aśoka (c. 268-232 BCE) and Jayavarman VII (1182-1220?), two of the greatest rulers of India and Southeast Asia, were Buddhists by any definition. However, the puzzling problem is that their deaths were followed by an inexorable decay of their erstwhile great empires.

The Buddhist tradition has tended to associate Moggallāna with concentration or serenity, and Sāriputta with wisdom or insight, and to characterize the former figure along with his outstanding faculty as inferior to the latter.

The historical period of this area was the third century until 627–649, when Zhenla took over. Buddhism on this route was mahāsāmghika. Important was Avalokiteśvara, Nanhai Guanyin, who may have merged with Mazu along the southern Chinese coast.

… the queerness of the figure of Ānanda, whose name can be variously translated as “joy,” “bliss,” or “happiness,” fairly lept off the pages at me

… the term Mūla-sarvāstivāda can serve a purpose as a designation for a specific, identifiable Āgama lineage of textual transmission

Just as the beautiful lotus blossom grows up from the mud and water, so one with an enlightened mind develops out of the ranks of ordinary beings

The early Buddhists of ancient India did not represent the Buddha with anthropomorphic statues as is ubiquitous now. This essay explores the symbols and objects that were venerated in the early period after the Buddha’s death.