Buddhism Comes West
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The encounter between Europeans and the Dharmic cultures of Asia.
Two Western monks in a thin, Australian forest drive their golf cart off into the late afternoon sunlight. (Gary A Collett, CC BY-SA 4.0)
Table of Contents
Books (24)
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273 pages
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… advice to Saṅgha members teaching to Americans; to Buddhist lay teachers and practicioners, both present and future, who are interested in engaging in [missionary] activities.
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A series of 16 short essays giving an excellent, high-level introduction to the history of Buddhism in America.
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⭐ Recommended214 pages[recommended but under copyright]
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246 pages[recommended but under copyright]
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194 pages[recommended but under copyright]
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Canonical Works (2)
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A young man in a remote part of India is able to ordain only after many delays. Eventually he meets the Buddha, who rejoices in his erudition.
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Readings (65)
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The Buddhist Modernist Monk: a figure now familiar and beloved in American culture as an embodiment of compassion and rationality, yet with a history of prejudice and politics that has yet to be meaningfully explored.
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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.
22 pages -
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An oral history of the antiquities smuggling which brought ancient Cambodian art to the Western world.
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… fundraising is a form of Dharma practice, gathering with peers is a way to raise money, and Buddhism is practiced as a form of group solidarity and support. These tight weaves have enabled temples to thrive in racially and religiously hostile lands
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In the quantitative analysis of a survey of 417 13- to 20-year-old [British] Buddhists, the 48% who had undergone a religious or spiritual experience (RSE) were significantly more likely to self-identify as a spiritual person.
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… white supremacy has created an American culture in which other practitioners, namely White practitioners, have been granted the freedom to be Buddhist in safer and more public ways. Instead of facing systemic injustice for embracing a spirituality that departs from the Judeo-Christian norm, White Buddhists are often lauded for this difference.
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… stereotypes flew in both directions: white Buddhists were called arrogant, over-focused on enlightenment, self-absorbed. Asian Buddhists were called too devotional, too hierarchical, over-focused on social and cultural activities.
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… it may be America’s destiny not to make Buddhism perfect but to make it banal
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… what do Buddhists do in the absence of resources to set up temples and attract monastics?
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On how Jesuit missionaries understood and portrayed Buddhism during the first modern encounters between the West and Far East.
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Intuition is the key to establishing any organization
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How the category of “Religion” was invented in colonial Asia.
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Understanding this three-fold structure involves adding a third term to the common opposition of religion as the transcendent sacred and science as the mundane secular.
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… monasticism in general is not ideal for some Western Buddhists—it is seen by some as too restrictive or anti-modern. While others find value in monasticism, they are aware of those who critique it, and some of these therefore offer instead a model that removes what they see as problematic, anti-modern elements.
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At these meetings a group of international European scholars developed a shared understanding of Buddhist doctrine and meditation that has become widespread, namely, the notion that Buddhism is, first and foremost, a noetic science the principal concern of which is the transformation of human psychology.
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Buddha-branded advertisements cater to all socio-economic classes not just the elite. Buddha is used as a spiritual resource to promote desire, reinforcing rather than challenging consumer culture. Buddha-branded advertisements are shaped by American cultural principles, and in return, the advertisements reshape various facets of identity and everyday American life.
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It gave me a chance to step out of go go go San Francisco culture, and take time to breathe — which I didn’t find time to do in the rest of my life.
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While the number of nominal Buddhists is still relatively low in Denmark, Danes’ appreciation of Buddhism is high.
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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.
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With a convert’s zeal, the young monk resolved to travel
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Having lost much of their following in the West, churches are now beginning to look for opportunities elsewhere.
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A photo essay celebrating Bhante Buddharakkhita: Uganda’s first Buddhist monk.
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a Barua caste member [and] an essential link between the Burmese vipassanā masters with whom he studied and his western students who have now become important meditation teachers
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For fascists, yoga was an occult tool for purifying and exalting the individual body as a microcosm of the triumphant nation.
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In the end money did come, from a most unexpected and unusual source
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In 1909 Lama Dorjev proposed to the Tsarist government that a Buddhist temple be set up in St. Petersburg
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A defense of Sam Hamill’s famous, unorthodox translation.
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… on the Western side of the Caspian Sea…
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180 years ago nobody really knew anything authentic about King Asoka
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Although Gunamuniratana and Dhammaratana did not go to Britain to teach the Dhamma they still stand as the first Buddhist monks to arrive in Europe, an extraordinary adventure in itself.
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Why were women not ordaining at a time when our world is so in need of the wise counsel and compassion of women monastic leaders?
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Audio/Video (30)
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Twentieth-century Americans imagined “the East” through a particular perception of what Eastern “spirituality” was and how one could access it: namely through the figure of the “Oriental Monk” which they encountered frequently in the movies and TV shows of that period.
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A neuroscientist and Tibetan translator shares the amazing yet familiar story behind his unconventional career.
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Because he’s neutral. I mean if we threw Christ up there, he is controversial. Everybody has got a deal about him. But Buddha, nobody seems to be that perturbed about a Buddha.
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The French anarchist who openned Tibetan Buddhism to the West.
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… mindfulness is being used to reinforce the capitalist system
1h 31 m -
The story of an itinerant, Irish laborer who ordains as a Buddhist monk in 1900 in British Burma and then campaigns tirelessly against colonialism.
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In which an American expresses his ambivalence about calling himself a Buddhist despite his belief in its therapeutic and even spiritual power: a common reaction among Westerners exposed to Buddhist practices.
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6 min -
Through the goodness that arises from my practice…
3 min
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