Background: Buddhism renders all the miseries and sorrows in human beings to the evils inherent in the cognitive process. In the Pāli Commentaries and Sub-commentaries, a comprehensive model of cognitive process is discussed in the terminology of Citta-Vīthi, however, this concept is depicted in the original Sutta, Vinaya, and Abhidhamma Canonical texts at the very basic level. In such teachings, knowledge acquired through sense perception is taken as the phenomena leading towards sorrow and misery. Objective: The objective of the study is to explore the models of five aggregates, six āyatana and eighteen dhātus, dependent origination, and thought proliferation in Sutta teachings. Methodology: This research work has adopted the critical thinking skill research method to explore the cognitive process models depicted in the Sutta Literature. Result: From such study, it has been found that in Sutta teachings cognitive process is depicted as the models of five aggregates, six āyatana and eighteen dhātus, dependent origination, and thought proliferation. Conclusion: The teachings of the Buddha always focus on the rational understanding (sammā-diṭṭhi) of the subject matter how the senses work and how the misery entails in these processes. Thus, it is important to explore the models of cognitive processes depicted in the original Sutta literature. For that purpose. At the end of this research, a conclusion is drawn that every event of the cognitive process begins from a simple sensation process and proceeds by degrees to a discriminative apprehension of the sense object.
Background: This paper analyzes Dr. B.R. Ambedkar's interpretation on the doctrine of karma and rebirth in Buddhism. Dr. Ambedkar, obviously, accepts the traditional Buddhist concept regarding karma and rebirth but he forwards his different opinion that the body upon the dissolution gets its Mahabhuts (Prithvi, Agni, jal, Vayu) stored in the respective Mahabhuts in the Universe. Objective: The paper is meant for clarifying Ambedkar's idea on karma and rebirth. It is to prove that the agrigates of a being get mixed into the mega agrigates in the universe during the time of death; and at the time of rebirth, the agrigates get reassembled with karmic consciousness, and there the being gets rebirth based on the past karma. Methodology: Library based Interpretive or Analytical approach is adopted to carry out the research. Result: Through the study it has been found that at the time of rebirth, the Mahabhuts including the elements like heat and consciousness come back to the mother's womb to get assembled and there the new being gets delivered on the planet together with the fruits of its old karma. Ambedkar relates karma and rebirth to modern science explaining 'Rebirth' as a cycle of physical elements, instead of the wandering soul. It is shown how Ambedkar reinterprets the traditional Buddhist ideas to fit with the conceptions of modern science and philosophy in the article. Conclusion: The Paper forwards the idea of Ambedkar that there is no rebirth of the soul but regeneration of the matter or element. There is the possibility of the fruit or retribution of the moral or immoral actions done by a person as the new being gets its old elements assembled during the time of rebirth.
This article investigates the interconnectedness of reality in the dialogue between quantum mechanics and Buddhist philosophy, from which is extracted an ethical stance on humanimal relationship. More precisely, physicist David Bohm’s ontological implicate order and Huayan Chinese Buddhism share a commonality of the preponderance of the whole, respectively expressed through the underlying unbroken wholeness of the nonlocal implicate order in Bohm and interpenetration in Huayan philosophy. Although caution is exerted in establishing such convergence of holistic thinking, a recurring and pervasive “principle of wholeness” can be inferred from this dialogue. In turn, this principle of wholeness is interpreted in an ethical way, providing a much-needed heuristic rearmament to encourage a revision of humanimal relationship, nurtured by a revived moral dedication. In a fundamentally interconnected universe, animals no longer represent an unfathomable and controllable “other” but become an instance of a reciprocal togetherness, an echo of the undifferentiated whole.
Over several decades, Liangkang Ni has developed a distinctive perspective on the parallels and divergences between Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology and Buddhism, particularly Yogācāra Buddhism. Despite the significance of his contributions, Ni’s writings remain largely unavailable in English and have thus had limited exposure in Western phenomenological discourse. This article addresses that gap by offering a thematic reconstruction of Ni’s key insights. The first part examines Ni’s reading of Husserl’s own philosophical reflections on Buddhism in relation to phenomenology. The second part explores Ni’s reconstruction of genetic and structural parallels between Husserl’s genetic phenomenology and Yogācāra doctrines such as vijñaptimātra (consciousness-only), ālaya-vijñāna, and manas. The article assumes some familiarity with Husserl and uses his framework as an entry point to introduce Buddhist concepts. Rather than offering new empirical data, the article provides conceptual clarification and theoretical integration aimed at informing contemporary debates in consciousness studies.
Abstract
This study aims to delve into the values of peace within Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity in Malaysia and its profound influence on the country's economic and political stability. This study employs a qualitative approach, utilising both primary and secondary sources. In-depth interviews were conducted with religious leaders representing Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity, while relevant documentation was used as a secondary source. The findings indicate the shared emphasis among religious leaders upon cultivating inner peace within their respective faiths. Each religion advocates that spiritual practices foster inner peace, contributing to a harmonious society, nation, and economic resilience. Conversely, neglecting these religious teachings can lead to violence, social issues, and an absence of peace within the country. Therefore, this study posits that peace holds immense significance, urging its integration among believers and indirectly impacting Malaysia's economic development and political stability.
Keywords:Value of peace, religious teachings, economic and political stability.
This paper explores the origin and role of the Buddhist taxonomic category “<i>zong</i> 宗” (“sect” or “school”) in the formation of modern Buddhism in China. It does so by examining a highly significant late-Qing Buddhist text titled <i>Ba-zong-er-xing</i> 八宗二行 (<i>Eight Schools and Two Practices</i>), which the author discovered recently in Japan. Authored by the 19th-century Manchu bannerman official Hešeri Rushan 赫舍裏如山, <i>Eight Schools and Two Practices</i> had a direct influence on the prominent Chinese lay Buddhist Yang Wenhui (1837–1911)’s <i>Shi-zong-lue-shuo</i> 十宗略说 (<i>Brief Outline of the Ten Schools</i>) (1913), which subsequently became the most important narrative model, known as the ten-school model, for describing Chinese Buddhist history in modern times. Historians have long recognized that Yang Wenhui’s <i>Brief Outline of the Ten Schools</i> (1913) was influenced by the medieval Japanese text <i>hasshū kōyō</i> 八宗綱要 (<i>Essentials of the Eight Schools</i>) composed by the 13th-century Japanese monk Gyōnen. Identifying, in detail, Hešeri Rushan’s influence on Yang Wenhui sheds light on how a narrative model for Buddhism in its national form grew out of trans-national intellectual sharing and interactions, and how Chinese Buddhism emerged from the interactive and mutually enabling Sino-Japanese discursive field of the 19th century. Gyōnen, Rushan, and Yang Wenhui all used the category <i>zong</i>, referring to both doctrine and school/sect, to organize narratives of Buddhist history. Their uses were, however, different. Gyōnen’s conception of <i>zong</i> (<i>shū</i> in Japanese) was fixed and exclusive, whereas <i>zong</i> for Rushan and Yang meant more of a mobile, nonexclusive identity. Without knowledge of Japanese Buddhism, Rushan made creative use of <i>zong</i> for describing the history and current condition of Chinese Buddhism, thereby superseding the traditional framework of lineage, doctrine, and precept, or <i>zong</i> 宗, <i>jiao</i> 教, <i>lu</i> 律. Rushan’s <i>zong</i> provided the necessary prerequisite knowledge for Yang Wenhui to understand Gyōnen’s theories, which he studied for constructing his own historical narrative and vision for modern Buddhism.
This paper examines the utilization of the mantra of light and its associated maṇḍala practices by Wang Hongyuan 王弘願 (1876–1937), a Chinese Buddhist during the Republican Period, and his adherents, which has not yet been noticed by previous scholars. With the import of esoteric Buddhist doctrines and practices from Japan, the mantra of light, which was a rarely used mantra in pre-modern China, gained renewed significance. This led to the widespread adoption of the ritual practices of this mantra by Wang Hongyuan and his surrounding Buddhist groups in early modern China. The rituals of this mantra were used as a supplement or substitute for near-death Pure Land practices. This paper presents Pure Land Buddhist practices intertwined with esoteric Buddhist elements or “esoteric” approaches to Pure Land rebirth in modern Chinese Buddhism which have been overlooked by previous scholars.
Over the last three decades of evolution, the Jogye Order’s postulant education system has made considerable progress in standardizing, centralizing, and modernizing Buddhist education for aspiring monastics. As celebrated by the order’s 2022 publication <i>The 30-year History of Buddhist Monastic Postulant Education</i>, the order’s program has successfully seen over 9800 ordained novices graduate since its launch in 1991. However, there is a broad consensus within Korea’s Buddhist community that the religion is in crisis and, within the order in particular, that its future is in peril. Unless it is reversed, the trend portends the very real possibility of the order’s demise by the end of the century, if not sooner. The order recently vowed to reverse the downward trend in monastic recruitment and raise the annual number of ordained novices to 150 by 2025 through a multifaceted plan involving greater youth outreach efforts, an increased social media presence, and online Buddhist educational materials, along with an expansion of the order’s international missionary efforts. Given that postulant recruitment is critical to the order’s survival, this paper examines the past, present, and future of the Jogye Order’s postulant education system in light of the current membership crisis, as well as the order’s recent publication of <i>The 30-year History of Buddhist Monastic Postulant Education</i>.
Introduction. The article summarizes the history of the Gandantegchinlen Monastery (Mongolia). Goals. It aims at revealing the latter’s place and role in the history of Buddhism nationwide. Insights into the history and functioning structures of the Gandantegchinlen Monastery reveal certain historical links between Buddhist centers of Mongolia and Buryatia. Being a stronghold of Buddhist education, Gandantegchenlin has made (and still does) its essential impacts on the shaping and development of religious and philosophical educational systems among Mongolic peoples — and contributed to the dissemination of Tibetan Buddhist culture. Methods. The study employs tools of factor analysis (characterizing the place and role in historical reality), the historical/genetic and retrospective research methods. Results. The retrospective analysis reveals key stages in the development of the monastery — from its earliest activities, closure, and restoration in the 1940s–1960s to present days witnessing a gradual revival of Buddhist traditions in Russia and Mongolia.
History of Asia, Political institutions and public administration - Asia (Asian studies only)
Although Thai Buddhism is the dominant religion in Bangkok, the capital contains ethnic and religious diversity. In particular, there is a large community of Muslims. This paper examines the Muslim community in Bangkok, focusing on the Minburi district. Most Thai Muslims in this district are Pattani descent migrating to Minburi since 1786 (B.E. 2329) and represent the common cultural practices Thailand's southernmost provinces sharing with Malaysia. It is estimated that there are 600,000 Muslims in Bangkok living mostly in the east of Bangkok. This district contains 13 mosques, while there are six Buddhist temples and one Catholic Church. The complex social, cultural, and political structures of Bangkok are rooted in the complexities of different religions and the migration phenomena. The international migration of Muslims to the Minburi district was motivated by various factors, while the contemporary sense of mobility has been shaped by existing networks. To explore the causes of migration and its legacy, this paper poses two research questions: 1) how have members of the Muslim community in the Minburi district settled through the migration process? 2) how do the Muslims in the Minburi district sustain and negotiate their identities through activities and changes within the community? To answer these questions, semi-structured interviews were conducted and secondary data analysis was performed. The paper argues that as a result of past migration and today’s mobility, Muslims in Minburi have constructed identities and interpersonal networks within their community. Islamic identities and faiths remain salient in the district despite other dominant norms in Bangkok as a whole. This paper contributes to our understanding of the migration phenomenon and the process by which identities are negotiated and communities transformed.
Assist. Prof. Dr. Abdulghani bin Hammad Al-Zahrani ALZAHRANI
This research is concerning with the study of Samanam religion that mentioned in ancient and contemporary sources. It is aimed to identify and trace Samanam in ancient and contemporary sources and collect related data and information to study and compare it to the recent Buddhism. The researcher used the historical, inductive and comparative approach. The most important findings, the researcher found that the origin of Samanam is traced back to the Sanskrit word which means, the monk who dedicates himself to meditation, and that Samanam is the Buddhist religion, not shamanism. In addition, ancient sources described Samanam almost the same as Buddhism and among of these is describing "bodhisattvas" or "Buddha" himself as the head of Buddhism and that Samanam and Buddhism believe in reincarnation but not in God. The ancient sources mentioned the places of Samana and the name of its founder and part of beliefs that these sources presented about Samana are: "eternity of the world", "the rewarding" and "idols worshipping".
This paper investigates how young Japanese women in contemporary Soka Gakkai (SG) navigate Japan’s continuous gender stratified society that remains culturally rooted in the ‘salaryman-housewife’ ideology. How are young SG members reproducing or contesting these hegemonic gender norms that few seek to emulate? While SG has long proclaimed that it stands for gender equality, its employment structure and organization in Japan until recently reflected the typical male breadwinner ideology that came to underpin the post-war Japanese nation-state and systemic gender division of labor. As shown here, this did not mean that SG women were without power; in fact, in many ways they drove organizational developments in the Japanese context. The recent imposition of the global framework for Sustainable Development Goals of 2015 has enabled SG to more substantially challenge its own patriarchal public front. Based on long-term fieldwork, in-depth interviews and multiple group discussions with SG members in their 20s, this article explores how SG-Japan is being challenged to follow its own discourse of ‘globalism’ and ‘Buddhist humanism’, promoted by Daisaku Ikeda since the 1990s. Using Bourdieu’s analysis of symbolic power, the research shows how Japan’s powerful doxa of ‘genderism’ that held sway over earlier generations is currently being challenged by a glocalized Buddhist discourse that identifies Nichiren Buddhism as ‘humanism’ rather than Japanese ‘genderism’.
The nunnery Keikōin was a powerful Buddhist institution, famous in late-medieval Japanese history for its vigorous and successful fundraising campaigns on behalf of the Grand Shrine of Ise. Much is known about the nuns’ fundraising activities, but very little is known about their religious practice. A recently discovered painting, I believe, sheds some light on this long-standing question. It depicts an elderly nun invoking the deity Uhō Dōji in the form enshrined at Kongōshōji, a temple situated at the top of Asama Mountain, to the east of Ise’s Inner Shrine. Based on several of the iconographic elements, I argue the nun portrayed in the painting is from Keikōin and that she is shown engaging in esoteric Buddhist practices related to those carried out at Kongōshōji. Comparative analysis with other paintings and the historical record has, moreover, led me to propose that the Keikōin nuns performed these esoteric practices at Ise’s Kora no tachi, the hall where young shrine maidens prepared the daily food offerings for Ise’s deities.
Sino-Japanese religious discourse, more often than not, is treated as a unidirectional phenomenon. Academic treatments of pre-modern East Asian religion usually portray Japan as the passive recipient of Chinese Buddhist traditions, while explorations of Buddhist modernization efforts focus on how Chinese Buddhists utilized Japanese adoptions of Western understandings of religion. This paper explores a case where Japan was simultaneously the receptor and agent by exploring the Chinese revival of Tang-dynasty Zhenyan. This revival—which I refer to as Neo-Zhenyan—was actualized by Chinese Buddhist who received empowerment (Skt. <i>abhiṣeka</i>) under Shingon priests in Japan in order to claim the authority to found “Zhenyan” centers in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, and even the USA. Moreover, in addition to utilizing Japanese Buddhist sectarianism to root their lineage in the past, the first known architect of Neo-Zhenyan, Wuguang (1918–2000), used energeticism, the thermodynamic theory propagated by the German chemist Freidrich Wilhelm Ostwald (1853–1932; 1919 Nobel Prize for Chemistry) that was popular among early Japanese Buddhist modernists, such as Inoue Enryō (1858–1919), to portray his resurrected form of Zhenyan as the most suitable form of Buddhism for the future. Based upon the circular nature of esoteric transmission from China to Japan and back to the greater Sinosphere and the use of energeticism within Neo-Zhenyan doctrine, this paper reveals the sometimes cyclical nature of Sino-Japanese religious influence. Data were gathered by closely analyzing the writings of prominent Zhenyan leaders alongside onsite fieldwork conducted in Taiwan from 2011–2019.
In September 2016, hundreds of thousands of devotees gathered in Ladakh to celebrate the millennial anniversary of Naropa (1016- 1100 CE), an Indian Buddhist scholar-saint who is widely revered in the Himalayas. Deemed ‘Naropa 2016,’ this Himalayan Buddhist festival centered on the ritual of na ro gyen druk (Tib. na ro rgyan drug), the ‘Six Bone Ornaments of Naropa.’ What was announced as a sacred Buddhist ritual of revealing these ornaments, also included evening performances by renowned Bollywood performers with booming sound and impressive light shows enjoyed by large crowds of monks and laity until late in the night. This was one of the first occasions that popular Bollywood artists came to perform in Ladakh, and the first time that Bollywood and Buddhism were combined to such a large degree. In this article, I take a closer look at the spectacular Naropa 2016 festival. Based on ethnographic participation and recording of the festival through fieldwork, I consider this Buddhist festival as an important site for negotiating social change. Especially due to heightened modernization processes in Ladakh, the role of Buddhist institutions has been undergoing swift changes. Under the leadership of the Gyalwang Drukpa, the Drukpa organization pushes against processes of secularization, which have entailed a lessening of the importance of monasteries in the swiftly transforming Ladakhi society. In organizing a large monastery festival and incorporating elements such as Bollywood performances, the Drukpa Kagyü organization presented a vision of their religious institution as adapting to the current times and relevant for modern, 21st century Ladakhi lives. Hence, the Naropa 2016 festival, I argue, worked as an attempt to introduce alternative cultural understandings of the role of Drukpa Kagyü monastic institutions, and in particular, the role of the Gyalwang Drukpa.
В статье анализируется буддийское изобразительное искусство. Подчеркивается специфика тибетского буддизма в сравнении с исходным индийским вариантом буддийского вероучения, что наложило отпечаток как на тематику произведений, так и на художественное воплощение основных идей и мотивов. Приводится классификация пантеистической вселенной ваджраянского буддизма, детально анализируется символика, которая образует основу буддийского искусства (символика цвета, жестов-мудр и т.д.), а также принципы иконологии. Делается вывод о том, что для адекватной оценки этого искусства важно понять его интеллектуальную сущность и значимость его символики, так как само художественное мастерство здесь является не самоцелью, а инструментом для достижения духовной цели.
Les doy la bienvenida a este segundo número. Un excelente equilibrio entre fisiología, política y religión; con artículos atravesados por, o que cuestionan, la visión tántrica de sujeto. Los cuatro trabajos seleccionados sintetizan el espíritu presentado en el primer número: un enfoque multidisciplinario sobre un único objeto de estudio —el Hombre y su relación con el universo en el que se desarrolla—.
Abstract
Welcome to our second issue, which is an excellent balance between physiology, politics, and religion. All its articles are driven by, or question, the tantric viewpoint of the human subject. The four selected works synthesize the spirit presented in the first issue: a multidisciplinary approach on a single object of study —man and his relationship with the universe where he realizes.