Is there a world out there when nobody is looking? This is a question that medieval Buddhist scholiasts struggled with over many centuries, giving rise to a variety of competing positions. In this ...article, I identify a loop that runs through and structures seemingly antithetical positions—some realist, some antirealist—in these debates. My claim is that the loop is a feature of our lifeworld, and thus any serious reflection on the mind/world relationship is bound to get entangled in it. Even modern physics has come up against it, such that rival positions advanced by quantum theorists are structurally analogous to positions proffered in medieval Buddhist writings. I conclude by turning to the Chan Buddhist tradition, which is often mischaracterized as hostile to philosophical analysis. Chan is among the few Buddhist schools that recognize, foreground, and celebrate the manner in which mind and world enfold each other. As such, this paper foregrounds the decidedly philosophical insights of the Chan tradition.
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Despite being one of the most avowedly secular nations in the world, Japan may have more prison chaplains per inmate than any other country, the majority of whom are Buddhist priests. In this ...groundbreaking study of prison religion in East Asia, Adam Lyons introduces a form of chaplaincy rooted in the Buddhist concept of doctrinal admonition rather than Euro-American notions of spiritual care.Based on archival research, fieldwork inside prisons, and interviews with chaplains, Karma and Punishment reveals another dimension of Buddhist modernism that developed as Japan’s religious organizations carved out a niche as defenders of society by fighting crime. Between 1868 and 2020, generations of clergy have been appointed to bring religious instruction to bear on a range of offenders, from illegal Christian heretics to Marxist political dissidents, war criminals, and death row inmates. The case of the prison chaplaincy shows that despite constitutional commitments to freedom of religion and separation of religion from state, statism remains an enduring feature of mainstream Japanese religious life in the contemporary era.
Dialogues Hudson, Wayne
Telos (New York, N.Y.),
10/2022
200
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
The Japanese philosopher and calligrapher Kukai (774-835), founder of esoteric Shingon Buddhism, talks to John Scotus Eriugena (800-877), an Irish philosopher and the author of The Division of ...Nature, who held that nature includes the things that are and the things that are not.
The hunping is an unusual shape of the buried Ming’s vessels. The characteristics of its shape originated from the realization of people’s concepts of life, death and funeral in ancient times, which ...has a strong local color and carries a variety of research values such as artistic decoration, living customs and religious myths at the same time. This paper will sort out the morphological changes of hunping in different periods, including how it evolved from the wulianguan to hunping, and analyze the reasons why wulianguan & hunping are mostly found in the South in relation to the areas where they were excavated. Then, this paper will discuss and conjecture around the funerary concepts and Buddhist connotations reflected in the Buddha statues and other decorations on hunping. The Buddhist elements on hunping aren’t an indication that Buddhism was widely spread and deeply rooted in people’s minds at that time, but only vaguely existed as part of the idea of the Divine Immortal’s formula.
In this pioneering study of the shifting status of the emperor within court society and the relationship between the state and the Buddhist community during the Heian period (794-1185), Asuka Sango ...details the complex ways in which the emperor and other elite ruling groups employed Buddhist ritual to legitimate their authority. Although considered a descendant of the sun goddess, Amaterasu, the emperor used Buddhist idiom, particularly the ideal king as depicted in theGolden Light Sūtra, to express his right to rule. Sango's book is the first to focus on the ideals presented in the sūtra to demonstrate how the ritual enactment of imperial authority was essential to justifying political power. These ideals became the basis of a number of court-sponsored rituals, the most important of which was the emperor's Misai-e Assembly.
Sango deftly traces the changes in the assembly's format and status throughout the era and the significant shifts in the Japanese polity that mirrored them. In illuminating the details of these changes, she challenges dominant scholarly models that presume the gradual decline of the political and liturgical influence of the emperor over the course of the era. She also compels a reconsideration of Buddhism during the Heian as "state Buddhism" by showing that monks intervened in creating the state's policy toward the religion to their own advantage. Her analysis further challenges the common view that Buddhism of the time was characterized by the growth of private esoteric rites at the expense of exoteric doctrinal learning.
The Halo of Golden Lightdraws on a wide range of primary sources-from official annals and diaries written by courtiers and monks to ecclesiastical records and Buddhist texts-many of them translated or analyzed for the first time in English. In so doing, the work brings to the surface surprising facets in the negotiations between religious ideas and practices and the Buddhist community and the state.
In the early fifteenth century, two Tibetan monks debated how to
transform the body ritually into a celestial palace inhabited by
buddhas. The discussion between Ngorchen Künga Zangpo and
Khédrupjé ...Gélek Pelzangpo concerned the mechanics of this tantric
ritual practice, known as body mandala, as well as the most
reliable sources to follow in performing it. As representatives of
the Sakya and emerging Geluk traditions respectively, these authors
spoke for communities of Buddhist practitioners vying for patronage
and prestige in an evolving Tibetan scholastic culture. Their
debate witnessed clashes between imagination and deception,
continuity and rupture, and tradition and innovation. Searching
for the Body demonstrates the significance of the body mandala
debate for understandings of Tibetan Buddhism as well as
conversations on representation and embodiment occurring across the
disciplines today. Rae Erin Dachille explores how Ngorchen and
Khédrup used citational practice as a tool for making meaning,
arguing that their texts reveal a deep connection between ritual
mechanics and interpretive practice. She contends that this debate
addresses strikingly contemporary issues surrounding
interpretation, intertextuality, creativity, essentialism, and
naturalness. Buddhist ideas about the construction of meaning and
the body offer new ways of understanding representation, which
Dachille illuminates in an epilogue that considers Glenn Ligon's
engagement with Robert Mapplethorpe's photography. By placing
Buddhist thought in dialogue with contemporary artistic practice
and cultural critique, Searching for the Body offers vital
new perspectives on the transformative potential of representations
in defining and transcending the human.
"Senshi was born in 964 and died in 1035, in the Heian period of Japanese history (794–1185). Most of the poems discussed here are what may loosely be called Buddhist poems, since they deal with ...Buddhist scriptures, practices, and ideas. For this reason, most of them have been treated as examples of a category or subgenre of waka called Shakkyoka, “Buddhist poems.” Yet many Shakkyoka are more like other poems in the waka canon than they are unlike them. In the case of Senshi’s “Buddhist poems,” their language links them to the traditions of secular verse. Moreover, the poems use the essentially secular public literary language of waka to address and express serious and relatively private religious concerns and aspirations. In reading Senshi’s poems, it is as important to think about their relationship to the traditions and conventions of waka and to other waka texts as it is to think about their relationship to Buddhist thoughts, practices, and texts. The Buddhist Poetry of the Great Kamo Priestess creates a context for the reading of Senshi’s poems by presenting what is known and what has been thought about her and them. As such, it is a vital source for any reader of Senshi and other literature of the Heian period."
