The Tibetan Book of the Deadis the most famous Buddhist text in the West, having sold more than a million copies since it was first published in English in 1927. Carl Jung wrote a commentary on it, ...Timothy Leary redesigned it as a guidebook for an acid trip, and the Beatles quoted Leary's version in their song "Tomorrow Never Knows." More recently, the book has been adopted by the hospice movement, enshrined by Penguin Classics, and made into an audiobook read by Richard Gere. Yet, as acclaimed writer and scholar of Buddhism Donald Lopez writes, "The Tibetan Book of the Deadis not really Tibetan, it is not really a book, and it is not really about death." In this compelling introduction and short history, Lopez tells the strange story of how a relatively obscure and malleable collection of Buddhist texts of uncertain origin came to be so revered--and so misunderstood--in the West.
The central character in this story is Walter Evans-Wentz (1878-1965), an eccentric scholar and spiritual seeker from Trenton, New Jersey, who, despite not knowing the Tibetan language and never visiting the country, crafted and namedThe Tibetan Book of the Dead. In fact, Lopez argues, Evans-Wentz's book is much more American than Tibetan, owing a greater debt to Theosophy and Madame Blavatsky than to the lamas of the Land of Snows. Indeed, Lopez suggests that the book's perennial appeal stems not only from its origins in magical and mysterious Tibet, but also from the way Evans-Wentz translated the text into the language of a very American spirituality.
Believers of karma believe in ethical causation where good and bad outcomes can be traced to past moral and immoral acts. Karmic belief may have important interpersonal consequences. We investigated ...whether American Christians expect more trustworthiness from (and are more likely to trust) interaction partners who believe in karma. We conducted an incentivized study of the trust game where interaction partners had different beliefs in karma and God. Participants expected more trustworthiness from (and were more likely to trust) karma believers. Expectations did not match actual behavior: karmic belief was not associated with actual trustworthiness. These findings suggest that people may use others’ karmic belief as a cue to predict their trustworthiness but would err when doing so.
Four experiments (total N = 3591) examined how thinking about Karma and God increases adherence to social norms that prescribe fairness in anonymous dictator games. We found that (1) thinking about ...Karma decreased selfishness among karmic believers across religious affiliations, including Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, and non-religious Americans; (2) thinking about God also decreased selfishness among believers in God (but not among non-believers), replicating previous findings; and (3) thinking about both karma and God shifted participants' initially-selfish offers towards fairness (the normatively prosocial response), but had no effect on already fair offers. These supernatural framing effects were obtained and replicated in high-powered, pre-registered experiments and remained robust to several methodological checks, including hypothesis guessing, game familiarity, demographic variables, between- and within-subjects designs, and variation in data exclusion criteria. These results support the role of culturally-elaborated beliefs about supernatural justice as a motivator of believer's adherence to prosocial norms.
This is a preliminary research note on the cluster concepts of collective karma in Chinese Canonical sources. The goal is to draw scholarly attention to this vast, understudied area of research and ...to invite more scholars to join this collective effort.
This research proposes that mortality salience leads individuals to engage in differentiation of excessive consumption based on their appraisal of the karmic system. Study 1 demonstrated that ...mortality salience interacts with belief in karma to jointly determine excessive consumption, such that consumers faced with mortality salience tend to increase overconsumption likelihood when they have a weak (vs. strong) belief in karma. Study 2 revealed the underlying mechanism - temporal perspective - that drives our main effect. Replicating the findings of the two previous studies, study 3 further delineated benefit appeal as a theoretically derived boundary condition for the proposed interaction effect on excessiveness. Theoretical and, practical implications, as well as avenues for future research are discussed.
In the mountainous interior of the Himalaya, a highland peasant transforms into a redeemer by cutting holes (chidra) in the social fabric to be delivered to the gods through his body as sacrificial ...victim. Closely observing this unique ritual-spectacle, CHIDRA. examines how men, gods, and mediums handle the dangerous substance of actions (karma) at the frontier of the Hindu cultural sphere. CHIDRA (2018) is the product of a collaboration between documentary filmmaker Nadav Harel and Himalayan specialist Arik Moran. The movie follows a transmuted human sacrifice ritual that is unique to the Indo-Tibetan frontier valley of Kullu in Himachal Pradesh, India. By steadily focusing on the expiatory methods that are enacted during this ritual-spectacle, CHIDRA explores the psychological and social constructs surrounding the communal cleansing of sin at the frontier of the Hindu cultural zone. For a detailed analysis of the ritual, see Moran (2018), The Invisible Path of Karma in a Himalayan Purificatory Rite. On the charter myth and probable origins of the ritual specialists, see Moran (2021), When the Nars descended from Heaven.
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