Early Buddhist Metaphysics provides a philosophical account of the major doctrinal shift in the history of early Theravada tradition in India: the transition from the earliest stratum of Buddhist ...thought to the systematic and allegedly scholastic philosophy of the Pali Abhidhamma movement. Entwining comparative philosophy and Buddhology, the author probes the Abhidhamma's metaphysical transition in terms of the Aristotelian tradition and vis-à-vis modern philosophy, exploits Western philosophical literature from Plato to contemporary texts in the fields of philosophy of mind and cultural criticism.
Noa Ronkin received her PhD from the University of Oxford. She is currently Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Buddhist Studies, Stanford University. Her research interests include a range of issues associated with Indian Theravada Buddhist philosophy and psychology, the Abhidhamma tradition and comparative Indian philosophy.
Introduction: Situating Theravådin Doctrinal Thought: Towards a Comparative Buddhist Philosophy 1. The Further Teaching: Abhidhamma Thought in Context 2. What the Buddha Taught and Abhidhamma Thought: From Dhamma 3. The Development of the Concept of Sabhåva and Buddhist 4. Individuals: Revisiting the Abhidhamma Dhamma Theory 5. Causation as the Handmaid of Metaphysics: From the Paticcasamuppåda to the Patthåna Concluding Reflections
'The author often uses methods of comparative philosophy of religion and draws on later Buddhist systems of philosophy, non-Buddhist Indian sources and also on achievements of western philosophical inquiries and Buddhological scholarship.... the references...are always well chosen and are good pointers for reflection and stimulants for further research.' - Karel Werner, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London,Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society
In the contemporary world the meeting of Buddhism and Islam is most often imagined as one of violent confrontation. Indeed, the Taliban's destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in 2001 seemed not only to ...reenact the infamous Muslim destruction of Nalanda monastery in the thirteenth century but also to reaffirm the stereotypes of Buddhism as a peaceful, rational philosophy and Islam as an inherently violent and irrational religion. But if Buddhist-Muslim history was simply repeated instances of Muslim militants attacking representations of the Buddha, how had the Bamiyan Buddha statues survived thirteen hundred years of Muslim rule?Buddhism and Islam on the Silk Roaddemonstrates that the history of Buddhist-Muslim interaction is much richer and more complex than many assume. This groundbreaking book covers Inner Asia from the eighth century through the Mongol empire and to the end of the Qing dynasty in the late nineteenth century. By exploring the meetings between Buddhists and Muslims along the Silk Road from Iran to China over more than a millennium, Johan Elverskog reveals that this long encounter was actually one of profound cross-cultural exchange in which two religious traditions were not only enriched but transformed in many ways.
This book deals with the confrontation of Buddhism and Brahmanism in India. Both depended on support from the royal court, but Buddhism had less to offer in return than Brahmanism. Buddhism developed ...in a manner to make up for this.
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.
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.
"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."
PDF
