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Author: Steven Collins Publisher: Columbia University Press ISBN: 0231541007 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 293
Book Description
The Vessantara Jataka tells the story of Prince Vessantara, who attained the Perfection of Generosity by giving away his fortune, his children, and his wife. Vessantara was the penultimate rebirth as a human of the future Gotama Buddha, and his extreme charity has been represented and reinterpreted in texts, sermons, rituals, and art throughout South and Southeast Asia and beyond. This anthology features well-respected anthropologists, textual scholars in religious and Buddhist studies, and art historians, who engage in sophisticated readings of the text and its ethics of giving, understanding of attachment and nonattachment, depiction of the trickster, and unique performative qualities. They reveal the story to be as brilliantly layered as a Homeric epic or Shakespearean play, with aspects of tragedy, comedy, melodrama, and utopian fantasy intertwined to problematize and scrutinize Theravada Buddhism's cherished virtues.
Author: Steven Collins Publisher: Columbia University Press ISBN: 0231541007 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 293
Book Description
The Vessantara Jataka tells the story of Prince Vessantara, who attained the Perfection of Generosity by giving away his fortune, his children, and his wife. Vessantara was the penultimate rebirth as a human of the future Gotama Buddha, and his extreme charity has been represented and reinterpreted in texts, sermons, rituals, and art throughout South and Southeast Asia and beyond. This anthology features well-respected anthropologists, textual scholars in religious and Buddhist studies, and art historians, who engage in sophisticated readings of the text and its ethics of giving, understanding of attachment and nonattachment, depiction of the trickster, and unique performative qualities. They reveal the story to be as brilliantly layered as a Homeric epic or Shakespearean play, with aspects of tragedy, comedy, melodrama, and utopian fantasy intertwined to problematize and scrutinize Theravada Buddhism's cherished virtues.
Author: Katherine A. Bowie Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres ISBN: 0299309509 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 377
Book Description
The 547 Buddhist jatakas, or verse parables, recount the Buddha's lives in previous incarnations. In his penultimate and most famous incarnation, he appears as the Prince Vessantara, perfecting the virtue of generosity by giving away all his possessions, his wife, and his children to the beggar Jujaka. Taking an anthropological approach to this two-thousand-year-old morality tale, Katherine A. Bowie highlights significant local variations in its interpretations and public performances across three regions of Thailand over 150 years. The Vessantara Jataka has served both monastic and royal interests, encouraging parents to give their sons to religious orders and intimating that kings are future Buddhas. But, as Bowie shows, characterizations of the beggar Jujaka in various regions and eras have also brought ribald humor and sly antiroyalist themes to the story. Historically, these subversive performances appealed to popular audiences even as they worried the conservative Bangkok court. The monarchy sporadically sought to suppress the comedic recitations. As Thailand has changed from a feudal to a capitalist society, this famous story about giving away possessions is paradoxically being employed to promote tourism and wealth.
Author: Steven Heine Publisher: Columbia University Press ISBN: 0231544081 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 200
Book Description
The Treasury of the True Dharma Eye (Shōbōgenzō) is the masterwork of Dōgen (1200–1253), founder of the Sōtō Zen Buddhist sect in Kamakura-era Japan. It is one of the most important Zen Buddhist collections, composed during a period of remarkable religious diversity and experimentation. The text is complex and compelling, famed for its eloquent yet perplexing manner of expressing the core precepts of Zen teachings and practice. This book is a comprehensive introduction to this essential Zen text, offering a textual, historical, literary, and philosophical examination of Dōgen’s treatise. Steven Heine explores the religious and cultural context in which the Treasury was composed and provides a detailed study of the various versions of the medieval text that have been compiled over the centuries. He includes nuanced readings of Dōgen’s use of inventive rhetorical flourishes and the range of East Asian Buddhist textual and cultural influences that shaped the work. Heine explicates the philosophical implications of Dōgen’s views on contemplative experience and attaining and sustaining enlightenment, showing the depth of his distinctive understanding of spiritual awakening. Readings of Dōgen’s Treasury of the True Dharma Eye will give students and other readers a full understanding of this fundamental work of world religious literature.
Author: Jonathan C. Gold Publisher: Columbia University Press ISBN: 0231549903 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 327
Book Description
Śāntideva’s eighth-century work, the Guide to Bodhisattva Practice (Bodhicaryāvatāra), is known for its eminently practical instructions and its psychologically vivid articulations of the Mahāyāna path. It is a powerful, succinct poem into which are woven diverse Buddhist traditions of moral transformation, meditative cultivation, and philosophical insight. Since its composition, it has seen continuous use as a ritual, contemplative, and philosophical manual, making it one of the crucial texts of the Buddhist ethical and philosophical tradition. This book serves as a companion to this Indian Buddhist classic. The fifteen essays contained here illuminate the Guide’s many philosophical, literary, ritual, and ethical dimensions. Distinguished scholars discuss the historical significance of the text as an innovative piece of Indian literature, illuminate the important roles it played in shaping Buddhism in Tibet, and bring to light its contemporary significance for philosophy and psychology. Whether experienced or first-time students of Buddhist literature, readers will find compelling new approaches to this resonant masterpiece.
Author: Jason A. Carbine Publisher: University of Hawaii Press ISBN: 0824891120 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 401
Book Description
Human-fashioned boundaries transform spaces by introducing dualisms, bifurcations, creative symbioses, contradictions, and notions of inclusion and exclusion. The Buddhist boundaries considered in this book, sīmās—a term found in South and Southeast Asian languages and later translated into East Asian languages—come in various shapes and sizes and can be established on land or in bodies of water. Sometimes, the word sīmā refers not only to a ceremonial boundary, but the space enclosed by the boundary, or even the markers (when they are used) that denote the boundary. Sīmās were established early on as places where core legal acts (kamma), including ordination, of the monastic community (sangha) took place according to their disciplinary codes. Sīmās continue to be deployed in the creation of monastic lineages and to function in diverse ways for monastics and non-monastics alike. As foundations of Buddhist religion, sīmās are used to sustain, revitalize, or reform Buddhist practices, notions of identity, and conceptualizations of time and history. In the last few decades, scholarly awareness of and expertise on sīmās has developed to a point where a volume like this one, which examines sīmās across numerous cultural contexts and scholarly fields of inquiry, is both possible and needed. Sīmā traditions expressed in the Theravāda cultures of Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka constitute the dominant focus of the work; a chapter on East Asia raises questions of historical transmission beyond these areas. Throughout contributors engage texts; history; archaeology; politics; art; ecology; economics; epigraphy; legal categories; mythic narratives; understandings of the cosmos; and conceptualizations of compassion, authority, and violence. Examining sīmās through multiple perspectives allows us to look at them in their contextual specificity, in a way that allows for discernment of variation as well as consistency. Sīmā spaces can be both simple and extremely intricate, and this book helps show why and how that is the case.
Author: Jaqueline S. Du Toit Publisher: Hebrew Union College Press ISBN: 0878201653 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 541
Book Description
In this volume, students of beloved teacher B. Barry Levy come together to honor his erudition, superb pedagogy, kindness, and verve, with a collection of essays that reflect Levy's wide range of interest and expertise. Levy, sensitive to the meaning of a text for its original and intended audience, but also to how that meaning changes and develops over the course of years of interpretation, gave his students the broadest education in the evolving context of biblical study. This expansive focus is evident in the essays included in this book. From a study of astronomical observations in the ancient Near East, to an exploration of the excesses of obedience and sacrifice as recounted in the stories of Abraham and Isaac and the Buddhist Vessantara Jataka, from Talmud, to modern Bibles for children, to the evolution of the Dead Sea Scrolls from text and artifact to sacred object, To Fix Torah in Their Hearts is a diverse and engaging collection, of value to scholars and general readers alike.
Author: Arash Khazeni Publisher: University of California Press ISBN: 0520289684 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 264
Book Description
The City and the Wilderness recounts the journeys and microhistories of Indo-Persian travelers across the Indian Ocean and their encounters with the Burmese Kingdom and its littoral at the turn of the nineteenth century. As Mughal sovereignty waned under British colonial rule, Indo-Persian travelers and intermediaries linked to the East India Company explored and surveyed the Burmese Empire, inscribing it as a forest landscape and Buddhist kingdom at the crossroads of South and Southeast Asia. Based on colonial Persian travel books and narratives in which Indo-Persian knowledge and perceptions of the wondrous edges of the Indian Ocean merged with Orientalist pursuits, The City and the Wilderness uncovers fading histories of inter-Asian crossings and exchanges at the ends of the Mughal world.
Author: Seth Zuihō Segall Publisher: Springer Nature ISBN: 3030370275 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 200
Book Description
The Buddha and Aristotle offer competing visions of the best possible life to which human beings can aspire. In this volume, Seth Zuihō Segall compares Theravāda and Mahāyāna accounts of enlightenment with Aristotelian and neo-Aristotelian accounts of eudaimonia, and proposes a syncretic model of eudaimonic enlightenment that, given prevalent Western beliefs about well-being and human flourishing, provides a credible new end-goal for modern Western Buddhist practice. He then demonstrates how this proposed synthesis is already deeply reflected in contemporary Western Buddhist rhetoric. Segall re-evaluates traditional Buddhist teachings on desire, attachment, aversion, nirvāṇa, and selfhood from the eudaimonic enlightenment perspective, and explores the perspective’s ethical and metaphysical implications.
Author: Vanessa R. Sasson Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0197649467 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 281
Book Description
Retellings of the Buddha's life story have animated and sustained Buddhist thought and practice through some 2,500 years of history. To this day, Buddhist holidays and rituals are pinned to the arc of his biography, celebrating his birth, awakening, teaching, and final nirvana. His story is the model that exemplary Buddhists follow. Often, there is a moment of insight akin to the Buddha's experience with the Four Sights, followed by a great departure from home, and a period of searching that it is hoped will lead to final awakening. The Buddha's story is not just the Buddha's story; it is the story of Buddhism. In this book, twelve leading scholars of South Asian texts and traditions articulate the Buddha-life blueprint--the underlying and foundational pattern that holds the life story of a buddha together. They retell the episodes of Buddha Gautama's extended life story, while keeping in mind the cosmic, paradigmatic arc of his narrative. The contributors have dedicated their careers to exploring hagiographical materials, each applying their own methodological and theoretical interests to shed new light on the enduring story of Buddhism. Using multiple perspectives, voices, and sources, this volume underscores the multivalent centrality of this story. The book will be an invaluable resource to practicing Buddhists and students of Buddhist Studies to help them engage in the most foundational story of the tradition.
Author: Vanessa R. Sasson Publisher: University of Hawaii Press ISBN: 0824889525 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 383
Book Description
Renunciation is a core value in the Buddhist tradition, but Buddhism is not necessarily austere. Jewels—along with heavenly flowers, rays of rainbow light, and dazzling deities—shape the literature and the material reality of the tradition. They decorate temples, fill reliquaries, are used as metaphors, and sprout out of imagined Buddha fields. Moreover, jewels reflect a particular type of currency often used to make the Buddhist world go round: merit in exchange for wealth. Regardless of whether the Buddhist community has theoretically transcended the need for them or not, jewels—and the paradox they represent—are everywhere. Scholarship has often looked past this splendor, favoring the theory of renunciation instead, but in this volume, scholars from a wide range of disciplines consider the role jewels play in the Buddhist imaginary, putting them front and center for the first time. Following an introduction that relates the colorful story of the Emerald Buddha, one of the most famous jewels in the world, chapters explore the function of jewels as personal identifiers in Buddhist and other Indian religious traditions; Buddhaghosa’s commentary on the Jewel Sutta; the paradox of the Buddha’s bejeweled status before and after renunciation; and the connection in early Buddhism between jewels, magnificence, and virtue. The Newars of Nepal are the focus of a chapter that looks at their gemology and associations between gems and celestial deities. Contributors analyze the Fifth Dalai Lama’s reliquary, known as the “sole ornament of the world”; the transformation of relic jewels into precious substances and their connection to the Piprahwa stupa in Northern India and the Nanjing Porcelain Pagoda. Final chapters offer detailed studies of ritual engagement with the deity known as Wish-Fulfilling Jewel Avalokiteśvara and its role in the new Japanese lay Buddhist religious movement Shinnyo-en. Engaging and accessible, Jewels, Jewelry, and Other Shiny Things in the Buddhist Imaginary will provide readers with an opportunity to look beyond a common misconception about Buddhism and bring its lived tradition into wider discussion.
Author: Steven Collins
Author: Steven Collins
Author: Katherine A. Bowie
Author: Steven Heine
Author: Jonathan C. Gold
Author: Jason A. Carbine
Author: Jaqueline S. Du Toit
Author: Arash Khazeni
Author: Seth Zuihō Segall
Author: Vanessa R. Sasson
Author: Vanessa R. Sasson