Online research in philosophy

This paper uses an ethnographic study of the Ghost Festival rite performed by a Sri Lankan Therav?da temple in Taipei to illustrate the relationship between religious syncretism and missionary work. It explains how this Chinese ritual has been transformed in a Therav?da setting and made acceptable to Therav?da sentiment, and how it is adopted to advance the agenda of Therav?da missionary. Ghost Festival has had a long history in the Chinese culture and is an important ritual in Chinese Buddhism. However, (...) the Ghost Festival does not exist in Therav?da tradition. The Therav?dization of Ghost Festival thus offers interesting insight into the increasing exchange among Buddhists across different traditions in Asia. (shrink)

This study is focused on cultural phenomena of contemporary Europe: the creation of a new religious identity without cultural precedent in European cultural history. It will concentrate on non-Asian Buddhist converts, who have adopted religious world views different from those of their ethnic heritage and the mainstream culture they live in and who use Buddhism as the value-source for their children's upbringing. The parents who, to a certain degree, master Buddhist practice and are attached to this particular religious culture, accumulate (...) a specific religious capital which develops when there are higher levels of religious participation, knowledge and experience, including social networks. The aim of my study is to illustrate how accumulated religious capital and value models affect parental choice regarding children's education. How are these values transmitted within the families of different Buddhist streams? What is the role of the local Buddhist community in family life? (shrink)

In the waning years of Spanish colonization in the Philippines, the ethnic Chinese there began gathering in private homes to carry out devotions to the bodhisattva Guanyin. These seeds of Chinese Buddhism in the Philippines bore fruit as temples began to be built during the American colonial period, and peaked in the decades following the Second World War. Based on fieldwork and the review of available literature, this article traces the development of Chinese Buddhism in the Philippines up to the (...) present time, and argues that religion played an important role in the preservation of ethnic identity for the Chinese Buddhists of the Philippines. This experience will be contextualized through references to the practice of Chinese Buddhism in other overseas Chinese communities in Southeast Asia, and the efforts of Christian churches in the Philippines to link religion and Chinese identity. (shrink)

Over the past 60 years Thomas Szasz (1960, 1961[1974], 2008) has forcefully argued that mental illnesses are mythical since all medical diseases are located in the body and, thus, have somatic causes. This has been accompanied by a scathing and coruscating critique of the whole mental health profession?particularly, those psychologists, psychiatrists and psychotherapists who collude in and exploit the alleged mythology of counterfeit mental disorders and often (unwittingly or deliberately) justify coercion, oppression and pharmacological manipulation of so-called ?mental patients? in (...) the name of ?treatments?. Since mindfulness practitioners?perhaps especially teachers of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, mindfulness-based stress reduction and related programmes?may, by association, be partially implicated in Szasz's allegations, this article seeks to explore and examine the implications for theory and practice in the field. It will be suggested that the strong foundational, theoretical, research and teaching bases of mindfulness-based interventions offer practitioners a solid defence against the general critique offered by Szasz, and more specific challenges advanced by critics such as Boysen (2007) and Whitaker (2010). However, there may still be potential pitfalls for those mindfulness-based interventions which are too closely allied to the psychiatric/pscychotheraputic establishment, and some suggestions for avoiding such obstacles will be offered through recommendations for maintaining connections between mindfulness and its Buddhist origins. (shrink)

Drawing upon research for a dissertation on lived religion in Myanmar as it pertains to various religious cults and followers whose devotions are directed towards Buddhist sorcerer saints (weizz?), this article examines the technologies at work in potency practices involving the production and use of in (cabbalistic squares) and sama (diagrams and drawings using specific Burmese syllables). In particular, the paper will examine how such devices are used by the devout traversing the weizz? path and explain how in and sama (...) are employed to transform one's self into a full-fledged weizz?. The paper will conclude with a discussion on how such an examination can help us reshape our understanding of Burmese Buddhism in contemporary Myanmar.1. (shrink)

Teaching an eight-week calm abiding meditation course to staff in a Child and Youth Mental Health Service located in a regional Australian city presented a curious meeting of Buddhism with Western culture. This meeting highlighted both the potential benefits and challenges of teaching meditation in the workplace and the value of qualitative methods for contributing to the development of meditation research. The thematic analysis of weekly participant responses to emailed reflective questions and follow-up interviews indicated that workplace meditation training can (...) precipitate sustainable changes in attitudes and behaviour beyond the workplace. Participants reported being less reactive and better able to manage emotions, having heightened self-awareness, self-acceptance and acceptance of others and of circumstances; and, in the longer term, were better able to make healthier lifestyle choices. The analysis is contextualized by a rich description of the course and salient concerns and conditions evident in contemporary Buddhist teachings and studies of mindfulness meditation. (shrink)

This article looks at the ways in which globalization and modernization have led to a number of changes in Buddhism. These include both the cultures in which it is practiced as well as the form that this practice takes. One consequence of existing within new cultures is that a religion that has been the majority faith for over 1000 years in many Asian countries is now a minority faith in the West. This study tests the hypothesis that religious doctrinal differences (...) are relative and the borders between religious organizations are malleable. In order to overcome inherent difficulties in studying small atypical organizations, these analyses rely on new methodological techniques by building on the internet and website links as a sociological tool. This study examines the use of websites by American Buddhists, both to determine the networks they are part of and what content they use. Comparisons are drawn to the similarities between American Buddhism as a small foreign religion and independent non-denominational Christian congregations. Consequences for studying Buddhism and future avenues of research involving the internet are discussed. (shrink)

This study sets out to establish which Buddhist values contrasted with or were shared by adolescents from a non-Buddhist population. A survey of attitudes toward a variety of Buddhist values was fielded in a sample of 352 non-Buddhist schoolchildren aged between 13?15 years in London. Buddhist values where attitudes were least positive concerned the worth of being a monk/nun or meditating, offering candles & incense on the Buddhist shrine, friendship on Sangha Day, avoiding drinking alcohol, seeing the world as empty (...) or impermanent and Nirvana as the ultimate peace. Buddhist values most closely shared by non-Buddhists concerned the Law of Karma, calming the mind, respecting those deserving of respect, subjectivity of happiness, welfare work, looking after parents in old age and compassion to cuddly animals. Further significant differences of attitude toward Buddhism were found in partial correlations with the independent variables of sex, age and religious affiliation. Correlation patterns paralleled those previously described in theistic religions. Findings are applied to spiritual, moral, social and cultural development and for the teaching of religion to pupils of no faith adherence. The study recommends that quantitative psychometrics employed to conceptualize Buddhist values by discriminant validity in this study could be extended usefully to other aspects of the study of Buddhism, particularly in the quest for validity in the conceptualization of Buddhist identity within specifically Buddhist populations. (shrink)

Increasingly open to question are the efficacies and timing of some traditional, conventional and current meditative techniques. Recent brain research emphasizes that it is important to distinguish between the Self-centred (egocentric) and other-centred (allocentric) streams of processing. It also proves useful to view as complementary the assets of the concentrative and receptive styles of meditation, especially when one's practices cultivate an appropriate balance between their top-down and bottom-up systems of attentive processing. From this neural perspective, Part I ventures a small (...) sample of empirical suggestions. Some of these could help practitioners engage in more open, effortless, choiceless, varieties of receptive meditation?indoors and outdoors. Part II discusses recent research that illuminates issues arising at the interface between Self and other. The evidence suggests how a balanced attentiveness might enable long-term meditators to enhance mindfulness of the present moment, while simultaneously becoming much less fearful and, ultimately, freer to openly express their most objective, innate instincts of selfless compassion. The art of Progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order. (Alfred North Whitehead 1861?1947). (shrink)

In 2007, young Buddhist monks demonstrated against the military regime and its neglect of the economy and education, as well as against its repression. The monks applied Buddhism's ethical concepts as spiritual politics against the regime's increasing totalitarian tendencies. The article analyses and discusses how Buddhism and different notions of power characterize the struggle for democracy in Burma. The opposing sides, the young monks and the regime share a Buddhist cosmological imaginary. But they apply Buddhism differently in the struggle and (...) have different perceptions of subjectivity. Following a brief outline of the military regime's rule, the article discusses power and Buddhism as interpreted by the opposition, the Generals and the young monks. (shrink)

Within the field, the ?innovative? study of Buddhism as a socio-historical phenomenon and the ?traditional? study of Buddhist texts and doctrine exist in an uneasy tension. In this paper this tension is ?resolved? by taking the story of the development of the nineteenth-century European view of and subsequent reactions to Buddhism configured particularly around the notion of ?nirvana? and showing in parallel, how through an Abhidharmic perspective it is a story of how an object comes to consciousness.

The central character in Sartre's 1938 novel La Nausée, Antoine Roquentin, has lost his sense of things, and now the world appears to him as utterly unstable. Roquentin suffers from what he calls ?nausea,? a condition caused by an ontological intuition that the self, as well as the world through which that ?self? moves, lacks a substantial nature. The novel portrays Sartre's own philosophical account of the self in La transcendence de l'égo. Here Sartre argues that Husserl's account of consciousness (...) is not radical enough; the ?I? or ego is a pseudo-source of activity (and Sartre thus draws very close to a particularly Buddhist account of personal identity). My essay questions Roquentin's response to his ontological insight: why is this the occasion for ?nausea?? Why doesn't Roquentin (as King Milinda famously does) celebrate and embrace his ?non-self?? I argue that Sartre's depiction of Roquentin's ailment, and the unsatisfactory solution he provides, misunderstands both the aggregate nature of things as well as authentically rendered consciousness-only (vijñaptim?tra). (shrink)

This paper interprets Buddhist meditation from perspectives of Western psychology and explores the common grounds shared by the two disciplines. Cognitive operations in Buddhist meditation are mainly characterized by mindfulness and concentration in relation to attention. Mindfulness in particular plays a pivotal role in regulating attention. My study based on Buddhist literature corroborates significant correspondence between mindfulness and metacognition as propounded by some psychologists. In vipassan? meditation, mindfulness regulates attention in such a way that attention is directed to monitor the (...) ever-changing experiences from moment to moment so that the practitioner attains the ?metacognitive insight? into the nature of things. In samatha meditation, mindfulness picks an object as the focus of ?selective attention' and monitors whether attention is concentrated on the chosen object so as to attain the state of ?concentration?. Nimitta that appears in a deep state of concentration resembles ?imagery? in psychology. Mindfulness consists in the wholesome functioning of saññ?. A finding by psychologists supports my view that saññ? can act as perception on the one hand and, on the other hand, it can produce nimitta ?imagery? in deep meditation where perception is suspended. (shrink)

This article addresses the wider issues of continuity and change in the context of the globalization of Tibetan Buddhism. Specifically, it looks at the emergence of lay oriented convert movements within the global Karma bKa? brgyud school, which are led by ?crazy wise? teachers. Firstly, the activities of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche (1939?1987) are interpreted on the background of the tension between tradition and modernity. In dialogue with modernity, Trungpa gradually pushed the borders of Tibetan Buddhist identity to the point of (...) collapse and established a secular teaching lineage and discourse. Trungpa's case is then compared to the development of one of the fastest growing and largest global lay movements of contemporary Tibetan Buddhism, the Diamond Way of the Danish lay teacher Ole Nydahl. The Diamond Way has transitioned into a late-charismatic stage, in which the traditionalist and modernizing features of Nydahl's teachings are creating an increasing tension. Post-Buddhist secularization and modernist packaging of neo-orthodoxy emerge as contesting paradigms of the globalization of these Tibetan Buddhist movements, which produce surprising intertextualities and shed light on the negotiation of converted Buddhist identities in a global context. (shrink)

Due to the extended time frame over which they occur, human-induced environmental changes are out of sync with human lives lived in an age characterized by nano-second attention spans. As a result, the violence exacted by such changes poses representational and motivational challenges to human abilities to address them. I tackle the question, as a scholar from outside the discipline of religious studies, how might Buddhist thought provide valuable tools for people interested in working progressively at the intersection of violence (...) and human-induced environmental degradation? Like other non-specialist Westerners, I have cobbled together an eclectic Buddhist perspective. I aim to explore affinities between certain Buddhist themes and my own professional orientation and expertise in earth science. To that end, I describe concepts of time derived from geological science and Asian mythical traditions; probe ideas about violence in relation to global environmental degradation; and, consider implications of the Noble Eightfold Path, the way to deliverance from suffering taught by the Buddha, for adjusting systemically to environmental change over time. By expanding, scientifically and spiritually, what the present moment can be, an instant of infinite duration, I hope to connect my journey towards taking a long view of a moment with the long view of change that human beings require to awaken to violence that is at once potentially catastrophic and so slow, that it's difficult to discern and therefore counter. (shrink)

The modern hospice movement is generally understood to have begun with the founding in 1967 by Cicely Saunders of the St. Christopher's Hospice in the United Kingdom. As the movement has grown, it has inspired Buddhists in Asia to rediscover and revive their own traditions around death and caring for the terminally ill and the bereaved that date back to the time of the Buddha. In Asia and the West as well, we are witnessing the work of several groups attempting (...) to apply Buddhist teachings and practices in modern medical settings or develop new institutions for holistic care based in Buddhist values. This paper draws on research conducted by the Ojo and Death Project established in 2006 by the Jodo Shu Research Institute (JSRI) in Tokyo, that is to be published in a volume by Wisdom Publications under the title, Buddhist Care for the Dying and Bereaved: Global Perspectives edited by Watts and Tomatsu (2012).1 It shows some of the innovative work that Buddhists in Asia and the West are doing in the area of caring for the terminally ill and, also, the bereaved, explores issues that can be seen especially well in the Japanese context, and reviews shared fundamental issues that emerged across the whole range of organizations studied over the first five years of this research programme. (shrink)