Buddhism, Nothingness, and Pessimism

As someone who entered the United States as a foreign student in the late 1980s, my academic career was intensely shaped by the then burgeoning discourses on colonialism and postcolonialism.1 The triumvirate of Said, Spivak, and Bhabha functioned like a citation machine; and despite Said’s Orientalism, South Asia, especially India, dominated as the colonial/ postcolonial site par excellence. Much of this had to do not just with the presence of many a South Asian scholar studying, writing, and teaching in U.S. universities but also with the fact that some of the most brilliant work was being undertaken on India: Lata Mani’s work on the discourses on sati, the work of the Subaltern Studies historians, Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” and her famous essays on the Rani of Sirmur, and of course Bhabha’s legendary essays “Sly Civility” and “Signs Taken for Wonders.” The outpouring of anglophone fiction from South Asia, topped off by the publication of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, made certain that there would be no dearth of work on South Asian (read Indian) postcolonial fiction, and even today, despite a fairer distribution of attention to other parts of the ex-colonial worlds, works on South Asia continue to dominate the scene. Much has been written about this privileging of South Asia (again, read India) and its incarnation as the quintessential postcolonial site, and I am not going to rehearse the debates here. But suffice it to say that while my teaching spans continents, my first book was part and parcel of the work on the discourse of gender and nationalism in colonial and postcolonial literary representations by British, Bengali, and anglophone South Asian writers. But, in another sense the book was comparative because it brought into play writers working in different languages, and I remember getting a report from Cambridge University Press asking me why there was no chapter on Rushdie.

The Uṣṇīṣavijayā dhāraṇī, considered a Buddhist text about the Goddess Uṣṇīṣavijayā and her dhāraṇī, is known as one of the most important texts in the Old Uyghur translation literature. It occupies a central position as a dhāraṇī text in South Asian, Central Asian, and East Asian Buddhism. Apart from Old Uyghur, it appears in a variety of languages and scripts, including Sanskrit, Tangut, Tibetan, Chinese, and Mongolian. The text is appraised as particularly beneficial for eliminating karmic obstacles and evil paths, annihilating hostility, disasters, demons, and scourges, relieving beings of suffering and bringing them happiness, prolonging their well-being, and increasing their longevity. It is also believed to increase wisdom, obliterate hells, and provide a chance to be born in Buddha heaven, called Sukhāvatī, or other pure lands. This paper deals with the edition of newly identified fragments of the Uṣṇīṣavijayā dhāraṇī in Old Uyghur preserved in the Serindia Collection of the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IOM, RAS). The fragments presented belong to the same blockprint edition produced during the Mongolian period. The study includes the transliteration, transcription, and translation of these fragments within the context of a semantic sequence of the text. The version on the fragments is compared with versions in other languages to reveal differences between texts. Finally, a reconstructed text is presented.

The overwhelming focus on textual or dharma studies in Buddhism, to the relative neglect of artistic production, has led to a bias in understanding the close and intricate relationships between Buddhist art (usually comprising sculptures, mural paintings, architectural facades and ornamental elements, illuminated paintings, cloth banners, and drawings in manuscripts), rituals, and the written word. The constant dialogue between material, visual, and ritual cultures should be approached in tandem. Visual culture is a significant part of Buddhism and must be treated as part of the same social, historical, and geographical contexts as texts and practices. Buddhist visual culture, including art media, graphic aids, and physical objects or monuments associated with Buddhist practices, does not merely serve to illustrate sacred texts, legends, and doctrines. In addition, the textual tradition does not always have to explain or justify the presence—or absence—of a material object such as a Buddha icon or a Buddhist painting. While visual culture studies have become increasingly important in various academic fields over the years, a critical and complete overview of the precise relationship between art, ritual, and text in the study of south and southeast Asian Buddhism has yet to be written.

In 1998, Phil Fontanarosa and George Lundberg declared, no alternative They maintained there is only scientifically proven, evidence-based medicine supported by solid data or unproven medicine, for which data lacking. Fontanarosa and Lundberg continued: Regardless of the origin or type of therapy, the theoretical underpinnings of its mechanism of action, or the practitioner who delivers it, the critical questions are the same. What the therapy? What the disease or condition for which it being used? What its purported benefit to the patient? What are the risks? How much does it cost? And, perhaps most important, does it work? (1) issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association in which this appeared contained six randomized clinical trials that evaluated various alternative interventions for the treatment of common clinical conditions. Now, more than ten years later, the enterprise of alternative and complimentary medicine boasts annual revenue in excess of sixty billion dollars, and visits to alternative practitioners outnumber visits to primary care providers. (2) But by no means should this be taken as an affront to Fontanarosa and Lundberg. Today, whole journals are devoted to evidence-based alternative medicine, and ancient practices are subjected to the rigor of randomized controlled trials. Sometime during medical school, I attended an alternative medicine conference in Chicago. keynote address was by a general internist trained in several other modalities, and a critic of holding alternative medicine accountable by Western standards. His practice, however, was a hodgepodge of interventions. Some of the medicine he practiced was evidence-based--hypnotism for smoking cessation--and he emphasized the data for it. Some were therapies that were conceivably testable, but had not yet been verified, and some were interventions that ran contrary to the best large population evidence in medicine. He argued that he did not need evidence to know what worked--citing patients who simply felt better after acupuncture--though he had earlier basked in the level one evidence for hypnotism. His talk was philosophically confused. But most importantly, his practice did little to add richness to the way patients thought of health. It was aspiritual and faddish. At a time when medicine increasingly pulled toward both evidence-based and alternative medicine, a number of philosophical issues arise, but they are all concerned with our conception of good health and the healthy life. I will argue that there a unique way to think of alternative medicine, a way to preserve it in the midst of the evidence-based movement. We should move toward a rich and meaningful philosophy of meditative medicine. Looking to Heidegger late works of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger were marked by recurring themes of poetry and technology as contrasting ways of making sense of the world (of Revealing, as Heidegger put it). Heidegger used these terms not only in the concrete way we think of them, but also as placemarkers for their essence. essence of technology for Heidegger calculative thinking--the use of objects to achieve some purpose--while the essence of poetry and art meditative thinking--reflecting on the beauty inherent in how things are. Heidegger believed that Man's nature was not restricted to either one of these modes of thinking; it encompassed both. So, though often described as antitechnology, Heidegger in reality was concerned that The approaching tide of technological revolution in the atomic age could so captivate, bewitch, dazzle, and beguile man that calculative thinking may someday come to be accepted and practiced as the only way of thinking. (3) issue then becomes saving man's essential nature. Therefore the issue keeping meditative thinking alive. …

Reviewed by: Seeking Śākyamuni: South Asia in the Formation of Modern Japanese Buddhism by Richard M. Jaffe Judith Snodgrass (bio) Seeking Śākyamuni: South Asia in the Formation of Modern Japanese Buddhism. By Richard M. Jaffe. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2019. xvi, 309 pages. $97.50, cloth; $32.50, paper; $32.50, E-book. Richard Jaffe's new book is a brilliant addition to the series Buddhism and Modernity, adding a crucial dimension to our knowledge of the formation of Buddhism in modern Japan and, by extension, to the history of modern global Buddhism. It builds on and contributes substantially to earlier work documenting the domestic and East-West imperatives in that formation. While these tended to focus on the journeys to the West undertaken by Japanese Buddhist reformers, Jaffe instead focuses on those who traveled to India, arguing convincingly that the "road to conceptualizing Japanese Buddhism for the twentieth century ran through Colombo, Madras, Calcutta and Bombay as much as it did through Oxford, Cambridge, Paris and Heidelberg" (p. 238). Indeed, for some of the pioneering Japanese scholar priests such as Nanjō Bun'yū and Takakusu Junjirō, travel between Oxford and Japan took them through India, where the facility with Indic languages gained in Europe enabled them to study texts and work with South Asian scholars directly. And, it should not be forgotten, many of the Indian pandits with whom Japanese scholars studied, Indian scholars who would lead the Buddhist revival in South Asia, had previously worked with and been trained by British scholars. They studied in British colonial institutions. The Buddhist pilgrimage sites they visited had been reinserted into Indian memory and heritage by the colonial archaeological surveys. The Western factor is not denied, just resituated and complimented by Jaffe's Asia-centric perspective. Most of the Japanese Buddhists in this study, however, traveled directly to South Asia. Among the earliest of these was Zen Abbot Shaku Sōen, more familiar in Western scholarship for the time he would later spend in the United States. While much has been written of him, Jaffe's account, based on Sōen's diary of his journey to Ceylon and resulting publication on Southern Buddhism, greatly expands English-language knowledge of his life and work. Sōen studied Pāli, working with Theravāda scholars—Asian and European—including leaders of the Buddhist reform movement taking place in Ceylon and Siam at the time, the activity documented in Anne Blackburn's Locations of Buddhism: Colonialism and Modernity in Sri Lanka (Princeton University Press, 2001). A major contribution of the book is the way it links with earlier studies and fills gaps between them. Jaffe's Asia-centric focus also contributes significantly to research on modern Japanese Buddhism, introducing a number of important figures previously [End Page 132] unknown to English-language readers, people who should be more widely known. Among these are Kawaguchi Ekai, Akegarasu Haya, and Kimura Ryūkan. Their stories add much to our knowledge of twentiethcentury Japanese Buddhism and to intra-Asian relations in the early twentieth century. The chapters covering their journeys range from the early twentieth century to the 1930s, several decades of rapid and tumultuous change in both countries and in the relationship between them. But more of this below. The book is clearly the culmination of years of research. The diaries and personal publications of more than 20 Japanese Buddhist priests who spent substantial periods in South Asia provide a core archive (see list on p. 115). As well as revealing their observations and responses to South Asian and Southeast Asian Buddhism (Jaffe translates extensive passages on this material), the author identifies the places they visited and the people they met, studied with, and learned from. This evidence is contextualized and expanded on with reference to a comprehensive array of additional primary and secondary sources (including temple records, private papers, photographs, interviews, and a note on a business card) to reveal the networks and the historical contexts that conditioned their experiences. The result is an impressive compendium of erudite research. As the records show, the factors motivating and enabling the journeys varied greatly, but the travelers were united in seeking knowledge of the origins...

Editors' Introduction James S. Donnelly Ver Kreilkamp Often in an issue organized without a predetermined focus, contributions by scholars from different disciplines enrich each other's perspectives, testifying once again to the serendipitous value of interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary publication. In this issue of Éire-Ireland, two essays, one by a historian and the other by a literary scholar, examine responses to enduring social and political problems facing Ireland in the mid-twentieth century. Roisín Higgins investigates how state planning for the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising reflected a series of national anxieties—the survival of partition, the languishing role of the Irish language, the continuing scourge of heavy emigration—that led to an "undercurrent of uncertainty and ambivalence" surrounding the 1966 commemoration. This ambivalence, argues Higgins, resulted in attempts to disavow for the postwar world any reminders, now termed "anti-modern," of the violent political nationalism that had accompanied the formation of a small sovereign state in the 1916–21 period. In a very different sort of essay, one examining high culture rather than popular commemoration and the working out of state policy, James Matthew Wilson suggests how the mid-century poetry of Denis Devlin reflected a related anxiety about Ireland in the decades since independence. Wilson reads Devlin's theologically inflected modernist political poems as this Irish poet/diplomat's response to the continuing failure of the small Irish nation-state to assert genuine sovereignty in the postwar world. [End Page 4] Through new research and interpretation several essays in this issue challenge accepted historical or literary assumptions. James Donnelly investigates the Rockite movement, a sustained outburst of extreme agrarian violence in the early 1820s. He concludes that although the Rockites gave primacy to the claims of local inhabitants, the movement nevertheless constituted a major regional agrarian revolt exhibiting many supralocal features. Promulgating laws intended to supersede parliamentary statutes even while asserting their loyalty to the king and constitution, the Rockites also expressed nationalistic, sectarian, and anti-English sentiments. In another essay interrogating received opinion, Raphael Ingelbien turns to Sydney Owenson's last novel, The Princess, or the Béguine (1835), to undermine the assumption that with the advent of Daniel O'Connell's repeal campaign in the 1830s, Irish writers revealed their essential conservatism by turning against their own country as a subject for fiction. Calling attention to the affinities that Owenson (Lady Morgan) found between a liberal post-revolutionary European nation like Belgium and O'Connell's Ireland, Ingelbien argues for a reassessment of her political trajectory by demonstrating that in a late work set outside Ireland, this novelist continued to advance a liberal agenda for her own nation. Keri Walsh's study of Elizabeth Bowen's short fiction written in the 1930s and 1940s implicitly challenges a more familiar reading of that writer as a conservative Big House novelist. In "Elizabeth Bowen, Surrealist," Walsh instead views Bowen as an innovative cosmopolitan, experimenting with the avant-garde techniques of European modernists in order to forge her own distinctive literary style. Caleb Richardson, however, confirms the accepted view of an inward-looking Ireland during the 1940s as he explores a culture retreating into defensive isolation during the World War II era of the "Emergency." In his analysis of the 1942 Senate debate surrounding the censorship of Eric Cross's The Tailor and Ansty, Richardson makes abundantly clear that in the very period when Bowen (and other Irish cultural modernists) were looking beyond Ireland for inspiration, key national figures were preoccupied with protecting the country from what one senator termed the foreign "floodgates of filth." Two essays in this issue engage with the creation of symbolic political spectacle in Ireland. Such historical displays, increasingly [End Page 5] reported in newspapers, influenced public opinion and provided enduring imagery whereby the state or its opponents sought to impress vivid ideological meanings in situations of intense political conflict. Padhraig Higgins examines the growing role of popular commemorative events enabling Irish Protestants during the Volunteer movement of the late 1770s and early 1780s...

About the Contributors

Ananda Coomaraswamy:Anarchizing Performance, East and West Kimberly Croswell (bio) Ananda Coomaraswamy (1866–1947) was a Sri Lankan born, English-raised anarchist, art historian, critic, and activist whose work spanned South and Southeast Asia, England, and America during the first half of the twentieth century (fig. 1).1 He mobilized South Asian performance traditions to inject the Western imagination with anarchist social, political, and cultural values. Coomaraswamy challenged the modern Western notion of "progress" to disrupt the colonialist assumptions of Western superiority; instead, he regarded the relationship between Eastern and Western cultures as potentially complementary. Rejecting capitalist-industrialism, he theorized a decolonizing "post-industrial" revolution that would liberate pre-industrial cultural and economic forces of the East and deindustrialize the West (Antliff, Anarchist Modernism, 128–31). Post-Industrial societies would be founded on the rejection of stated-based social organization in favor of economic and political self-management rooted in arts and crafts traditions (127). To foster the necessary social consciousness to overthrow capitalism and oppression and create a world in which the arts would permeate all aspects of everyday life, Coomaraswamy looked to spiritual and cultural values he encapsulated in the term "Idealistic Individualism" (134). For Coomaraswamy, "Idealistic Individualism" was anarchistic consciousness emergent in the Western philosophies of Nietzsche, Whitman, and Blake, as well as modern art. But, first and foremost, it already existed in Asian cultures because they were rooted in a craftsmanship ethos that unified the arts within the living spiritual traditions from which they developed (134). Fomenting a revolution against industrial capitalism in the West [End Page 467] compelled him to work tirelessly in his role as educator to sensitize Westerners to the Idealistic Individualist "core" of Eastern art traditions. While he contested the forces of industrial-capitalism and colonialism from an anarchist perspective, he simultaneously developed a social-historical narrative in which Eastern Idealistic Individualism resonated with Western parallels.2 Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1. Ananda Coomaraswamy, ca. 1909. Photographer unknown. Private collection. Coomaraswamy first articulated his anarchist vision in an address to vocational arts students at the Newcastle-under-Lyme School of Art, which was published in the internationally acclaimed Modern Review Journal in June of 1913. In this speech, [End Page 468] Coomaraswamy explicitly states, "It is only by means of art that a permanent revolution can be achieved."3 The foundations of this revolution, according to Coomaraswamy, are located in the calling of the artists and craftspeople, whose "sincere and purposeful" work will ensure the "re-education of the sense-sensitiveness" of individuals living under the conditions of industrialism—conditions under which "our daily environment" has been "sacrificed to the purposes of trade, empire and priesthood" (Coomaraswamy, "The Purposes of Art," 606). Here, Coomaraswamy calls for European cultural revitalization as political activity. Furthermore, the revolutionary purpose of the arts offered cross-cultural transformations: Coomaraswamy believed if Westerners were exposed to South Asian art forms and educated as to their significance, they might realize a critical understanding of European modernity (Coomaraswamy, The Dance of Śiva, 1–3, 113–14). As such, his goal in promoting the arts was to foment a dynamic cultural revolution. Revolutionizing Performance West to East In this endeavor, he had a key ally: Ratan Devi (Alice Richardson). Coomaraswamy first met Richardson in England in 1907 when she was part of an ensemble performing English folk songs and dance.4 By 1911, Richardson and Coomaraswamy were married and traveling together to northern Kashmir where they lived on a houseboat at Shrinagar.5 There, Richardson studied with Ustad Abdul Rahim of Kapurthala. She mastered thirty traditional songs from the region which she would perform in England, adopting the persona Ratan Devi. During performances, Coomaraswamy assumed the role of educator, explaining various aspects of the music to the audiences. In keeping with their "sense-education" campaign, they co-produced Thirty Songs from the Panjab and Kashmir (1913), which included Ratan Devi's notations with commentaries and an introduction by Coomaraswamy. Coomaraswamy explained Ratan Devi's training in Shrinagar: "The songs were first learned by imitation and studied until they could be sung to the Ustad's satisfaction, no easy matter, by reason of the extraordinary elusiveness of Indian...

In an early discourse from the Saṃyuttanikāya, the Buddha states: “I do not see any other order of living beings so diversified as those in the animal realm. Even those beings in the animal realm have been diversified by the mind, yet the mind is even more diverse than those beings in the animal realm.” This paper explores how this key early Buddhist idea gets elaborated in various layers of Buddhist discourse during a millennium of historical development. I focus in particular on a middle period Buddhist sūtra, the Saddharmasmṛtyupasthānasūtra, which serves as a bridge between early Buddhist theories of mind and karma, and later more developed theories. This third-century South Asian Buddhist Sanskrit text on meditation practice, karma theory, and cosmology psychologizes animal behavior and places it on a spectrum with the behavior of humans and divine beings. It allows for an exploration of the conceptual interstices of Buddhist philosophy of mind and contemporary theories of embodied cognition. Exploring animal embodiments—and their karmic limitations—becomes a means to exploring all beings, an exploration that can’t be separated from the human mind among beings.

This chapter surveys Theravāda Buddhism in America using the “two Buddhisms” model. While subject to well-founded critique, the model can still serve as a valuable heuristic tool if used to distinguish two interrelated Buddhist cultures, rather than two groups of people (often contrasted as “convert” versus “heritage” Buddhists). One culture, oriented to meditation, began in the late nineteenth century in the United States and has drawn its perspectives from Buddhist sources approached through metaphysical and often Orientalist, racializing conceptions. The other culture, oriented to a cosmological outlook that foregrounds karma and giving, emerged from South and Southeast Asian understandings of Buddhism that arrived in the United States starting in the mid-1960s. Whatever their sources, this historical overview stresses that both cultures are distinctly American versions of Theravāda. Analyzing each offers a better grasp of a significant portion of the U.S. population and, more broadly, of Theravāda’s role in shaping American culture.

Review for "Child Ordination in South and Southeast Asian Buddhism"

In the introduction to the volume, the editor justifies the need to address Buddhism’s varied attitudes to rival religious traditions by attending to concrete literary examples of how Buddhist authors wrote about religious interlocutors and themselves in relation to them. With reference to relevant existing scholarship on Buddhism and its frontiers with other religions, the editor provides an overview of Buddhist religious history in especially India and East Asia, focusing on some particular contexts of inter-religious encounter with which contributions to the present volume are concerned. The introduction concludes with reflections on recurring mechanisms and strategies for making sense of the religious other that are in evidence in South and East Asian Buddhist writing and art.

It must be stated that there are not sufficient sources to study the theory and the practice of Zen Buddhism for the students and the teachers of Sri Lankan universities, who do their studies in Sinhala language. To fulfil this gap to some extent, this research is carried out. This tradition is named as “Dhyana” in Sanskrit, “Chan” in Chinese, “Son” in Korean, and “Zen” in Japanese. Though this isrecognized as a tradition that refuses books or scriptures, its great teachers have produced many books which are known as the primary sources of Zen Buddhism. The main subject discussed in these sources is the Buddhist meditation systems which developed as “Zen” Buddhism in the East-Asian countries such as China, Korea and Japan. Thus, these sources were written in Chinese, Korean and Japanese languages. One of the main characteristics of these sources is that they try to introduce the path of purification in a simple manner so that the followers can easily practice. This can be seen throughout the Zen Buddhist history, and that knowledge will help the readers to understand how to implement simple Zen Buddhist techniques in their busy day to day life. Hence, the objective of the research is to examine the Zen Buddhist sources and the meditation systems or techniques which are found in them.

The ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche, the nineteenth-century German philosopher famous for his assertion that “God is dead,” have influenced management theories in the West over the last century. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he celebrates the übermensch, or superman, destined to run the world.KeywordsLeadershipCharismaHonestyImposter syndromeHumilityVirtues

In his 1987 best seller, The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom argued that late twentieth-century American intellectual and cultural life was in moral disrepair. In universities and colleges, where professors had once instructed students in the serious contemplation of the good life, they now taught young minds that “reason cannot establish values, and [the] belief that it can is the stupidest and most pernicious illusion.” Instead of participating in rational discourse, students were learning that values are descriptions with no correspondence to eternal truths, that language is an inadequate medium for communication, and that all knowledge and beliefs are culturally contingent. Bloom added that this wholesale “value relativism” had made its “passage from the academy to the marketplace.” Americans celebrated free choice unburdened by the responsibilities of the group. He asserted that “America has no-fault automobile accidents, no-fault divorces, and it is moving with the aid of modern philosophy toward no-fault choices.” Unable to accept limitations on individual striving, contemporary Americans had adopted an unwholesome, lighthearted, and softheaded “nihilism, American style.” According to Bloom, this cynical quality of late twentieth-century American thought stemmed from the nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche. “This is our scene,” lamented Bloom, “the spectacle consists in how [Nietzsche's] views have been trivialized by democratic man desirous of tricking himself out in borrowed finery.”1