Download or read book Brides of the Buddha written by Karen Muldoon-Hules and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2017-06-05 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For young women in early South Asia, marriage was probably the most important event in their lives, as it largely determined their socioeconomic and religious future. Yet there has been little in the way of systematic examinations of the evidence on marriage customs among Buddhists of this time, and our understanding of the lives of early Buddhist women is still quite limited. This study uses ten stories from the Avadānaśataka, the collection of Buddhist narratives compiled from the second to fifth centuries CE, to examine the social landscape of early India. The author analyzes marital customs and the development of nuns’ hagiographies, while revealing regional variations of Buddhism in South Asia during this period.
Download or read book Bride of the Buddha written by Barbara McHugh, PhD and published by Monkfish Book Publishing. This book was released on 2021-01-05 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This engrossing exploration of gender dynamics, identity, and the spiritual quest for meaning will appeal to Buddhists and general readers alike." —Publishers Weekly “This is an impressive tapestry of history, spiritual philosophy, and literary drama and an edifying look at the patriarchal limitations of Buddhism’s genesis...An intelligently conceived and artistically executed reconsideration of religious history.” —Kirkus Reviews “Bride of the Buddha is an immersive novel about the founding of Buddhism, told in the voice of a woman who would not be excluded from the spiritual quest, nor from the presence of the man whom she loved.” —ForeWord Magazine This is the story of Yasodhara, the abandoned wife of the Buddha. Facing society’s challenges, she transforms her rage into devotion to the path of liberation. The page-turner about a woman’s struggle in an unapologetic religious patriarchy, Bride of the Buddha offers a penetrating perspective on the milieu of the Buddha.
Download or read book The Buddha in the Attic written by Julie Otsuka and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2011-08-23 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • PEN/FAULKER AWARD WINNER • The acclaimed author of The Swimmers and When the Emperor Was Divine tells the story of a group of young women brought from Japan to San Francisco as “picture brides” a century ago in this "understated masterpiece ... that unfolds with great emotional power" (San Francisco Chronicle). In eight unforgettable sections, The Buddha in the Attic traces the extraordinary lives of these women, from their arduous journeys by boat, to their arrival in San Francisco and their tremulous first nights as new wives; from their experiences raising children who would later reject their culture and language, to the deracinating arrival of war. Julie Otsuka has written a spellbinding novel about identity and loyalty, and what it means to be an American in uncertain times.
Download or read book The Dharma of The Princess Bride written by Ethan Nichtern and published by North Point Press. This book was released on 2017-09-12 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Friendship. Romance. Family. These are the three areas Ethan Nichtern delves into, taking as departure points the indelible characters--Westley, Fezzik, Vizzini, Count Rugen, Princess Buttercup, and others from Rob Reiner's perennially popular film--as he also draws lessons from his own life and his work as a meditation teacher. Nicthern devotes the first section of the book to exploring the dynamics of friendship. Why do people become friends? What can we learn from the sufferings of Inigo Montoya and Fezzik? Next, he leads us through all the phases of illusion and disillusion we encounter in our romantic pursuits, providing a healthy dose of lightheartedness along the way by sharing his own Princess Buttercup List and the vicissitudes of his dating life as he ponders how we idealize and objectify romantic love. Finally, Nichtern draws upon the demands of his own family history and the film's character the Grandson to explore the dynamics of "the last frontier of awakening," a reference to his teacher Chogyam Trungpa's claim that it's possible to be enlightened everywhere except around your family.
Download or read book Family in Buddhism written by Liz Wilson and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2013-08-06 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Buddha left his home and family and enjoined his followers to go forth and "become homeless." With a traditionally celibate clergy, Asian Buddhism is often regarded as a world-renouncing religion inimical to family life. This edited volume counters this view, showing how Asian Buddhists in a wide range of historical and geographical circumstances relate as kin to their biological families and to the religious families they join. Using contemporary and historical case studies as well as textual examples, contributors explore how Asian Buddhists invoke family ties in the intentional communities they create and use them to establish religious authority and guard religious privilege. The language of family and lineage emerges as central to a variety of South and East Asian Buddhist contexts. With an interdisciplinary, Pan-Asian approach, Family in Buddhism challenges received wisdom in religious studies and offers new ways to think about family and society.
Download or read book The Woman Who Raised the Buddha written by Wendy Garling and published by Shambhala Publications. This book was released on 2021-03-23 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nautilus Book Award Winner The first full biography of Mahaprajapati Gautami, the woman who raised the Buddha--examining her life through stories and canonical records. Mahaprajapati was the only mother the Buddha ever knew. His birth mother, Maya, died shortly after childbirth, and her sister Mahaprajapati took the infant to her breast, nurturing and raising him into adulthood. While there is a lot of ambiguity overall in the Buddha's biography, this detail remains consistent across all Buddhist traditions and literature. In this first full biography of Mahaprajapati, The Woman Who Raised the Buddha presents her life story, with attention to her early years as sister, queen, matriarch, and mother, as well as her later years as a nun. Drawing from story fragments and canonical records, Wendy Garling reveals just how exceptional Mahaprajapati's role was as leader of the first generation of Buddhist women, helping the Buddha establish an equal community of lay and monastic women and men. Mother to the Buddha, mother to early Buddhist women, mother to the Buddhist faith, Mahaprajapati's journey is finally presented as one interwoven with the founding of Buddhism.
Download or read book Encountering the Dharma written by Richard Hughes Seager and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2006-03-16 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This engaging, deeply personal book, illuminating the search for meaning in today’s world, offers a rare insider’s look at Soka Gakkai Buddhism, one of Japan’s most influential and controversial religious movements, and one that is experiencing explosive growth around the world. Unique for its multiethnic make-up, Gakkai Buddhists can be found in more than 100 countries from Japan to Brazil to the United States and Germany. In Encountering the Dharma, Richard Seager, an American professor of religion trying to come to terms with the death of his wife, travels to Japan in search of the spirit of the Soka Gakkai. This book tells of his journey toward understanding in a compelling narrative woven out of his observations, reflections, and interviews, including several rare one-on-one meetings with Soka Gakkai president Daisaku Ikeda. Along the way, Seager also explores broad-ranging controversies arising from the Soka Gakkai’s efforts to rebuild post-war Japan, its struggles with an ancient priesthood, and its motives for propagating Buddhism around the world. One turning point in his understanding comes as Ikeda and the Soka Gakkai strike an authentically Buddhist response to the events of September 11, 2001.
Download or read book Buddhism written by Peter Harvey and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2001-07-05 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays examines ten core themes from a comparative perspective and thus provides an integrated introduction to the social and spiritual values at the centre of Buddhist thought. Following an introductory chapter, the themes covered are moral decision making, worship, myth and history, the role of women, attitudes to nature, sacred writings, beliefs about human nature, rites of passage, sacred place and the depiction of the divine. Each chapter concludes with a list of recommended further reading.
Download or read book The Epic of the Buddha written by Chittadhar Hrdaya and published by Shambhala Publications. This book was released on 2019-05-21 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A translation of the modern Nepalese classic Winner of the Toshihide Numata Book Award in Buddhism and the Khyentse Foundation Prize for Outstanding Translation This award-winning book contains the English translation of Sugata Saurabha (“The Sweet Fragrance of the Buddha”), an epic poem on the life and teachings of the Buddha. Chittadhar Hṛdaya, a master poet from Nepal, wrote this tour de force while imprisoned for subversion in the 1940s and smuggled it out over time on scraps of paper. His consummate skill and poetic artistry are evident throughout as he tells the Buddha’s story in dramatic terms, drawing on images from the natural world to heighten the description of emotionally charged events. It is peopled with very human characters who experience a wide range of emotions, from erotic love to anger, jealousy, heroism, compassion, and goodwill. By showing how the central events of the Buddha’s life are experienced by Siddhartha, as well as by his family members and various disciples, the poem communicates a fuller sense of the humanity of everyone involved and the depth and power of the Buddha’s loving-kindness. For this new edition of the English translation, the translators improved the beauty and flow of most every line. The translation is also supplemented with a series of short essays by Todd Lewis, one of the translators, that articulates how Hṛdaya incorporated his own Newar cultural traditions in order to connect his readership with the immediacy and relevancy of the Buddha’s life and at the same time express his views on political issues, ethical principles, literary life, gender discrimination, economic policy, and social reform.
Download or read book Gendered Agency in Transcultural Hinduism and Buddhism written by Ute Hüsken and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-04-01 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on complex entanglements of religion and gender from a diversity of perspectives, this book explores how women enact agencies in transcultural Hindu and Buddhist settings. The chapters draw on original, in-depth empirical research in various contexts in South Asian religious traditions. Today, in an increasing number of such contexts, women are able to undergo monastic and priestly education, receive ordination/initiation as nuns and priestesses, and are accepted as ascetic religious leaders. They are starting to establish new religious communities within conservative traditions, occupying religious leadership positions on par with men. This volume considers the historical background, contemporary trajectories, and potential impact of the emergence of these new and powerful female agencies in conservative South Asian religious traditions. It will be of particular interest to scholars of religion, women’s and gender studies, and South Asian studies.
Download or read book Family Matters in Indian Buddhist Monasticisms written by Shayne Clarke and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2013-12-31 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholarly and popular consensus has painted a picture of Indian Buddhist monasticism in which monks and nuns severed all ties with their families when they left home for the religious life. In this view, monks and nuns remained celibate, and those who faltered in their “vows” of monastic celibacy were immediately and irrevocably expelled from the Buddhist Order. This romanticized image is based largely on the ascetic rhetoric of texts such as the Rhinoceros Horn Sutra. Through a study of Indian Buddhist law codes (vinaya), Shayne Clarke dehorns the rhinoceros, revealing that in their own legal narratives, far from renouncing familial ties, Indian Buddhist writers take for granted the fact that monks and nuns would remain in contact with their families. The vision of the monastic life that emerges from Clarke's close reading of monastic law codes challenges some of our most basic scholarly notions of what it meant to be a Buddhist monk or nun in India around the turn of the Common Era. Not only do we see thick narratives depicting monks and nuns continuing to interact and associate with their families, but some are described as leaving home for the religious life with their children, and some as married monastic couples. Clarke argues that renunciation with or as a family is tightly woven into the very fabric of Indian Buddhist renunciation and monasticisms. Surveying the still largely uncharted terrain of Indian Buddhist monastic law codes preserved in Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Chinese, Clarke provides a comprehensive, pan-Indian picture of Buddhist monastic attitudes toward family. Whereas scholars have often assumed that monastic Buddhism must be anti-familial, he demonstrates that these assumptions were clearly not shared by the authors/redactors of Indian Buddhist monastic law codes. In challenging us to reconsider some of our most cherished assumptions concerning Indian Buddhist monasticisms, he provides a basis to rethink later forms of Buddhist monasticism such as those found in Central Asia, Kaśmīr, Nepal, and Tibet not in terms of corruption and decline but of continuity and development of a monastic or renunciant ideal that we have yet to understand fully.
Download or read book Translating Buddhism written by Alice Collett and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2021-04-01 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although many Buddhist studies scholars spend a great deal of their time involved in acts of translation, to date not much has been published that examines the key questions, problems, and difficulties faced by translators of South Asian Buddhist texts and epigraphs. Translating Buddhism seeks to address this omission. The essays collected here represent a burgeoning attempt to begin to shape the subfield of translation studies within Buddhist studies, whereby scholars actively challenge primary routine decisions and basic assumptions. Exploring questions including how interpretive translators can be and how cultural and social norms affect translations, the book draws on the broad experiences of its contributors—all of whom are translators themselves—who bring different themes to the table. Each chapter can be used either independently or as part of the whole to engender reflections on the process of translation.
Download or read book Women in Early Indian Buddhism written by Alice Collett and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is a broad-ranging comparative study with translations of texts, sections of texts and textual fragments that are concerned with women in early Indian Buddhism, including study of texts in Gandhari, Sanskrit, Pali, Chinese, Tibetan and Sinhala.
Download or read book Family in Buddhism written by Liz Wilson and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2013-08-01 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A wide-ranging exploration of Buddhism and family in Asiafrom biological families to families created in monasteries. The Buddha left his home and family and enjoined his followers to go forth and become homeless. With a traditionally celibate clergy, Asian Buddhism is often regarded as a world-renouncing religion inimical to family life. This edited volume counters this view, showing how Asian Buddhists in a wide range of historical and geographical circumstances relate as kin to their biological families and to the religious families they join. Using contemporary and historical case studies as well as textual examples, contributors explore how Asian Buddhists invoke family ties in the intentional communities they create and use them to establish religious authority and guard religious privilege. The language of family and lineage emerges as central to a variety of South and East Asian Buddhist contexts. With an interdisciplinary, Pan-Asian approach, Family in Buddhism challenges received wisdom in religious studies and offers new ways to think about family and society.
Download or read book Your Interfaith Wedding written by Laurie Sue Brockway and published by Greenwood. This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For those looking to create a personalized wedding ceremony that honors and celebrates the diverse religious, racial, or ethnic backgrounds of the couple and their families, this book provides expert guidance for perfectly blending traditions and faiths. "Alternative" wedding ceremonies are quickly becoming the norm in the United States as ethnic cultures merge and people willingly embrace love where they find it. Couples planning an interfaith, interethnic, or interracial marriage often encounter difficulty identifying the right rituals and language for their ceremony or struggle to appease their parents or relatives. This book will help couples learn more about each other's faiths and family mindset, freeing them to create a wedding that truly blesses their married life. Reverend Brockway explains her motivation to write this text: "This book was a very personal mission for me. As an interfaith minister, I deal with so many diverse couples, from so many different backgrounds, but the common denominator with all couples boils down to love. So the book focuses on celebrating the love between the couple as the most important part of the ceremony, and weaves in honoring family, cultures, and traditions in a way that is personally meaningful to the couple." Contains insights shared by brides and grooms, interviews and information from other attributed sources, as well as special contributions from Rev. Victor Fuhrman Presents exclusive materials designed by the author throughout more than a decade of experience in ministry
Download or read book Special Times Buddhism written by Jane A.C. West and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2009-07-10 with total page 33 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A contemporary and diverse picture of the journey through life in each world religion.
Download or read book Women in Buddhist Literature written by Bimala Churn Law and published by . This book was released on 1927 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
