Download or read book Metaphor and Literalism in Buddhism written by Soonil Hwang and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2006-09-27 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Soonil Hwang studies the doctrinal development of nirvana in the Pali Nikaaya and subsequent tradition and compares it with the Chinese aagama and its traditional interpretation. He clarifies early doctrinal developments of Nirvana and traces the word and related terms back to their original metaphorical contexts, elucidating diverse interpretations and doctrinal and philosophical developments in the abhidharma exegeses and treatises of Southern and Northern Buddhist schools. The book finally examines which school, if any, kept the original meaning and reference of Nirvana.
Download or read book Metaphor and Literalism written by Soon-il Hwang and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Metaphor and Literalism written by Soon-il Hwang and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Yog ac ara Buddhist Theory of Metaphor written by Roy Tzohar and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-09 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Buddhist philosophy is fundamentally ambivalent toward language. Language is paradoxically seen as both obstructive and necessary for liberation. In this book, Roy Tzohar delves into the ingenious response to this tension from the Yogacara school of Indian Buddhism: that all language-use is metaphorical. Exploring the profound implications of this claim, Tzohar makes the case for viewing the Yogacara account as a full-fledged theory of meaning, one that is not merely linguistic, but also applicable both in the world as well as in texts. Despite the overwhelming visibility of figurative language in Buddhist philosophical texts, this is the first sustained and systematic attempt to present an indigenous Buddhist theory of metaphor. By grounding the Yogacara pan-metaphorical claim in a broader intellectual context, of both Buddhist and non-Buddhist schools, the book uncovers an intense philosophical conversation about metaphor and language that reaches across sectarian lines. Tzohar's analysis radically reframes the Yogacara controversy with the Madhyamaka school of philosophy, sheds light on the Yogacara application of particular metaphors, and explicates the school's unique understanding of experience.
Download or read book How Buddhism Began written by Richard F. Gombrich and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2006-03-07 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by one of the world's top scholars in the field of Pali Buddhism, this new and updated edition of How Buddhism Began, discusses various important doctrines and themes in early Buddhism. It takes 'early Buddhism' to be that reflected in the Pali canon, and to some extent assumes that these doctrines reflect the teachings of the Buddha himself. Two themes predominate. Firstly, the author argues that we cannot understand the Buddha unless we understand that he was debating with other religious teachers, notably Brahmins. The other main theme concerns metaphor, allegory and literalism. This accessible, well-written book is mandatory reading for all serious students of Buddhism.
Download or read book Empty Vision written by David McMahan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-12-19 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Visual metaphors in a number of Mahayana sutras construct a discourse in which visual perception serves as a model for knowledge and enlightenment. In the Perfection of Wisdom (Prajnaparamita) and other Mahayana literature, immediate access to reality is symbolized by vision and set in opposition to language and conceptual thinking, which are construed as obscuring reality. In addition to its philosophical manifestations, the tension between vision and language also functioned as a strategy of legitimation in the struggle of the early heterodox Mahayana movement for authority and legitimacy. This emphasis on vision also served as a resource for the abundant mythical imagery in Mahayana sutras, imagery that is ritualized in Vajrayana visualization practices. McMahan brings a wide range of literature to bear on this issue, Including a rare analysis of the lavish imagery of the Gandavyuha Sutra in its Indian context. He concludes with a discussion of Indian approaches to visuality in the light of some recent discussions of "ocularcentrism" in the west, inviting scholars to expand the current discussion of vision and its roles in constructing epistemic systems and cultural practices beyond its exclusively European and American focus.
Download or read book Metaphors Magic and Mystery written by Sangharakshita and published by Windhorse Publications. This book was released on 2015-01-27 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The theme of this anthology is words, especially words in the context of the Dharma. Words have such power and magic, and yet they also present so many limitations and pitfalls. There are questions of how to use them skilfully and accurately, and the dangers of taking things too literally or misunderstanding metaphors. Indeed, there's the difference between understanding words and really knowing anything at all. There's the relationship between words and the truth, and the role poetry plays in connecting them.
Download or read book Death and Reincarnation in Tibetan Buddhism written by Tanya Zivkovic and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-08 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contextualising the seemingly esoteric and exotic aspects of Tibetan Buddhist culture within the everyday, embodied and sensual sphere of religious praxis, this book centres on the social and religious lives of deceased Tibetan Buddhist lamas. It explores how posterior forms – corpses, relics, reincarnations and hagiographical representations – extend a lama’s trajectory of lives and manipulate biological imperatives of birth and death. The book looks closely at previously unexamined figures whose history is relevant to a better understanding of how Tibetan culture navigates its own understanding of reincarnation, the veneration of relics and different social roles of different types of practitioners. It analyses both the minutiae of everyday interrelations between lamas and their devotees, specifically noted in ritual performances and the enactment of lived tradition, and the sacred hagiographical conventions that underpin local knowledge. A phenomenology of Tibetan Buddhist life, the book provides an ethnography of the everyday embodiment of Tibetan Buddhism. This unusual approach offers a valuable and a genuine new perspective on Tibetan Buddhist culture and is of interest to researchers in the fields of social/cultural anthropology and religious, Buddhist and Tibetan studies.
Download or read book The Spread of Tibetan Buddhism in China written by Dan Smyer Yu and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-03-01 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on contemporary Tibetan Buddhist revivals in the Tibetan regions of the Sichuan and Qinghai Provinces in China, this book explores the intricate entanglements of the Buddhist revivals with cultural identity, state ideology, and popular imagination of Tibetan Buddhist spirituality in contemporary China. In turn, the author explores the broader socio-cultural implications of such revivals. Based on detailed cross-regional ethnographic work, the book demonstrates that the revival of Tibetan Buddhism in contemporary China is intimately bound with both the affirming and negating forces of globalization, modernity, and politics of religion, indigenous identity reclamation, and the market economy. The analysis highlights the multidimensionality of Tibetan Buddhism in relation to different religious, cultural, and political constituencies of China. By recognizing the greater contexts of China’s politics of religion and of the global status of Tibetan Buddhism, this book presents an argument that the revival of Tibetan Buddhism is not an isolated event limited merely to Tibetan regions; instead, it is a result of the intersection of both local and global transformative changes. The book is a useful contribution to students and scholars of Asian religion and Chinese studies.
Download or read book Sexuality in Classical South Asian Buddhism written by José Ignacio Cabezón and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-10-10 with total page 631 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A prolific scholar surveys classical Buddhism’s approach to sex, gender, and sexual orientation in this landmark volume. More than twenty-five years in the making, this detailed sourcebook on Buddhist understandings of sexuality, desire, ethics, and deviance in classical South Asia is filled with both engaging translations and original and provocative analysis. Jose Cabezon, the XIVth Dalai Lama Professor at the University of California Santa Barbara, marshals an incredible array of scriptures, legal and medical texts, and philosophical treatises, explaining the subtleties of this ancient literature in lucid prose. This work will be of immense interest not only to scholars of Buddhism and gender studies but also to lay readers who want to learn more about traditional Buddhist attitudes toward sex.
Download or read book Buddhist Monasticism in East Asia written by James A. Benn and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-09-10 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking into account the diverse religious, historical, social and cultural contexts within which they have existed, this book provides a multifaceted examination of Buddhist monasteries. Written by specialists in the study of monasteries and monastic practice in East Asia, it is a timely contribution on this aspect of Buddhist religious practice.
Download or read book Engendering the Buddhist State written by Ashley Thompson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-14 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing from more than a decade of field and archival research, this monograph concerns Cambodian cultural history and historiography, with an ultimate aim of broadening and deepening bases for understanding the Cambodian Theravadin politico-cultural complex. The book takes the form of an interdisciplinary analysis of performative and representational strategies for constituting social collectivities, largely developed at Angkor. The analysis involves extended close readings of a wide range of cultural artefacts including epigraphic and manuscript texts, sculpture and ritual practices. The author proposes a critical re-evaluation of dominant paradigms of Cambodian historiography in view of engendering new histories, or hybrid histories, which make room for previously absent perspectives and voices, while developing new theoretical tools engaging with and partially derived from "indigenous" narrative practices in the broadest sense. In this history-making process the historical event is shown to never be entirely separable from its aesthetic representation. Particular attention is paid to the roles of sexual difference in such (re)constructions of history. The book presents a theory of power capable of accounting for the historical phenomena by which vernacular cultures appropriate, subvert and submit to cosmopolitan forces. It charts out a novel approach to the study of classical Southeast Asian materials, and is of interest to students and scholars of Asian Art, Religion and Philosophy, Buddhism and Southeast Asian History.
Download or read book New Buddhist Movements in Thailand written by Rory Mackenzie and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-01-24 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The new Buddhist religious movements of Wat Phra Dhammakaya and Santi Asoke, emerged in Thailand in the 1970s at a time of political uncertainty. This book explores why they have come into being, what they have reacted against and what they offer to their members.
Download or read book Buddhist Manuscript Cultures written by Stephen C. Berkwitz and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-01-13 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Buddhist Manuscript Cultures explores how religious and cultural practices in premodern Asia were shaped by literary and artistic traditions as well as by Buddhist material culture. This study of Buddhist texts focuses on the significance of their material forms rather than their doctrinal contents, and examines how and why they were made. Contributions are by reputed scholars in Buddhist Studies and represent diverse disciplinary approaches from religious studies, art history, anthropology, and history.
Download or read book Buddhist Rituals of Death and Rebirth written by Rita Langer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-08-07 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on early Vedic sutras and Pali texts as well as archaeological and epigraphical material, this book provides a thorough analysis of the rituals and social customs surrounding death in the Theravada tradition of Sri Lanka.
Download or read book The Buddhist Art of Living in Nepal written by Lauren Leve and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-08-05 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theravada Buddhism has experienced a powerful and far-reaching revival in modern Nepal, especially among the Newar Buddhist laity, many of whom are reorganizing their lives according to its precepts, practices and ideals. This book documents these far-reaching social and personal transformations and links them to political, economic and cultural shifts associated with late modernity, and especially neoliberal globalization. Nepal has changed radically over the last century, particularly since the introduction of liberal democracy and an open-market economy in 1990. The rise of lay vipassana meditation has also dramatically impacted the Buddhist landscape. Drawing on recently revived understandings of ethics as embodied practices of self-formation, the author argues that the Theravada turn is best understood as an ethical movement that offers practitioners ways of engaging, and models for living in, a rapidly changing world. The book takes readers into the Buddhist reform from the perspectives of its diverse practitioners, detailing devotees' ritual and meditative practices, their often conflicted relations to Vajrayana Buddhism and Newar civil society, their struggles over identity in a formerly Hindu nation-state, and the political, cultural, institutional and moral reorientations that becoming a "pure Buddhist"—as Theravada devotees understand themselves—entails. Based on more than 20 years of anthropological fieldwork, this book is an important contribution to scholarly debates over modern Buddhism, ethical practices, and the anthropology of religion. It is of interest to students and scholars of Asian Religion, Anthropology, Buddhism and Philosophy.
Download or read book Buddhist Architecture in America written by Robert Edward Gordon and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-11-18 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first comprehensive overview of Buddhist architecture in North America and provides an analysis of Buddhist architecture and communities. Exploring the arrival of Buddhist architecture in America, the book lays out how Buddhists have expressed their spiritual beliefs in structural form in the United States. The story follows the parallel history of the religion’s emergence in the United States since the California Gold Rush to the present day. Conceived of as a general history, the book investigates Buddhist structures with respect to the humanistic qualities associated with Buddhist doctrine and how Buddhist groups promote their faith and values in an American setting. The author’s point of view starts from the ground floor of the buildings to move deeper into the space of Buddhist practice, the mind that seeks enlightenment, and the structures that help one to do so. It discusses Buddhist architecture in the United States in a manner consistent with the intensely human context of its use. A unique and ground-breaking analysis, this book adds to the study of Buddhist architecture in America while also addressing the topic of how and why Buddhists use architecture in general. It will be of interest to scholars of religion, architecture, space and place, U.S. history, Asian Studies, and Buddhist Studies. It will also be a valuable addition to the libraries of Buddhist communities across the United States and the world, since many of the observations about Buddhist architecture in the United States may also apply to structures in Europe and Asia.
