Buddhist Life Stories

This article argues that contemporary Buddhist memoirs are an important source to investigate and understand the phenomenon of modern Buddhism. Modern Buddhism is a current development in which Buddhists consider their tradition in new ways. The connections between life stories and modern Buddhist traits are striking. No document can get closer to the source of this movement than a life story. In this article I consider this in terms of the memoirs of the German Buddhist nun Ayya Khema and the Sinhalese monk Bhante Gunaratana. Although the figures may not represent all of the categories of modern Buddhism, the reader understands their choices in terms of their entire lives. The reader is constantly faced with the interplay between modern and traditional traits that make up their life stories.     

The Limits of the Buddhist Embrace of Science

The readiness of Buddhists to dialogue with and embrace modern science has caused some to worry that this encounter will deform Buddhist traditions for the sake of acceptance by the West. But their strong tradition of epistemological skepticism and intellectual pluralism makes it unlikely that Buddhists will embrace scientific positivism. Given the tensions between religion and science in contemporary western society, it is perhaps this feature of Buddhism that can make the most fruitful contribution in its dialogue with science.     

The Role of the Ego in Jungian Individuation and Yogacara Buddhism’s Enlightenment

This article explores the Buddhist and Jungian approaches to the role of the ego in overcoming the limited (for Jung) or illusive (for Buddhists) sense of self rooted in ego-consciousness. Even though both Buddhists and Jung turn to the unconscious (for Jung) or the subliminal consciousness (for Buddhists) to overcome the limitations of the ego, their approaches are radically different. The Jungian ego seems to work diligently in order to transcend itself, whereas Buddhists believe that we can bypass the ego’s participation, namely, its rational analysis and interpretation, and can directly access the subliminal consciousness, alaya. In other words, Buddhists see the ego itself as the problem, or obstacle, in the path to Enlightenment whereas Jung ends up relying upon the active ego’s intervention to become the full Self via individuation. Understanding this substantial difference will lead us to reappraise the reciprocal relationship between the ego and the subliminal mind in both the Jungian theory of individuation and Buddhist enlightenment.     

(Re)producing Buddhist hegemony in Sri Lanka: advancing the discursive formations of self-Orientalism,religious (im)mobility and ‘unethical’ conversion

This paper explores how Buddhist groups in Sri Lanka attempt to suppress conversion to Christianity. Conversion to Christianity can dilute the power and legitimacy of Buddhist groups, which has caused them to promote a discourse of ‘unethical’ conversion. My argument is that such a discourse is self-Orientalising in nature, and is designed to enable the (re)production of Buddhist hegemony in Sri Lanka. By constructing Buddhists as vulnerable and in need of protection, the hegemonic actions of Buddhist groups are validated. These constructions serve to restrict the religious (and socio-cultural) mobility of Buddhists, and to legitimise the persecution of Christians through both legislative and violent means. Sensitivity to the effects of self-Orientalism reveals the need for more critical readings of the effects of religious protectionism on both the Christian other, and the national self as well.     

Spiritual Coping in American Buddhists: An Exploratory Study

Researchers in the United States have examined spiritual coping in Christians, Jews, Hindus, and Muslims, but rarely Buddhists. Using qualitative methodology, the present study represents an initial investigation into Buddhist forms of coping. Twenty-four Buddhists from across the United States were interviewed by phone, examining how their spirituality is used to cope with stress. Thematic analyses revealed six forms of Buddhist coping—right understanding, meditation, mindfulness, spiritual struggles, morality, and finding support in one's sangha. Implications of the study are discussed, including possibilities for future research on Buddhist coping.     

Buddhist Teen Worldview: Some Normative Background for Health Professionals

Although there are dangers in essentializing religious practice, to be able to typify the worldviews of healthy Buddhists becomes advantageous when health professionals need to recognize atypical worldviews that are potentially pathological. The paper is an anthology of potentially ambiguous claims expressed by healthy Buddhist teenagers during UK research including outlook on karma, rebirth, meditation, mindfulness, contact with spirit presences, renunciation, spiritual teachers and superstition. The testimony helps clarify diagnosis of identity, well-being and conformity issues, social withdrawal, anxiety and psychotic disorders in Buddhist teens while offering advice on management of ADHD, OCD, substance abuse and depression. While offering normalized background against which health professionals can evaluate spiritual well-being of young Buddhists the paper offers advice for how treatment can be made more culturally sensitive for Buddhists.     

A Research Note on English‐Speaking Buddhists in the United States

Using data from the 2007 Pew Religious Landscape survey (PRLS), which includes over 650 Buddhist respondents (after weighting), this research note examines the usefulness of previously devised typologies for describing the religious and social characteristics of Buddhists in the United States. Existing “two Buddhisms” typologies capture the category breaks of the U.S. Buddhist landscape, with a couple of exceptions: convert Buddhists report higher rates of belief and higher rates of social activity than do those born into the religion. Analysis also shows that three‐group typologics capture additional complexity within the U.S. Buddhist landscape. Examination of the social characteristics of Buddhists in the United States mostly corroborates previous assumptions with one exception, women do not outnumber men.     

How the Swans Came to Lake Michigan: The Social Organization of Buddhist Chicago

An analysis of the social organization of Buddhist groups and networks in metropolitan Chicago sheds light on the social organization of Buddhism and other new religions in American cities generally. Following an overview of the history and geography of Buddhist Chicago, this essay examines the dynamics underlying the emergence of local Buddhist groups and networks under two main headings: religious identities and sociological factors. First, Buddhism's various branches, traditions, and lineages are discussed; sociological factors discussed include organizational types, ethnic/racial distinctions, sociological functions played by Buddhism for “culture Buddhists” and “convert Buddhists,”and the role of local social dynamics in the emergence, proliferation, and interaction of Buddhist groups. As the field of American Buddhist studies enters a period of renewed productivity, this essay offers a conceptual framework for understanding major issues that can benefit both researchers within the field and interested social scientists outside of it.     

Buddhist shrines: bringing sacred context and shared memory into the home

Previous research has recognized shrines in homes as sites of shared cultural memory with the function of contextualising religious narratives and bringing the sacred into the home. For Buddhists, shrines occupy a grey area between the cultural and the religious and have not been widely considered as indicators of religiosity. A quantitative study of 417 British teenagers self-identifying as Buddhists found that the 70% who had a home shrine were less likely to visit a Buddhist temple, but more likely to exhibit daily personal religious practice and to bow to parents. The attitude profile of those with shrines showed that these teenagers were generally happier at school, more collectivist, polarised regarding their identities, and strict about intoxicants. Heightened affective religiosity was linked with having a home shrine, particularly for female, late-teen, and heritage Buddhists. The article argues that, for these groups of Buddhists, a shrine represents a locus for shared memory, especially accessible to those of Sensing Psychological Types, but, for males, early teens, and converts, there is more a sense of shrines giving context to their Buddhist narratives.     

The role of frequent personal religious practice in Buddhist teen religiosity

A quantitative study explored the relationship for teen Buddhists in Britain between the frequency of personal religious practice (PRP), affective religiosity (as measured by Thanissaro’s 24-item Scale of Attitude to Buddhism), individual differences in attitudes and Psychological Type (as measured by the Francis Psychological Type Scales). Those with frequent PRP (18% practising daily and 54% monthly) were more likely to want their children to grow up Buddhist and felt school was helping them prepare for life. Only daily PRP was associated with Buddhist worldview whereas less frequent PRP was associated with collectivist and traditionalist attitudes. Daily PRP was found to be positively linked with affective religiosity for heritage Buddhists, males, females and 17-to-20-year-olds, but linked with diminished affective religiosity for convert Buddhists. Daily PRP was associated with a Sensing preference in terms of Psychological Type, rather than psychoticism predicted by some previous meditation research.     

“THE NEW SCIENCE OF HEALTH AND HAPPINESS”: INVESTIGATING BUDDHIST ENGAGEMENTS WITH THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF MEDITATION

Clinical and neuroscientific studies of Buddhist meditation practices are frequent topics in the news media, and have helped certain practices (such as mindfulness) achieve mainstream cultural status. Buddhists have reacted by using these studies in a number of ways. Some deploy the studies to show the compatibility of science and Buddhism, often using the authority of science to lend credence to Buddhism. Other Buddhists use meditation studies to demonstrate the superiority of Buddhism over science. Within inter‐Buddhist debates, meditation studies are used to argue for changes in practice or belief, but also sometimes to reinforce certain traditional practices. Benjamin Zeller's threefold categorization of religious groups’ attitudes toward science (guide, replace, absorb) and José Ignacio Cabezón's three ideal types of relationships between Buddhism and science (conflict/ambivalence, compatibility/identity, complementarity) contribute to analysis of Buddhist uses of scientific studies of meditation.     

艾香德牧师与中国佛教:民国时期宗教对话的一个案例

民国时期,中国佛教进入改革发展阶段,社会影响力也波及到其他各种宗教。挪威传教士艾香德来到中国后,受佛教影响,积极学习佛经,深入寺庙与佛教徒进行交流,参访南京支那内学院,撰写了有关中国佛教的著作,并依照佛教寺院制度,先在南京和平门外创办景风山基督教丛林,后又在香港建立道风山基督教丛林。艾香德以较为开放的胸怀倡导宗教对话与宗教联合,当时虽然没有得到人们特别重视,甚至还受到了一些批评,但在全球化的今天,宗教对话与宗教联合被越来越多的宗教团体所认同与接受,已成为世界宗教发展中的一种值得关注的文化现象,重新回视艾香德所倡导的宗教对话就显得更有理论价值与实践意义。     

Suffering and the Shape of Well-Being in Buddhist Ethics

This article explores the defense Indian Buddhist texts make in support of their conceptions of lives that are good for an individual. This defense occurs, largely, through their analysis of ordinary experience as being saturated by subtle forms of suffering (du?kha). I begin by explicating the most influential of the Buddhist taxonomies of suffering: the threefold division into explicit suffering (du?kha-du?khatā), the suffering of change (vipari?āma-du?khatā), and conditioned suffering (sa?skāra-du?khatā). Next, I sketch the three theories of welfare that have been most influential in contemporary ethical theory. I then argue that Buddhist texts underdetermine which of these theories would have been accepted by ancient Indian Buddhists. Nevertheless, Buddhist ideas about suffering narrow the shape any acceptable theory of welfare may take. In my conclusion, I argue that this narrowing process itself is enough to reconstruct a philosophical defense of the forms of life endorsed in Buddhist texts.     

Hermeneutic analysis of virtuous exemplar narratives of Cambodian-American Buddhists and Christians

Virtuous exemplars embody the virtues of a cultural community, a dynamic, contextual understanding that is best explored by critical hermeneutic analysis. In order to describe their lives and refine the mental-health treatment of Cambodian immigrants, 12 virtuous exemplars from a Cambodian-American Buddhist and 12 from a Cambodian-American Christian population were interviewed. Grounded theory and a mixed-methods analysis were used. Rigor-enhancing strategies include triangulation, collaboration, member checking, and researcher reflexivity, as well as interviewing a comparison group of 12 Euro-American Christians. Cambodian-American Buddhists and Christians take their religion seriously, and it influences their daily lives. These Buddhists focus on perseverence in the present life and gaining merit for the next. The Christians focus on serving God and nurturing relationships in this life. They report that they are more different from the Cambodian-American Buddhists than Latent Semantic Analysis indicates, providing evidence of both religious and cultural distinctives among the subgroups.     

To do no harm: A Buddhist view on animal use in research

The issue of using animals for research raises many concerns for Buddhists. Buddhism recognizes that all sentient life shares the same fundamental consciousness but also recognizes a difference in the ability of a species to express that basic, underlying consciousness.Ahimsa or no-harm has been a guiding principle of Buddhist ethics which applies to nonhuman species as well as humans. Conflict arises when available methods for removing some forms of human suffering are dependent upon inflicting suffering on animals. This paper explores several resolutions to the conflict, with the resulting opinion that Buddhism will condone some forms of animal research.     

To be or not to be: Buddhist selves in Toronto

Buddhist identity: a Buddhist by any other name?When we talk about a ‘Buddhist’ or ‘Buddhists’ in Canada and the United States, what exactly is our referent—a label or category, an identity, or perhaps something more? Is the term ‘Buddhist’ signifying a reified object (or subject?), one that subsumes all sorts of practices, beliefs, philosophies, and preconceptions under its umbrella? Or can the term be used to signify choice, personal commitment, motivation, partiality, and perhaps even struggle? We have a great many labels and categorizations of the differences among and between Buddhists, but can we really assume that the term ‘Buddhist’ itself is unproblematic? Calling someone a Buddhist in the West, or ‘naming’ them as such, appears initially and on the surface a fairly straightforward undertaking. And yet, the very act of naming itself is a composite of assumptions and expectations. In much of the anthropological literature on initiation rituals, the act of naming has been construed as more-or-less a societal quest for order and control of the individual. Naming marks who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out’. Being named is an important marker of social identity, socialness, and social belonging (inter alia, Jell-Bahlsen 1989; Jacquemet 1992; Cohen 1994).     

The vihara of compassion: an introduction to Buddhist care for the dying and bereaved in the modern world

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 ?1. This volume is the second publication of the Jodo Shu Research Institute's (JSRI) project, ‘Ojo and death: Its meaning for Pure Land Buddhism, Japanese Buddhism and contemporary society.’ The Ojo and Death Project has sought to confront a variety of practical issues that directly impact the average Japanese, such as: Japan's rapidly ageing society coupled with its low birth rate, the subsequent financial crisis in the ability to take care of the elderly and dying, and the Japanese medical establishment's outdated approach to patient care. The project has also, of course, tried to confront the crisis of the growing irrelevancy of the Buddhist priests and temples in the lives of their lay followers. 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.