Reviews

Nirvana and other Buddhist felicities: Utopias of the Pali imaginaire. By Steven Collins. Published by Cambridge University Press, 1998, xxiv + 684 pp.

Verses from the Center: A Buddhist Vision of the Sublime. By Stephen Batchelor. Published by Riverhead Books, 2000, xvii + 181 pp.

Innovative Buddhist Women: Swimming Against the Stream. Edited by Karma Lekshe Tsomo. Published by Curzon Press, 2000, xxviii + 354 pp.     

Reviews

Collected Papers on Buddhist Studies, by Padmanabh S. Jaini with a Foreword by Paul Dundas, Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi, 2001, xvii & 557 pp.     

Review

The Resonance of Emptiness: A Buddhist inspiration for a contemporary psychotherapy. By Gay Watson. Published by Curzon Press, 1998, ix + 317 pp.     

Buddhist Meditation and the British Colonial Gaze in Nineteenth-Century Sri Lanka

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that the multiple orientalist expressions that flowed from British pens in nineteenth century Sri Lanka are of use to the scholar of Buddhism, in that they can not only shed light on the growth of Buddhist modernism and the use of the term ‘meditation’ within it, but also on Sri Lankan Buddhist practice on the ground. It first surveys the preconceptions of the British about the concept of ‘meditation’. It then examines the writings of a representative selection of scholar civil servants and Christian missionaries who were resident in Sri Lanka within the century. This data reveal that a vibrant culture of Buddhist devotion and preaching existed throughout the century, together, among the laity, with the practice of ‘meditation’ on objects related to insight into reality. Additionally, it suggests that the jhānas, although hard for westerners to understand, were an important part of Buddhist self-understanding. The paper, therefore, argues that the priority given to vipassanā as the essence of meditation within Buddhist Modernism is a reduction of the diversity within traditional practice and a distortion of the traditionally recognised interrelationship between the jhānas and other forms of mental culture.     

Queering Buddhism or Buddhist De-Queering?

Abstract

This article examines how multiple axes of difference — race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality — operate in the religious/spiritual lives of western convert LGBTQI Buddhists. Through an ethnographic study of a diverse LGBTQI Buddhist group in Oakland, California, it will reflect on emerging differences between western convert Buddhist LGBTQI practitioners. In particular, it examines how distinct populations of LGBTQI practitioners utilize the non-essentialist philosophy of Buddhism, showing how it can operate both conservatively as a way to reinforce heteronormativity and subversively as a way to challenge heteronormativity.     

Gift narration: dynamic themes of reciprocity,debt, and social relations in Theravāda Buddhist Myanmar

ABSTRACT

Scholarly studies of Buddhist gift-giving have explored the many ways in which gifts are or are not reciprocal. This topic is revisited in this article by the author drawing greater attention to the practice of narration. Instead of understanding Buddhist words about dāna as representing religious doctrines or the experience of its social practice, the author considers how Buddhists narrate dāna as a means of maintaining relationships with self and others. Examining narratives of one monastic gift-recipient, meanings of dāna and moral principles of gift-giving are shown to vary alongside shifting relations between givers and receivers. This case suggests that themes of reciprocity are most salient when narrators grapple with interpersonal threats. Offering possible interpretations of this correlation, the author argues how reciprocal forces could be external social conditions to which narratives respond as well as created ex nihilo through the practice of narration as a strategy of ordering interpersonal conflicts potentially unrelated to reciprocity.     

HARD-BOILED ZEN: JANWILLEM VAN DE WETERING’S THE JAPANESE CORPSE AS BUDDHIST LITERATURE

ABSTRACT

Though many studies of the contemporary Buddhist literature exist, such studies often limit their purview to canonised, ‘high-brow’ authors. In this article, I read Janwillem van de Wetering’s The Japanese Corpse, a detective novel, for how it portrays Zen Buddhism. I show that The Japanese Corpse portrays Zen as non-dualist and amoral: good and bad are arbitrary categories that impede spiritual freedom. Likewise, characters’ identities are fluid, not fixed. The novel shows this by insistently associating Zen with sex and violence, and by the use of dramatic motifs. However, the novel also excludes women, particularly Japanese women, from spiritual attainment, instead essentialising them as the sexual objects of the hard-boiled detective story. As a matrix of conflicting values, The Japanese Corpse thus turns out to be a case study of Buddhist modernism, and of challenges of detective fiction as world literature.     

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 ‘UNIVERSAL DHARMA FOUNDATION’ OF MINDFULNESS-BASED STRESS REDUCTION: NON-DUALITY AND MAHĀYĀNA BUDDHIST INFLUENCES IN THE WORK OF JON KABAT-ZINN

ABSTRACT

The discussion on the Buddhist roots of contemporary mindfulness practices is dominated by a narrative which considers the Theravāda tradition and Theravāda-based ‘neo-vipassanā movement’ as the principal source of Buddhist influences in mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) and related mindfulness-based programmes (MBPs). This Theravāda bias fails to acknowledge the significant Mahāyāna Buddhist influences that have informed the pioneering work of Jon Kabat-Zinn in the formation of the MBSR programme. In Kabat-Zinn’s texts, the ‘universal dharma foundation’ of mindfulness practice is grounded in pan-Buddhist teachings on the origins and cessation of suffering. While MBSR methods derive from both Theravāda-based vipassanā and non-dual Mahāyāna approaches, the philosophical foundation of MBSR differs significantly from Theravāda views. Instead, the characteristic principles and insights of MBSR practice indicate significant similarities and historical continuities with contemporary Zen/S?n/Thi?n and Tibetan Dzogchen teachings based on doctrinal developments within Indian and East Asian Mahāyāna Buddhism.     

Secular Buddhism and Justice

Abstract

Starting point: The core idea of secular Buddhism is to grasp the spirit of early Buddhism and transpose it into the present. The best known approach to implement this idea is Stephen Batchelor’s Buddhism Without Beliefs, an approach which advocates an agnostic stance with regard to the doctrine of rebirth and denies its relevance for daily practice.

Type of problem:

? Is there a way to revise the doctrine of rebirth, instead of completely dropping it?

? What is the impact on the notion of justice?

Result: The doctrine of rebirth cannot be revised in a strict sense, but there are some striking similarities between the ancient and modern (biological) view on the topic. Since the stream of genetic and epigenetic information has the power to create consciousness and reflects experiences of past lives, it can be associated with the stream of consciousness (cittasantāna) in the Mahayana model of rebirth. Parents not only determine the genetic constitution of their children, they also transfer character traits by means of epigenetic heredity. If genetic inheritance is associated with karma, then genes become an element of synchronic and diachronic connectedness (pratītya-samutpāda). Instead of an individual learning process across successive lives, there is a collective learning process across successive generations.

Given the biological model of rebirth, the belief in cosmic justice turns into a quest for mundane justice. There is a thought experiment for constructing such a concept, which complies well with the secular Buddhist spirit. John Rawls assumes that the legislative deliberation is taking place ‘behind a veil of ignorance’, so that the participants of the deliberation do not know their future genetic constitution and their future position within the society. If the participants imagine that their future self is contingent and impermanent – in accordance with the Buddhist doctrine of anātman and anitya – then the resulting principles of justice will be impartial.     

Fromm’s understanding of the Buddhist philosophical theory and psychoanalysis: From the phenomenal ego to the authentic being1

Abstract

Erich Fromm was one of the first psychoanalytic thinkers who was genuinely interested in Asian philosophies. In the first part of this article, I will show Fromm’s imago of Buddhism as a radical, nontheistic, and ethical philosophy “without God.” I will argue that Fromm made an important difference between the phenomenal ego and being that proves crucial for his understanding of psychoanalysis and his critique of modern society. I will also explore Fromm’s synthesis of Buddhist philosophy and psychoanalysis, and show the similarities and differences between them.     

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.     

The Concept of Intermediate Existence in the Early Buddhist Theory of rebirth

This article investigates the concept of intermediate existence in the early Buddhist theory of rebirth. The main sources investigated for this article are the Pāli canonical and commentarial literature. My main thesis is that early Buddhist discourses contain instances that suggest a spatial-temporal gap between death and rebirth known as ‘intermediate existence’ (antarābhava), in contrast to the idea of Theravāda Buddhist theory that rebirth takes place immediately without a spatial-temporal gap. In order to prove this, I argue that the ‘one who liberates in interval’ (anarāparinibbāyī) attains Nibbāna in the intermediate existence and the concept of gandhabbā in early Buddhist discourses refers to a being in intermediate existence, not to a dying consciousness (cuti-viññāna), and there are indirect inferences to an spatiotemporal gap between death and rebirth in the early Buddhist discourses.     

Mettābhāvanā in Traditional and Popular Buddhist Contexts

Some have referred to relatively recent forms of popular Buddhism as an ‘engaged’ Buddhism that has revived or redirected traditional Buddhist ideas and practices found in meditation texts to reflect a greater social or worldly emphasis than suggested in earlier historical moments. One of these ideas is the quadripartite framework of the ‘immeasurable states’ (aprameya/appameya) or ‘divine abidings’ (brahmavihāra), the most prominent of which in popular Buddhism is mettā (friendliness/loving-kindness). This article traces the philosophy of the ‘immeasurable states’ found in meditation texts from various Indic traditions (Buddhist, Jain, and Hindu) and then presents the ways in which these traditional ideas (especially mettā) have informed popular Buddhist movements in the twentieth century. Points of discussion include: ‘engaged’ Buddhism's relationship with traditional Buddhist ethics; arguments concerning the coalescence of monastic-centred meditation practices with popular Buddhist notions of social service; and the distinct utilization of mettā in contemporary Buddhist societies in contrast to the mobilizing impulses of comparable religious communities (Hindu and Jain) with a similar heritage of mettā discourse in South Asia.     

The Bodhi-Therapist

SUMMARY

This paper presents formulations and case studies that indicate the relevance of Buddhist meditation practice for the practice of psychotherapy. Samatha-vipassana meditation, the core of all Buddhist methods is described as a training in the cultivation of specific therapeutic talents that arise as concomitants of bodhicitta, awakened experience.     

Bad gifts,community standards,and the disciplining of Theravāda monks

ABSTRACT

The act of giving is among the most fundamental acts within the Buddhist world, particularly in the Theravāda communities of Southeast Asia. In many of these communities, lay followers give food and other dāna (merit-making gifts), providing monastics with the ‘requisites’ that they need to survive. Yet there is relatively little discussion within Buddhist or scholarly communities about what should be given, with formulaic lists representing the majority of discussions about these gifts. However, sometimes, the gifts given to monastics are not always appropriate, even bad. What to do in those cases is not always clear. In this article, I explore the ways in which monks in Thailand and Southwest China think about gifts that are not good. What becomes clear is that, despite the prevailing view that discipline is a universal process based on the vinaya (disciplinary code of Buddhism), monks have different views about what constitutes a ‘bad gift’ and what to do about it. I argue that paying attention to bad gifts allows us to see that lay communities have significant voice—although this is often implicit rather than explicit—about what constitutes ‘proper’ monastic behavior.     

Mindfulness-based Therapy in Modern Psychology: Convergence and Divergence from Early Buddhist Thought

This article offers a comparative analysis on mindfulness from mindfulness-based therapies in the contemporary literature and from Buddhist meditation practices in the Pāli Canon. This includes a review of the presiding definitions of mindfulness, recent scientific findings in the literature and the current theories on the underlying mechanisms of mindfulness. The meditation practices from the Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction (MBSR) programme are compared to the origins of mindfulness of breathing meditations from the Satipa??hāna Sutta (MN 10). Further, recent research into the cultivation of skilful states of mind including compassion, self-compassion, loving-kindness, equanimity and sympathetic joy are reviewed and compared to an anthology of texts from the Pāli Canon. Ethical issues emerging from the convergence of science and Buddhist philosophy are also discussed for further consideration.

Abbreviations: AN: A?guttara Nikāya; BPS: Buddhist Publication Society; Dhp: Dhammapada; Dhs: Dhammasa?ga?ī; DN: Dīgha Nikāya; Iti: Itivuttaka; MN: Majjhima Nikāya; Miln: Milindapañha; Pa?is: Pa?isambhidāmagga; SN: Sa?yutta Nikāya; Sn: Sutta Nipāta; Ud: Udāna; Vibh: Vibha?ga; Vim: Vimuttimagga; Vsm: Visuddhimagga     

Angels and the Dragon King's Daughter: Gender,Sexuality in Western Buddhist New Religious Movements

Abstract

Through colonialism and globalization, Buddhism has developed an increasing profile in the West. This can be observed within popular culture as well as the presence of Buddhist practitioners from a range of ethnicities of whom a significant number are converts. This presence has led to the development of Buddhist new religious movements (NRMs). We first outline interpretations of gender and sexuality that have arisen within Buddhist traditions. Then, using Linda Woodhead's (2007) model that theorises religion's positioning with respect to gender, we discuss gender norms that have developed for two of the largest Buddhist NRMs in the UK: the Triratna Buddhist Community (TBC, formerly the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order, FWBO) and the Nichiren group Sōka-Gakkai International-UK (SGI-UK). Through examining new empirical data, we explore how their gender norms are negotiated by members. We note that within these movements, women, queer people and people of colour are creating provisional spaces that challenge attempts to hegemonize hetero-patriarchal perspectives.     

The Ritual Use of Music in US Jōdo Shinshū Buddhist Communities

US Jōdo Shinshū Buddhist songs in the style of Christian hymns—what the community refers to as gāthā—are an integral part of the lived experience of North American Shin Buddhism. Rather than focusing on processes of acculturation, in the following paper I take gāthā seriously as a form of Buddhist practice, asking questions related not to their origins or legitimacy but to their function and purpose. I argue that gāthā function as a mechanism by which shifting ideas, attitudes, and practices become normative within the community. This function becomes apparent when gāthā are placed within their larger ritual context and are performed by the community as a whole. Following on Rappaport's analysis of ritual, gāthā serve as indexical expressions of canonical orientations toward Buddhist practice and teachings.     

The Varied Trajectories of Engaged Buddhism: New Works on Buddhist Environmental Ethics,Interdependence, and Racial Karma

This book discussion reads three works in contemporary Buddhist social ethics alongside one another: Ogyen Trinley Dorje’s Interconnected, David Loy’s Ecodharma, and Larry Ward’s America’s Racial Karma. Each of these works contributes to the subfield of engaged Buddhism, which aims to bring Buddhist value theory to contemporary social and political issues in order to effect social change. The rapid development of engaged Buddhism constitutes a particularly rich moment in the history of Buddhist thought, as Buddhist ethics is showing itself to be actively in process—a tradition in the midst of rapid transformation, revision, and cross-cultural application. This book discussion interrogates these three works with that metaphilosophical and historiographical issue in mind, analyzing the particular ways in which they contribute to challenging and reshaping the traditional contours of Buddhist ethics into a contemporary social and political register. In exemplifying the approaches of translation, extending, and applying, these works demonstrate the creative and experimental moment in which Buddhist social ethics finds itself today. Such adaptations of the Buddhist tradition are historiographically significant as innovations, while also of a piece with Buddhism’s history of intercultural transmission.