Religious Giving and the Invention of Karma in Theravada Buddhism

Religious Giving and the Invention of Karma in Theravada Buddhism
Author: James Egge
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2013-12-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1136859152

Demonstrates that Buddhists appropriated the practice, vocabulary, and ideology of sacrifice from Vedic religion, and discusses the relationship of this sacrificial discourse to ideas of karma in the Pali canon and in early Buddhism.

Religious Giving and the Invention of Karma in Theravada Buddhism

Religious Giving and the Invention of Karma in Theravada Buddhism
Author: James R. Egge
Publisher: Psychology Press
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2002
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 9780700715060

Demonstrates that Buddhists appropriated the practice, vocabulary, and ideology of sacrifice from Vedic religion, and discusses the relationship of this sacrificial discourse to ideas of karma in the Pali canon and in early Buddhism.

Karma and Grace

Karma and Grace
Author: Neena Mahadev
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2023-10-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 0231555938

Around the turn of the millennium, Pentecostal churches began to pepper majority-Buddhist Sri Lanka, setting off a sense of alarm among Buddhists who saw Christianity as a neocolonial threat to the nation. Rumors of foul play in the death of a Buddhist monk, as well as allegations of proselytizing in the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami and during the final stages of civil war, spurred nationalist anxieties, moral panics, and even episodes of violence by Buddhists against Christians suspected of facilitating “unethical” conversions. Through vivid ethnography and keen observations of media events, Karma and Grace illuminates disputes over religious freedom and pluralism amid the rise of charismatic Christianity in Sri Lanka. Neena Mahadev explores the dueling efforts of Buddhist nationalists and Christian evangelists to reshape Sri Lanka’s religious, economic, and political landscapes. She considers theological and political impasses between Buddhism’s vast timescales of karma and Christians’ promises of the immediacy of their God’s salvific grace. While Christian missions spread “the Good News,” subsets of Buddhists produced bad press, sting operations, and disparaging media to impede born-again churches from taking root. In gripping detail, Mahadev recounts how modernist and traditionalist Theravāda Buddhists, Pentecostal newcomers, long-established Christian denominations, local deity and spirit cults, and the innovations of mavericks intermingle in a multireligious public sphere. Even amid trenchant conflicts, Karma and Grace demonstrates that social proximity between rivals is also conducive to religious experimentation and the ambiguities of identity that allow Sri Lankans to live with difference.

Narrating Karma and Rebirth

Narrating Karma and Rebirth
Author: Naomi Appleton
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2014-02-13
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 1107033934

This book explores how multi-life stories served to construct, communicate, and challenge ideas about karma and rebirth within early South Asia.

Proselytizing and the Limits of Religious Pluralism in Contemporary Asia

Proselytizing and the Limits of Religious Pluralism in Contemporary Asia
Author: Juliana Finucane
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2013-10-21
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9814451185

This volume brings together a range of critical studies that explore diverse ways in which processes of globalization pose new challenges and offer new opportunities for religious groups to propagate their beliefs in contemporary Asian contexts. Proselytizing tests the limits of religious pluralism, as it is a practice that exists on the border of tolerance and intolerance. The practice of proselytizing presupposes not only that people are freely-choosing agents and that religion itself is an issue of individual preference. At the same time, however, it also raises fraught questions about belonging to particular communities and heightens the moral stakes in involved in such choices. In many contemporary Asian societies, questions about the limits of acceptable proselytic behavior have taken on added urgency in the current era of globalization. Recognizing this, the studies brought together here serve to develop our understandings of current developments as it critically explores the complex ways in which contemporary contexts of religious pluralism in Asia both enable, and are threatened by, projects of proselytization.

Yoga, Karma, and Rebirth

Yoga, Karma, and Rebirth
Author: Stephen H. Phillips
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 548
Release: 2009-05-20
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0231519478

For serious yoga practitioners curious to know the ancient origins of the art, Stephen Phillips, a professional philosopher and sanskritist with a long-standing personal practice, lays out the philosophies of action, knowledge, and devotion as well as the processes of meditation, reasoning, and self-analysis that formed the basis of yoga in ancient and classical India and continue to shape it today. In discussing yoga's fundamental commitments, Phillips explores traditional teachings of hatha yoga, karma yoga, bhakti yoga, and tantra, and shows how such core concepts as self-monitoring consciousness, karma, nonharmfulness (ahimsa), reincarnation, and the powers of consciousness relate to modern practice. He outlines values implicit in bhakti yoga and the tantric yoga of beauty and art and explains the occult psychologies of koshas, skandhas, and chakras. His book incorporates original translations from the early Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, the Yoga Sutra (the entire text), the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, and seminal tantric writings of the tenth-century Kashmiri Shaivite, Abhinava Gupta. A glossary defining more than three hundred technical terms and an extensive bibliography offer further help to nonscholars. A remarkable exploration of yoga's conceptual legacy, Yoga, Karma, and Rebirth crystallizes ideas about self and reality that unite the many incarnations of yoga.

Epitome of the Pali Canon

Epitome of the Pali Canon
Author: Chroniker Press Book
Publisher: Lulu.com
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2012-10-29
Genre: Reference
ISBN: 1300327154

This book is an authorized reprint of Wikipedia articles pertaining to the Pali Canon, the oldest collection of Buddhist scriptures. Included are articles on Pali, the Early Buddhist Schools, and many suttas and other parts of the Vinaya, Sutta, and Abhidhamma Pitakas. This book presents a comprehensive and in depth overview of the Pali Canon in a convenient collection.

Gift and Duty

Gift and Duty
Author: Paul H. De Neui
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 221
Release: 2017-12-21
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1532638698

Is the Christian concept of grace anathema to the social structure of merit-making found in Buddhist karmic communities? Are all Buddhist forms of merit-making purely for religious purposes to assuage cosmic consequences or are there other reasons? Are there not Christian churches who operate under a legalistic view of God’s divine wrath and are in essence living as karmic communities of the Christian type? The result of discussions about these and other questions is the volume you now hold in your hand. SEANET proudly presents what is number 14 in its series of missiological reference texts, Gift and Duty: Where Grace and Merit Meet. Each of the ten authors presented here represent a particular perspective, both Christian and Buddhist, that can inform the other. The goal of this volume is to lead to a deeper understanding of the significance of diverse religious and cultural perspectives.

Moral Theory in Santideva's Siksasamuccaya

Moral Theory in Santideva's Siksasamuccaya
Author: Barbra R. Clayton
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 184
Release: 2006-04-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 1134278292

This book analyses the moral theory of the seventh century Indian Mahayana master, Santideva.

Post-Tsunami Recovery in Thailand

Post-Tsunami Recovery in Thailand
Author: Monica Lindberg Falk
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2014-09-19
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317690125

Of all the huge natural disasters that claimed the lives of thousands in Asia, the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 was the largest, estimated to have killed more than 230,000 people. The scope of damage brought about by this natural disaster urges focus on recovery and post-disaster reconstruction from several perspectives. Here we find an in-depth ethnography of Thailand and the role of culture and religion as an underpinning issue in post-disaster recovery. Following the post-tsunami recovery over five years, the book provides knowledge on socio-cultural responses from affected local communities after natural hazards, and is based on original material collected in Thailand after the 2004 tsunami. With a focus on how culture and religion interplay in the processes of building resilience and decreasing vulnerability, it gives a deeper understanding of how disasters are experienced and dealt with on a local level. It examines survivors’ experiences of rituals and ceremonies that became a part of the survivors’ lives in new ways after the tsunami, offering psychological reassurance and religious efficaciousness as well as communication links between themselves and the deceased. Using observations, narratives and material from in-depth interviews with survivors, relatives, relief workers, officials and Buddhist monks and nuns, this book contributes to the research on anthropology of disaster and to the development of research on cultural resilience and religion in post-disaster recovery. It will be of interest to scholars of Disaster Studies, Buddhist Studies and Asian Studies.