The Many Canons of Tibetan Buddhism

The Many Canons of Tibetan Buddhism
Author: International Association for Tibetan Studies. Seminar
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 392
Release: 2002-01-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9789004125957

The Many Canons of Tibetan Buddhism is one of the first publications to include scholarship on both the mainstream Tibetan canons of translated Buddhist classics, and the alternative canons of literature of the Nyingma sectarian traditions.

Managing Monks

Managing Monks
Author: Jonathan A. Silk
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 358
Release: 2008-10-15
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0195326849

The paradigmatic Buddhist is the monk. It is well known that ideally Buddhist monks are expected to meditate and study -- to engage in religious practice. The institutional structure which makes this concentration on spiritual cultivation possible is the monastery. But as a bureaucratic institution, the monastery requires administrators to organize and manage its functions, to prepare quiet spots for meditation, to arrange audiences for sermons, or simply to make sure food, rooms, and bedding are provided. The valuations placed on such organizational roles were, however, a subject of considerable controversy among Indian Buddhist writers, with some considering them significantly less praiseworthy than meditative concentration or teaching and study, while others more highly appreciated their importance. Managing Monks, as the first major study of the administrative offices of Indian Buddhist monasticism and of those who hold them, explores literary sources, inscriptions and other materials in Sanskrit, Pali, Tibetan, and Chinese in order to explore this tension and paint a picture of the internal workings of the Buddhist monastic institution in India, highlighting the ambivalent and sometimes contradictory attitudes toward administrators revealed in various sources.

A Saint in Seattle

A Saint in Seattle
Author: David P. Jackson
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 803
Release: 2003
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0861713966

Exiled from his native land by the Communist Chinese, Tibetan lama Dezhung Rinpoche arrived in Seattle and continued his role as a teacher of teachers, mentoring some of the most prominent Western scholars of Tibetan Buddhism today.

Rethinking 'Classical Yoga' and Buddhism

Rethinking 'Classical Yoga' and Buddhism
Author: Karen O'Brien-Kop
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2021-09-09
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1350230014

This book revisits the early systemic formation of meditation practices called 'yoga' in South Asia by employing metaphor theory. Karen O'Brien-Kop also develops an alternative way of analysing the reception history of yoga that aims to decentre the Eurocentric and imperialist enterprises of the nineteenth-century to reframe the cultural period of the 1st – 5th centuries CE using categorical markers from South Asian intellectual history. Buddhist traditions were just as concerned as Hindu traditions with meditative disciplines of yoga. By exploring the intertextuality of the Patanjalayogasastra with texts such as Vasubandhu's Abhidharmakosabhasya and Asanga's Yogacarabhumisastra, this book highlights and clarifies many ideologically Buddhist concepts and practices in Patanjala yoga. Karen O'Brien-Kop demonstrates that 'classical yoga' was co-constructed systemically by both Hindu and Buddhist thinkers who were drawing on the same conceptual metaphors of the period. This analysis demystifies early yoga-meditation as a timeless 'classical' practice and locates it in a specific material context of agrarian and urban economies.

Imagining Tibet

Imagining Tibet
Author: Thierry Dodin
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 482
Release: 2001
Genre: History
ISBN: 0861711912

In the past century, the Western view of Tibet has evolved from an exotic Shangri-la filled with golden idols and the promise of immortality, to a peaceful land with an enlightened society now ravaged by outside aggression. How and why did our perception change? How accurate are our modern conceptions of Tibet? Imagining Tibet is a collection of essays that reveal these Western conceptions. Providing an historical background to the West's ever-changing relationship with Tibet, Donald Lopez, Jeffrey Hopkins, Jamyang Norbu, and other noted scholars explore a variety of topics - from Western perceptions of Tibetan approaches to violence, monastic life, and life as a nation in exile, to representations of Tibet in Western literature, art, environmentalism, and the New Age movement.

Tree and Serpent: Early Buddhist Art in India

Tree and Serpent: Early Buddhist Art in India
Author: John Guy
Publisher: Metropolitan Museum of Art
Total Pages: 348
Release: 2023-07-17
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1588396932

A pioneering study of the emergence of Buddhist art in southern India, featuring vibrant photography of rare works, many published here for the first time Named for two primary motifs in Buddhist art, the sacred bodhi tree and the protective snake, Tree & Serpent: Early Buddhist Art in India is the first publication to foreground devotional works produced in the Deccan from 200 BCE to 400 CE. Unlike traditional narratives, which focus on northern India (where the Buddha was born, taught, and died), this groundbreaking book presents Buddhist art from monastic sites in the south. Long neglected, this is among the earliest surviving bodies of Buddhist art, and among the most sublimely beautiful. An international team of researchers contributes new scholarship on the sculptural and devotional art associated with Buddhism, and masterpieces from recently excavated Buddhist sites are published here for the first time—including Kanaganahalli and Phanigiri, the most important new discoveries in a generation. With its exploration of Buddhism’s emergence in southern India, as well as of India’s deep commercial and cultural engagement with the Hellenized and Roman worlds, this definitive study expands our understanding of the origins of Buddhist art itself.

Buddhism and Law

Buddhism and Law
Author: Rebecca Redwood French
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 409
Release: 2014-07-28
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1139952056

As the first comprehensive study of Buddhism and law in Asia, this interdisciplinary volume challenges the concept of Buddhism as an apolitical religion without implications for law. Buddhism and Law draws on the expertise of the foremost scholars in Buddhist studies and in law to trace the legal aspects of the religion from the time of the Buddha to the present. In some cases, Buddhism provided the crucial architecture for legal ideologies and secular law codes, while in other cases it had to contend with a pre-existing legal system, to which it added a new layer of complexity. The wide-ranging studies in this book reveal a diversity of relationships between Buddhist monastic codes and secular legal systems in terms of substantive rules, factoring, and ritual practices. This volume will be an essential resource for all students and teachers in Buddhist studies, law and religion, and comparative law.

Histories of Tibet

Histories of Tibet
Author: Kurtis Schaeffer
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 491
Release: 2023-07-25
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1614298084

The thirty-four essays in this volume follow the particular interests of Leonard van der Kuijp, whose groundbreaking research in Tibetan intellectual and cultural history imbued his students with an abiding sense of curiosity and discovery. As part of Leonard van der Kuijp’s research in Tibetan history, as he patiently and expertly revealed treasures of the Tibetan intellectual tradition in fourteenth-century Tsang, or seventeenth-century Lhasa, or eighteenth-century Amdo, he developed an international community of colleagues and students. The thirty-four essays in this volume follow the particular interests of the honoree and express the comprehensive research that his international cohort have engaged in alongside his generous tutelage over the course of forty years. He imbued his students with the abiding sense of curiosity and discovery that can be experienced through every one of his writings, and that can be found as well in these new essays in intellectual, cultural, and institutional history by Christopher Beckwith, the late Hubert Decleer, Franz-Karl Ehrhard, Jörg Heimbel and David Jackson, Isabelle Henrion-Dourcy, Nathan Hill, Matthew Kapstein, Kurtis Schaeffer, Michael Witzel, Allison Aitken, Yael Bentor, Pieter Verhagen, Todd Lewis, William McGrath, Peter Schwieger, Gray Tuttle, and others.

Figments and Fragments of Mahayana Buddhism in India

Figments and Fragments of Mahayana Buddhism in India
Author: Gregory Schopen
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 408
Release: 2005-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780824825485

In these articles, Gregory Schopen once again displays the erudition and originality that have contributed to a major shift in the way that Indian Buddhism is perceived, understood, and studied.

Text, History, and Philosophy

Text, History, and Philosophy
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 445
Release: 2016-05-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004318828

Text, History, and Philosophy. Abhidharma Across Buddhist Scholastic Traditions discusses Abhidhamma / Abhidharma as a specific exegetical method. In the first part of the volume, the development of the Buddhist argumentative technique is discussed. The second part investigates the importance of the Buddhist rational tradition for the development of Buddhist philosophy. The third part focuses on some peculiar doctrinal issues that resulted from rational Abhidharmic reflections. In this way, an outline of the development of the Abhidharma genre and of Abhidharmic notions and concepts in India, Central Asia, China, and Tibet from the life time of the historical Buddha to the tenth century CE is given. Contributors are: Johannes Bronkhorst, Lance S. Cousins, Bart Dessein, Tamara Ditrich, Bhikkhu Kuala Lumpur Dhammajoti, Dylan Esler, Eric Greene, Goran Kardaš, Jowita Kramer, Chen-kuo Lin, Andrea Schlosser, Ingo Strauch, Weijen Teng and Yao-ming Tsai.