This paper addresses imagination, focusing on two words, bhāvana and vikalpa, both frequently translated as "imagination," and addresses the connections imagination has with the body, specifically within the context of contemplative practices. Drawing primarily from the 10th and 11th century philosophical school of the Pratyabhijñā of Abhinavagupta and Utpaladeva, this paper proposes a more complex understanding of imagination as consisting of different forms, some connected with the body, others not. This paper suggests that the medieval Indian understanding of imagination as linked to the body allows this term for imagination to side-step much of our current philosophical difficulty within contemporary coginitive science regarding the mind-body problem.
Adaptations, modifications, and realignments of religious doctrine and practice can be found in any period of social history. It can be official and highly orchestrated (as in Vatican II) but more often it takes a subjective and reactionary form (as in the Hindutva movement). This paper promotes the idea of “experimental religion” as both an analytical concept and an observable set of behaviors that help identify how contemporary trends (such as individualism, secularity, information technologies, and market economies) reconfigure attitudes and motivations regarding the relevance and applicability of religious resources. Drawing from Buddhist-related case material in Japan and other liberal democracies, we see lay practitioners, priests, and occasionally institutions as well using innovation and activism to reposition and reboot existing paradigms. The intention is to fashion a religious practice responsive to individual concerns as well as to pressing environmental, political, and economic issues.
Relations between Buddhism and Catholicism began to take place in Vietnam in the sixteenth century and in Ho Chi Minh City in the seventeenth century. There have been conversions of Buddhists to Catholicism and a very few reconversions of Catholics to Buddhism. Dialogue and tension/conflict between Buddhists and Catholics have been also sometimes found. The article first examines some types of conversion and relations between Buddhists and Catholics in a number of countries. It then explores relations between the two religions in Vietnam. Finally, the article surveys how Buddhist-Catholic relations have been in Ho Chi Minh City. It focuses on cooperation, and conversion and its causes between Buddhists and Catholics.
In this article the alternating voices of colleagues and collaborators Jane Brucker and Christopher Chapple describe their way of using contemplative pedagogies to bring Engaged Learning to their students at Loyola Marymount University. A requirement of the curriculum for all undergraduate students, these courses integrate study and reflection beyond the classroom. As a professor of studio arts, Brucker has developed techniques of awareness that utilize a contemplative approach with students engaged in drawing and creative activity in a studio or off-campus setting. As a professor of comparative theology, Chapple has designed course requirements for meditation experience and field visits that embed his students within the contemplative aspects of Buddhism as well as in communities deeply grounded in environmental action. Grounded in the Jesuit-Marymount concern for educating the ‘whole person’, Brucker and Chapple understand this as engaging students in experiences that include the relationship between the inner experience of meditation and the outward experiences of spirituality, creativity, and nature.
Bhikṣuṇī Shig Hiu Wan was a Buddhist master in more than one sense of the word. She was not only a highly accomplished practitioner, teacher, artist, and poet, but she was also a feminist pioneer in higher education. When she arrived in Taiwan in 1966 and began teaching at the Chinese Cultural University, she was the first Buddhist nun to teach at the university level in Taiwan. At that time, it was highly unusual for a nun to take a visible role in the public sphere, so when Shihfu allowed her paintings to be exhibited in Taipei, this was an important breakthrough in helping raise awareness of Chinese and Indian Buddhist culture, Buddhist women’s cultural achievements, and women’s achievements in general. In this paper, I take a participant/observer approach in an effort to understand Shihfu’s unique teaching style and the qualities and achievements that establish her as one of the leading Buddhist nuns of the twentieth century. In this personal reflection, based on fieldwork conducted in Taiwan between 1982 and 2002, I consider her life’s work and the impact that she has had on successive generations of Buddhists, particularly Buddhist women. In the process, I examine what it means to be a uniquely progressive master in an overtly, proudly traditional Buddhist culture.
Tirumular’s Tirumandiram is the earliest known Tamil treatise on yoga. This text is considered to be both, a devotional work as well as a tantric text. Unlike other major Siddha compositions, Tirumandiram does not contain any section on medicinal preparations or alchemy. It is the only Tamil text where the sections are named tanṭiram. In contrast to the popular pluralistic Śaiva Siddhānta, Tirumandiram, one of the twelve Saiva cannons (tirumurai), is monistic in its philosophy. This study, while elaborating on the metaphysics of the text Tirumandiram, also examines the shared philosophical thoughts between the monistic Kashmir Śaivism and Tamil Siddha mystics.
We will offer in this essay an analytic overview of four texts from the second half of the nineteenth century which elaborated different variations on the Hindu dharma. These are Rajnarayan Basu’s Hindu Dharmera Sresthata (‘The Superiority of the Hindu dharma’, 1879), Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s Dharmatattva (1888, ‘Principles of Dharma’), Bhudeb Mukhopadhyay’s Sāmājika Prabandha (‘Essays on Society’, 1892), and Chandranath Basu’s Hindutva (‘Hinduness’, 1892). These textual constructions of Hindu identity sometimes have different argumentative goals, employ different rhetorical strategies, and draw upon different scriptural resources. Notwithstanding these distinctive variations relating to aims, methods, and styles, they seek to engage Europe as the Other both as a conceptual toolbox whose instruments can be appropriated for reconfiguring the Hindu dharmaand as a dialectical foil which highlights the superiority of the Hindu dharma to its diverse critics. For Rajnarayan Basu, Chatterjee, Mukhopadhyay, and Chandranath Basu, the Hindu dharma is the hermeneutic site for evaluating specific aspects of European modernities and for re-asserting Vedic norms, ideas, and practices through a critical engagement with European modernities. These texts are multi-faceted vignettes into the Bengali Hindu appropriations of European concepts in late nineteenth century Bengal, and also the anxieties about the stability of the Hindu dharma in an age of rapid socio-cultural transformations.
The aim of this paper is to two fold—first, to set forth a definition of "mastery" as it is understood across diverse Buddhist traditions. Secondly, using verses from the Therigatha, I argue that the first female monastics meet the criteria of Buddhist masters. My claim is based on evidence from the teachings of the historical Buddha and by citing examples from the elder female disciples, and finally, by illustrating that the embodied experience as women was central to their development of mastery.
This article analyzes how the modern movement of Santmat, literally “the views of sants,” primarily popular in the rural areas of northern India, uniquely situates itself within the context of “Vedic Dharma.” Through the monastic leadership’s redefinition of the categories of Vedic Dharma and Sanātana Dharma, the Santmat tradition creates a space where vernacular Hindu practices and mystical Vedic paths can co-exist. Thus, it stands apart from other contemporary Sant Mat traditions that reject Vedic Dharma. In this article, I pair an examination and analysis of the Santmat movement’s historical development and methods, in which Vedic wisdom coheres with the sants’ spiritual insights, with an ethnographic analysis of how this movement enacts a creative integration of vernacular traditions. I suggest that this particular Santmat’s “bricolage,” to borrow a term from Claude Levi-Strauss, illustrates a distinctive example of experimental dharmas in the context of vernacular sant traditions in contemporary North India. Santmat’s skillful integration of local religious vernaculars gives expression to its engagement with lived devotional traditions. Such mixing of practices, which illustrate the processes of hybridity and syncretism, has helped to make the esoteric practices more meaningful and relevant to the everyday lives of the masses, including the tribal and rural people of Bihar and Nepal, populations often marginalized in orthodox Hindu practices. I examine the experimentation occurring within the Santmat tradition and argue that Bihar’s Santmat movement may be termed “Vernacular Vedic Dharma.” Furthermore, I address how within the 21st-century rise of extremism, Santmat shows that Vedic Dharma, within its manifold strands of practices and philosophies, encourages an adherence to the harmonizing esoteric spiritual path as well as a universal ethical framework.
This article advances a conceptual shift in the ways that scholars think and teach about the established categories of religion, renunciation, and the modern in religious studies, anthropology, and Asian studies through the use of the concept of “experimental Hinduism.” Drawing on an analytical model of “experimental religion” developed by the anthropologist John Nelson, a contributor to this volume, and based on fifteen years of ethnographic fieldwork with Hindu renouncers (sādhus) in North India, the article examines the sādhus’ views, experiences, and practices of the modern technological as an empirical –and underrepresented– context for reconfiguring Hinduism in the 21st century. It shows that they revision the dominant definitional boundaries of Hinduism by theologizing what is called "the forms of the modern," like communication technologies, in the context of their public teaching events (dharm-kathās). Thus, this article calls attention to the creative—and experimental—thinking taking place in vernacular asceticism (sannyās) among sādhus from different renunciant traditions, and who want to make sense of the vast technological changes shaping their lives and those of the communities whom they serve. The theologizing of technology is seen in their drawing on a synthesis of Hindu ideological frameworks through which the sādhus emphasize by means of storytelling three narrative motifs that articulate the divinity of technology. These are: Sannyās represents the “original technology" and the "original science”; technology manifests the properties of creativity and change that characterize what the sādhus associate with “the nature of Brahman” and “the rule of dharm”; and, finally, the apocalyptic Kalki avatār concept offers a redemptive metaphor for the evolving human-technology interface in the current global milieu.
This essay discusses the fundamental structure of ritual practice among the Rathvas, an adivasi group in Chhotaudepur district, Gujarat. It examines in some detail various sites of ritual practice to show how Rathvas imaginatively construct borders at these sites. At times Rathvas elaborate upon pre-existing natural or artificial borders, while at other times they construct a border where none existed previously; they do both in order to locate a place for devs, devis and ancestors. The essay then suggests that Rathvas construct these borders in order to breach them imaginatively and interact with devs, devis and ancestors via ritual practice. Elements within contemporary cognitive science, such as the notion of subconscious mental processing, the image schemata developed by Mark Johnson and utilized by George Lakoff, and analyses of theory of mind, can help to explain these practices. By contrast, a strong tradition in the study of religions that has focused upon sacred space does not. Rathva rituals occur at specific places, but they do not necessarily construct sacred spaces. In doing so, they are not unique.
This paper examines change and experimentation in Agama Hindu Dharma, a form of Hinduism which has adapted to the modern Muslim influence in Indonesia by emphasizing a monotheistic deity unique to the country and an ethical system and prayer rituals with many similarities to Muslim practices. This is a new form of Hinduism developed by scholars, psychologists and priests. The paper analyzes changes in ritual, the arts, and theology. It also focuses on the major locale for modernization, the religion curriculum used in public education. It is a study of religion as lived, with experimentation that has been adopted into state policy.
This paper offers a set of nuanced narratives and a theoretically-informed report on what is the driving force and motivation behind the movement of Hindus and Sikhs from one continent to another (apart from their earlier movement out of the subcontinent to distant shores). What leads them to leave one diasporic location for another location? In this sense they are also ‘twice-migrants’. Here I investigate the extent and nature of the transnational movement of diasporic Hindus and Sikhs crossing borders into the U.S. and Australia – the new dharmic sites – and how they have tackled the question of the transmission of their respective dharmas within their own communities, particularly to the younger generation. Two case studies will be presented: one from Hindus and Sikhs in Australia; the other from California (temples and gurdwaras in Silicon Valley and Bay Area).
The paper deals with a historical and hitherto obscure case of de-commercialisation of sacred geography of India. Sahajanand Swami, an eighteenth century religious leader from Gujarat who became popular as Bhagwan Swaminarayan took an initiative to eliminate corruption in Dwarka, one of the most sacred destination in Hindu imagination. He also attempted to transpose the piety of Dwarka and recreate a parallel religious experience at Vadtal, an important site in Swaminarayan Hinduism. This process of making sacred sites more egalitarian is classified here as a 'religious reform'. The paper assesses this bivalent pursuit as an institutional reform within religion as well as a religious process in the context of piety, authority and orthodoxy. Through the example of Sahajanand Swami, it is argued to calibrate the colonial paradigm of reform that was largely contextual to social issues and western thought and failed to appreciate the religious reforms of that era. By constructing a nuanced typology of 'religious reform' distinct from 'social reforms', the paper eventually calls for a reassessment of religious figures who have significantly contributed in reforming the Hindu tradition in the medieval and modern era.
This paper deals with koan practice of silence through analyzing the Korean Zen Buddhist film, Why Has Boddhidharma Left for the East? (Bae, Yong-Kyun, Why Has Bodhidharma Left for the East? 1989). This paper follows Kibong's path along with the Buddha's journey of 1) departure, 2) journey in the middle way, and 3) returning with a particular focus on koan practice of silence as the transformative element of enlightenment. Analyzing silence throughout the film, this paper studies the Seon Buddhist lifestyle in an aesthetic way and finds a philosophical understanding of interdependency of samsara and nirvana. Silence is a crucial element of koan. Koan is, indeed, not to be answered, but to be practiced through one's life.
In this paper I examine how the Japanese True Pure Land Buddhist school (Jōdo Shinshū or Shin Buddhism) has attempted to come to terms with the position of temple wife (bōmori), which has historically been a local position based solely on marriage ties to the resident priest of a temple, in a way that accommodates the modern principles of individual rights and freedom of religion. The central Jōdo Shinshū institutions of the Ōtani-ha and Honganji-ha have responded to demands to recognize the autonomous choice of temple wives to undertake a life of service to the parish temple by formulating an initiation ceremony meant to encourage the temple wife’s self-awareness as a religious professional. Utilizing ethnographic fieldwork conducted from 2009 to 2013, I survey the various sites where Buddhism is lived and experimented in contemporary Japan. I highlight the interplay between local and central sources of religious meaning and authenticity.
