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Author: Ian Harris
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824865774
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 258
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Book Description
This pioneering study of the fate of Buddhism during the communist period in Cambodia puts a human face on a dark period in Cambodia’s history. It is the first sustained analysis of the widely held assumption that the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot had a centralized plan to liquidate the entire monastic order. Based on a thorough analysis of interview transcripts and a large body of contemporary manuscript material, it offers a nuanced view that attempts to move beyond the horrific monastic death toll and fully evaluate the damage to the Buddhist sangha under Democratic Kampuchea. Compelling evidence exists to suggest that Khmer Rouge leaders were determined to hunt down senior members of the pre-1975 ecclesiastical hierarchy, but other factors also worked against the Buddhist order. Buddhism in a Dark Age outlines a three-phase process in the Khmer Rouge treatment of Buddhism: bureaucratic interference and obstruction, explicit harassment, and finally the elimination of the obdurate and those close to the previous Lon Nol regime. The establishment of a separate revolutionary form of sangha administration constituted the bureaucratic phase. The harassment of monks, both individually and en masse, was partially due to the uprooting of the traditional monastic economy in which lay people were discouraged from feeding economically unproductive monks. Younger members of the order were disrobed and forced into marriage or military service. The final act in the tragedy of Buddhism under the Khmer Rouge was the execution of those monks and senior ecclesiastics who resisted. It was difficult for institutional Buddhism to survive the conditions encountered during the decade under study here. Prince Sihanouk’s overthrow in 1970 marked the end of Buddhism as the central axis around which all other aspects of Cambodian existence revolved and made sense. And under Pol Pot the lay population was strongly discouraged from providing its necessary material support. The book concludes with a discussion of the slow re-establishment and official supervision of the Buddhist order during the People’s Republic of Kampuchea period.
Author: Ian Harris
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824865774
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 258
Get Book Here
Book Description
This pioneering study of the fate of Buddhism during the communist period in Cambodia puts a human face on a dark period in Cambodia’s history. It is the first sustained analysis of the widely held assumption that the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot had a centralized plan to liquidate the entire monastic order. Based on a thorough analysis of interview transcripts and a large body of contemporary manuscript material, it offers a nuanced view that attempts to move beyond the horrific monastic death toll and fully evaluate the damage to the Buddhist sangha under Democratic Kampuchea. Compelling evidence exists to suggest that Khmer Rouge leaders were determined to hunt down senior members of the pre-1975 ecclesiastical hierarchy, but other factors also worked against the Buddhist order. Buddhism in a Dark Age outlines a three-phase process in the Khmer Rouge treatment of Buddhism: bureaucratic interference and obstruction, explicit harassment, and finally the elimination of the obdurate and those close to the previous Lon Nol regime. The establishment of a separate revolutionary form of sangha administration constituted the bureaucratic phase. The harassment of monks, both individually and en masse, was partially due to the uprooting of the traditional monastic economy in which lay people were discouraged from feeding economically unproductive monks. Younger members of the order were disrobed and forced into marriage or military service. The final act in the tragedy of Buddhism under the Khmer Rouge was the execution of those monks and senior ecclesiastics who resisted. It was difficult for institutional Buddhism to survive the conditions encountered during the decade under study here. Prince Sihanouk’s overthrow in 1970 marked the end of Buddhism as the central axis around which all other aspects of Cambodian existence revolved and made sense. And under Pol Pot the lay population was strongly discouraged from providing its necessary material support. The book concludes with a discussion of the slow re-establishment and official supervision of the Buddhist order during the People’s Republic of Kampuchea period.
Author: Jacob P. Dalton
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300153929
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 325
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Book Description
The Taming of the Demons examines mythic and ritual themes of violence, demon taming, and blood sacrifice in Tibetan Buddhism. Taking as its starting point Tibet's so-called age of fragmentation (842 to 986 C.E.), the book draws on previously unstudied manuscripts discovered in the "library cave" near Dunhuang, on the old Silk Road. These ancient documents, it argues, demonstrate how this purportedly inactive period in Tibetan history was in fact crucial to the Tibetan assimilation of Buddhism, and particularly to the spread of violent themes from tantric Buddhism into Tibet at the local and the popular levels. Having shed light on this "dark age" of Tibetan history, the second half of the book turns to how, from the late tenth century onward, the period came to play a vital symbolic role in Tibet, as a violent historical "other" against which the Tibetan Buddhist tradition defined itself. -- Georges Dreyfus
Author: Kurt Mahlburg
Publisher: Australian Heart Publishing
ISBN: 1922480096
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 356
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Book Description
Is There Hope in the Chaos? Our civilisation is unstable. Everyone can feel it. We face a looming mental health crisis. Slavery, censorship and superstition are back. Our politics are polarising. All the affluence in the world can’t seem to quench our thirst for meaning and purpose. But maybe there is hope—if we know where to look. In this timely book, Kurt Mahlburg shows how profoundly the West has been shaped by the life and teachings of Jesus—from our democratic freedoms and our pursuit of reason and science to our belief that every life is precious. Could rediscovering Jesus be the answer to our crisis?
Author: David L. McMahan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199884781
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 310
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Book Description
A great deal of Buddhist literature and scholarly writing about Buddhism of the past 150 years reflects, and indeed constructs, a historically unique modern Buddhism, even while purporting to represent ancient tradition, timeless teaching, or the "essentials" of Buddhism. This literature, Asian as well as Western, weaves together the strands of different traditions to create a novel hybrid that brings Buddhism into alignment with many of the ideologies and sensibilities of the post-Enlightenment West. In this book, David McMahan charts the development of this "Buddhist modernism." McMahan examines and analyzes a wide range of popular and scholarly writings produced by Buddhists around the globe. He focuses on ideological and imaginative encounters between Buddhism and modernity, for example in the realms of science, mythology, literature, art, psychology, and religious pluralism. He shows how certain themes cut across cultural and geographical contexts, and how this form of Buddhism has been created by multiple agents in a variety of times and places. His position is critical but empathetic: while he presents Buddhist modernism as a construction of numerous parties with varying interests, he does not reduce it to a mistake, a misrepresentation, or fabrication. Rather, he presents it as a complex historical process constituted by a variety of responses -- sometimes trivial, often profound -- to some of the most important concerns of the modern era.
Author: Praphōt ʻAtsawawirunhakān
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 296
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Book Description
This wide-ranging account of early Buddhism in Southeast Asia overthrows dominant theories among both Western and Asian Scholars. The author argues that Pali-based Buddhism was brought from India and Sri Lanka by merchants, monks, and pilgrims by the fourth century. Several schools flourished alongside Brahmanism, Mahayanism, and local spirit beliefs--in coexistence rather than conflict. There was no "conversion" to Theravada in the eleventh century as the school was already well established. Prapod draws on a broad range of source material including inscriptions, texts, archaeology, iconography, architecture, and anthropology from India, Sri Lanka, China, and the region itself. He highlights the lived tradition of religious practice rather than scriptural sources.
Author: Richard P. Hayes
Publisher: Windhorse Publications
ISBN: 9781899579129
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 302
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Book Description
Writing with a perspective that comes from more than twenty years of study and practice, Richard Hayes casts a critical eye over modern society and the teachings of Buddhism as they flow into the West.
Author: Ian Harris
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824861760
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 369
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Book Description
The study of Cambodian religion has long been hampered by a lack of easily accessible scholarship. This impressive new work by Ian Harris thus fills a major gap and offers English-language scholars a booklength, up-to-date treatment of the religious aspects of Cambodian culture. Beginning with a coherent history of the presence of religion in the country from its inception to the present day, the book goes on to furnish insights into the distinctive nature of Cambodia's important yet overlooked manifestation of Theravada Buddhist tradition and to show how it reestablished itself following almost total annihilation during the Pol Pot period. Historical sections cover the dominant role of tantric Mahayana concepts and rituals under the last great king of Angkor, Jayavarman VII (1181–c. 1220); the rise of Theravada traditions after the collapse of the Angkorian civilization; the impact of foreign influences on the development of the nineteenth-century monastic order; and politicized Buddhism and the Buddhist contribution to an emerging sense of Khmer nationhood. The Buddhism practiced in Cambodia has much in common with parallel traditions in Thailand and Sri Lanka, yet there are also significant differences. The book concentrates on these and illustrates how a distinctly Cambodian Theravada developed by accommodating itself to premodern Khmer modes of thought. Following the overthrow of Prince Sihanouk in 1970, Cambodia slid rapidly into disorder and violence. Later chapters chart the elimination of institutional Buddhism under the Khmer Rouge and its gradual reemergence after Pol Pot, the restoration of the monastic order's prerevolutionary institutional forms, and the emergence of contemporary Buddhist groupings.
Author: Allan Hunt Badiner
Publisher: Chronicle Books
ISBN: 9780811832861
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 248
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Book Description
Buddhism and psychedelic experimentation share a common concern: the liberation of the mind. Zig Zag Zen launches the first serious inquiry into the moral, ethical, doctrinal, and transcendental considerations created by the intersection of Buddhism and psychedelics. With a foreword by renowned Buddhist scholar Stephen Batchelor and a preface by historian of religion Huston Smith, along with numerous essays and interviews, Zig Zag Zen is a provocative and thoughtful exploration of altered states of consciousness and the potential for transformation. Accompanying each essay is a work of visionary art selected by artist Alex Grey, such as a vividly graphic work by Robert Venosa, a contemporary thangka painting by Robert Beer, and an exercise in emptiness in the form of an enso by a 17th-century Zen abbot. Packed with enlightening entries and art that lie outside the scope of mainstream anthologies, Zig Zag Zen offers eye-opening insights into alternate methods of inner exploration.
Author: Glenn Wallis
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 147428356X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 237
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Book Description
This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched. What are we to make of Western Buddhism? Glenn Wallis argues that in aligning their tradition with the contemporary wellness industry, Western Buddhists evade the consequences of Buddhist thought. This book shows that with concepts such as vanishing, nihility, extinction, contingency, and no-self, Buddhism, like all potent systems of thought, articulates a notion of the “real.” Raw, unflinching acceptance of this real is held by Buddhism to be at the very core of human “awakening.” Yet these preeminent human truths are universally shored up against in contemporary Buddhist practice, contravening the very heart of Buddhism. The author's critique of Western Buddhism is threefold. It is immanent, in emerging out of Buddhist thought but taking it beyond what it itself publicly concedes; negative, in employing the “democratizing” deconstructive methods of François Laruelle's non-philosophy; and re-descriptive, in applying Laruelle's concept of philofiction. Through applying resources of Continental philosophy to Western Buddhism, A Critique of Western Buddhism suggests a possible practice for our time, an "anthropotechnic", or religion transposed from its seductive, but misguiding, idealist haven.
Author: S R RAMANUJAN
Publisher: Partridge Publishing
ISBN: 1482834634
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 271
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Book Description
The temple for the Lord of Vengadam in Tirumala (Andhra Pradesh, India) is one of the richest places of worship in the entire world with ever-increasing popularity, the footfall of devotees on the Seven Hills touching a whopping figure of seventy thousand on weekdays and one hundred thousand during the weekends. The Temples annual budget hovers around 25 billion rupees. This world record to fame and riches is not without its flip side. The temple has become the focal point for a variety of controversiessome created by the political class, some by historians with an axe to grind, and some more by Hindus with a sectarian outlook. The never-ending dispute is over the identity of the idol as a result of the age-old conflict between the worshippers of Siva and Vishnu, the two most important deities of the Hindu pantheon. Taking their cue from this, Neo-Buddhists joined the fray with the claim that the temple was a Buddhist shrine and that it was converted into Vishnu temple by wily Brahmins. The book aims to unravel the mystery over the history of the temple, providing a historical perspective to the issue and thus establishing the real identity of the Lord, which is indisputably that of the Vishnu.
