Institute of Buddhist Studies

“Hermeneutics” as a philosophical discipline of rational interpretation of a traditional canon of Sacred Scriptures authoritative for a religious community has usually been considered peculiar to the West. This notion is anchored only in the misconception that “Eastern” thought is somehow “non-rational,” or “mystical,” hence excused from the burden of reconciling the tensions between some forms of authority and philosophical reason. Buddhism in particular has been misconceived in this way, due to its emphasis on meditational experience and non-dualistic wisdom. These misconceptions are quickly cleared away when we examine the role of authority in Buddhist teaching, appreciating the predominantly pedagogic concerns of Śākyamuni during his long tenure as a teacher who sought to encourage the individual disciple's ability to think for himself; the role of analytic reasoning in Buddhist practice, wherein a practitioner's first task is to sift through the complexities of Doctrine to discover its inner meaning as relevant to his own experience and its systematic transformation; the role of hermeneutical strategies in guiding the practitioner's analytical meditations, wherein the first two stages of wisdom (prajñā) are cultivated through a refined discipline of philosophical criticism of all false views (drsti), such as naive realism, nihilism, etc., as to the nature of ultimate reality and of the self; and finally the role of transcendent experience, wherein the transcendence of verbalization is approached not as a non-rational escape into mysticism, but as an affirmation of empiricism, a rational acknowledgement of the fact that reality, even ordinary reality, is never, in the final analysis, reducible to what we may say about it. These four functions in Buddhism are traditionally expressed in an ancient rule of thumb known as the “Four Reliances”: “Rely on the Teaching, not the Teacher; rely on the meaning, not the letter; rely on the definitive meaning, not the interpretable meaning; rely on wisdom, not on consciousness.” To examine the traditional usage of these Reliances, we must trace the work of the Buddhist hermeneuticians, who, far from maintaining any “golden silence” beyond the silvery speech of philosophers, have kept alive over two and one half millennia an illustrious line known as the “Golden Speech” (Ch. jin ko) tradition, whose members include from among the sage-scholars of India, Tibet, China, and Japan, Śākyamuni himself (himself the first hermeneutician of his own Holy Doctrine!), Nāgārjuna, Āryadeva, Asanga, Chih I, Candrakīrti, Fa Tsang, Śāntaraksita, and Tsong Khapa. This latter, working in the 14th and 15th centuries, was one of the greatest scholars of any of the Buddhist cultures, and his masterwork, Essence of the Eloquent, composed in 1407, provides a golden key with which the door to this tradition can be opened.

article published in Journal of Global Buddhism; Vol 13 (2012)

“For the beat generation,” Stephen Prothero wrote in 1991, “dissertation time is here. Magazine and newspaper critics have gotten in their jabs. Now scholars are starting to analyze the literature and legacy of the beat writers.” Prothero goes on to argue that scholars should take seriously the contribution Beat writers made to American religious history, and it is something of a foregone conclusion that this contribution includes perspectives inspired by Asian religious traditions. In rejecting what they viewed as the repressive climate of the 1950s, the Beats collectively “turned East” for inspiration; and some, notably Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, and Allen Ginsberg, explicitly sought inspiration from Buddhism. Despite Prothero’s plea, little scholarly work has been done on the Beat-Buddhism connection either in Buddhist studies or in the study of American religion. There may be a lingering bias against the Beats, the sense that their movement was nothing more than a short-lived and decadent rebellion against Eisenhower-era culture. Buddhist studies scholars often cringe at the way Beat writers misrepresent Buddhist teachings, and other critics have rightly pointed out the latent racism and sexism in early Beat writing. Nevertheless, the Beat generation influenced the development of US Buddhism in important and lasting ways. Many prominent Beat writers became leaders in established US Buddhist communities in the 1970s and 1980s, including the foundation by Ginsberg and Anne Waldman of the Jack Kerouac School for Disembodied Poetics at the Buddhist Naropa University in Colorado. Moreover, many of the Beats’ early experiences with Buddhism were through connections to the already well-established Japanese-American Buddhist community in the San Francisco Bay Area, a subject well deserving of further research. The lion’s share of scholarly work on the Beat generation remains in literary criticism first and in American cultural history second. The contribution that Beat writers made to the history of US Buddhism thus remains an open field. The following bibliography is meant to be more selective than comprehensive, providing the researcher with entry points to more sustained research projects. See also Buddhism in the West (North America and Europe).

Abstract From Buddha statues in home decor to meditating figures in advertising, film, and television, images of Buddhism proliferate in US popular media. This paper reflects on the relative lack of sustained critical examinations of these representations while offering an approach to future studies based, in part, on Jane Iwamura's Virtual Orientalism . An iconographic approach to Buddhism in media can help the researcher identify recurring tropes and their implicit meanings across a wide range of media and point toward emerging trends in the development of Buddhism in Western cultural contexts. Video abstract (click to view)

"Silver Screen Buddha: Buddhism in Asian and Western Film." Journal of Contemporary Religion, 31(3), pp. 453–454

Abstract The Making of American Buddhism tells the story of how Japanese Americans in the 1950s made possible American Buddhism. Using the Berkeley Bussei, a Buddhist magazine published from 1939 to 1960, as a case study, the book demonstrates how Japanese American Buddhists argued that Buddhism was both what made them good Americans and what they had to contribute to America—a rational and scientific religion of peace. Such rhetorical constructions of Buddhist modernism were common at midcentury, and this study centers American Jōdo Shinshū Buddhists in this history. Boldly claiming an American Buddhist identity, even in the face of racial and religious discrimination, they created communities, published magazines, and hosted scholarly conventions and translation projects. In short, Nisei Buddhists built religious infrastructure. Without this infrastructure, the Buddhist modernists and Beat Generation writers who are often credited with popularizing Buddhism in the later twentieth century would not have had places to publish their ideas and communities in which to learn Buddhist practice. D. T. Suzuki, Alan Watts, Jack Kerouac, and Gary Snyder, all of whom make appearances in the Berkeley Bussei, were supported by or connected to the Nisei Buddhist community. This book recenters their experiences and the unseen labor that ultimately made possible American Buddhism.

Globalization intensifies the range, intensity, and diversity of interactions among world societies, but along with phenomena of hybridization, glocalization, or creolization it is just as likely to produce counter-reactive phenomena of resistance or conservative radicalization. In the case of the major Japanese Buddhist tradition of Shin Buddhism, the interactive possibilities that could have been theoretically imagined for its modern encounter with North American society were overwhelmed by the ethno-chauvinism which became embedded in the nikkei population particularly in the context of early twentieth-century competition between the Japanese and American empires. The chauvinism took form, in Shin Buddhism as in certain other domains of nikkei life, as a pervasive, persistent pressure for an “equal but separate” structuring of nikkei relations with White society. The analysis suggests that in at least some instances—although North America is a quite major instance—issues of race consciousness and racial formation need to be given more attention in globalization studies.

HIKKHU Anlayo has made a name for

In the preface to his new book, Rebirth: A Guide to Mind, Karma, and Cosmos in the Buddhist World, Roger Jackson notes that accepting that one’s consciousness goes on to another life after this one...

Abstract This introductory chapter addresses ongoing academic debates regarding the origins and earliest forms of tantra, as well as defining it and methodologies for its study. Did it begin as a movement within Hinduism, or Buddhism, or perhaps in some less-documented “pre-tantric” traditions, and what were the interactions between traditions? And what about “tantra” as a category term, regarding which there are a diversity of scholarly opinions. Any study of tantra must also consider the dynamics of gender, embodiment, sexuality, the roles of goddesses, and historical gender biases in scholarship. Because there are many flourishing communities of “lived tantra” across Asia, a survey of ethnographic and anthropological studies is included. Cognitive scientific and neuroscientific approaches to tantric studies are also reviewed. And an appendix discusses scholarly institutions and collaborations that focus on tantric studies, including a survey of archives of available tantric texts and images.

This essay is an inquiry into the religio-cultural background of the opposition to ritual evidenced by many adherents of Buddhist modernism. This background can be structured by three different kinds of questions—historical, philosophical, and cultural.

The concept of “ritual syntax” is developed by relating it to cognitive studies of ritual, providing a fuller theoretical basis. Developing theoretical grounding requires differentiating between the members of five pairs of concepts: production is not the same as analysis, syntax is not the same as semantics, ritual is not the same as the mental, cognition is not the same as the mental, and syntax is not the same as language. These distinctions help avoid overly strong interpretations of the analogy between ritual and language. A discussion of “ritual” suggests that it is best conceptualized in terms of multiple scalar characteristics with degrees of ritualization. Two Buddhist practices, insight meditation and homa, are introduced as instances for the cognitive study of ritual. Syntax involves not simply ordering of elements, but also hierarchical organization of those elements. While syntax allows sentential elements to move within a sentence, ritual tends toward invariance. Invariance seems to contradict the claim that ritual is syntactically organized. However, rituals are often modeled on ordinary activities, producing a kind of “semantic” motivation for invariance.

Abstract The homa is a votive offering involving the construction of a fire in a hearth-altar, and the immolation of offerings in the fire. The altar is homologized with a mandala, and as with other ritual uses of mandalas, the deity evoked in the course of the ritual is located at the mandala’s center, and in this case identified with the fire itself. As a tantric ritual, the practitioner is also ritually identified with both the deity and the fire, and the offerings made into the fire are the spiritual obstacles that impede the practitioner from full awakening. Tantric homas are generally categorized according to different functions or goals, such as protection, subduing adversaries, and so on. As a form of individual practice conducive to awakening, the practitioner’s own inherent wisdom is identified with the fire, and just as the offerings are transformed and purified, the practitioner’s own spiritual obstacles are as well. Ritualized activities of maintaining and making fire are some of the most ancient forms of social coordination, which is essential to the development of the human species. Such ritualization would seem to be the basis for fire cults, forms of which are known throughout the world’s religions. In the scope of Indo-European religions, similarities of practice and symbolism provide a shared background to the homa per se. More directly, there appear to be both Vedic and Indo-Iranian traditions of ritual praxis that converge in the tantric homa. The homa is found in all of the Indic tantric traditions: Buddhist, Śaiva, and Jain. Once established as part of tantric practice, the homa was spread throughout Central, East, and Southeast Asia, particularly in its Buddhist form. This transmission of ritual practice engaged local traditions wherever it spread. Tibetan tantric traditions developed an extensive literature of homa rituals, and from there the practice also influenced Mongolian fire rituals as well. In China, interaction between tantric Buddhism and Daoism led to the creation of a homa devoted to the Northern Dipper, a figure unknown in Indian sources of Buddhist tantra. Two similar examples are found in Japan. The Shintō traditions of Yuiitsu (or Yoshida) and Miwa modified the tantric Buddhist form for the worship of a selection of Shintō deities. Similarly, the tradition of mountain asceticism, Shugendō, also adopted the homa and adapted it to its purposes. As a result of the repression of Buddhism in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, the Shintō forms are no longer extant, though in the present many Shintō shrines perform rituals of various kinds in which fire plays an important role. In contrast, the Shugendō homa, sometimes as a prelude to fire-walking, remains an active part of Japanese religion into the present day. The tantric homa has been interpreted in a variety of ways, reflecting the multifaceted character of fire itself. There are two important strains of interpretation. One is the yogic interiorization of ritual found in post-Vedic Indian religion, more as a form of esoteric physiology than as a psychologized understanding of visualization. While closely related to yogic interiorization of ritual, the sexual symbolisms that are attached to all aspects of the fire rituals constitute a second strain of interpretation. These symbolic associations are important for their role in understanding tantric notions of ritual efficacy, which require greater nuance of understanding than can be attained by simply categorizing such practices as magic.

The modern study of Buddhism reflects the values of Western and Westernized scholars, values that determine why certain texts are selected to represent the tradition and what it means to read religiously. Many people in the West naïvely presume that religious texts can be understood just by reading them. The plausibility of this presumption is supported by cultural familiarity with the biblical narratives. Someone raised in a Euro-American religious culture can pick up the Bible or other Christian religious literature and read it without scholarly paraphernalia. This presumption, however, is not valid when approaching the majority of non-Western religious texts, even in translation. Buddhist texts, and indeed the majority of non-Western religious literatures, require readers to become familiar with cultural traditions and reading practices markedly divergent from their own. When Buddhist texts are read on the basis of their congeniality with core Western values such as individualism, egalitarianism, and simplicity, they are, quite simply, misused. A similar problem occurs with selection: the familiarity of texts such as Dhammapada, the Diamond Sutra, and the Tibetan Book of the Dead means that they have already been interpreted into a religious discourse about texts, textuality, and reading that is informed by Christian preconceptions. As such, they do little to challenge the presumptions that privilege a certain set of ideas about faith, practice, identity, time, and so on, themes constitutive of one kind of religious existence, but themes neither universal nor universalizable. To understand a text in its Buddhist context, it is important to recognize the systems according to which Buddhist thinkers have themselves organized their textual heritage. The large mass of Buddhist literature has led both traditional and modern scholars to create multiple canons, systems of organization, and bibliographic categories. One basic categorization of Buddhist literature is that of the “three baskets” ( tripiṭaka ): discourses or teaching stories ( sūtra s), rules of the order ( vinaya ), and the higher teachings ( abhidharma ). Gregory Schopen has noted that the metaphor of basket was in use prior to the creation of written texts, so the image, delightful as it otherwise is, of the three collections being transported in three baskets cannot be historically accurate.

[in Japanese]

Abstract The recent emphasis on materiality in religion has encouraged a good deal of attention to materiality in Buddhism, but that attention has fallen entirely on Buddhist traditions with conventional monastic orientations. Yet the major Japanese Buddhist school known as True Pure Land Buddhism (Jōdo Shinshū) has also historically possessed a highly important, if different, material dimension, for which one touchpoint has been its merchant members called Ōmi shōnin who flourished in later premodern Japanese history. After alluding to the difficulty of isolating the ‘material’ in any religious culture, the article sketches the transition in Christian materialities in Europe which marked a cognitive shift from medieval modes of thinking (exteriorized, animistic-monistic, oriented to relics and ancestor religion) towards modern modes (interiorized, oriented to abstraction and the psychological individual). Against that paradigm, almost all premodern Buddhist materialities, including those in Japan, can be seen as medieval in nature. However, Jōdo Shinshū was a departure employing an innovatively interiorized doctrine. From that perspective, both Europe and Japan were highly complex civilizations displaying a long-term medieval-to-modern shift, which impacted the material manifestations of religions by gradually replacing older economies of ritual exchange with more modern-looking economies of preaching, religious publication and commercial life. Western scholarship has resisted appreciating these issues in an Asian setting.

This study provides an overview of what is known about the shorter Chinese Samyukta Agama and also an annotated translation of its first 22 suttas, which corresponds to the Pali Bhikkhu Samyutta. Recent research suggests that T.100 belongs to the corpus of Sarvastivada Literature. The annotations resolve some unique expressions, correct some mistakes found in the textus receptus, and point out significant differences between the versions of the suttas. The text base for Chinese is the CBETA/Taisho edition, for Pali the Chatta Sangayana edition published by the Vipassana Research Institute, if not indicated otherwise (but with volume and page references to the Pali Text Society editions). The paper is a first result of the Bieyi za ahan jing-Project 1 at the Chung-hwa Institute of Buddhist Studies, Taiwan, which aims at a digital edition and translation of the complete work.

Birth in Ancient China: A Study of Metaphor and Cultural Identity in Pre-Imperial China By C. A. Cook and X. Luo (2017) Albany: Suny Press, 172pp.

This zip archive contains the XML data, schema, stylesheets, and associated material that are the basis for a print edition of 48 Dunhuang manuscript witnesses of four early Chan Buddhist texts. The print edition is: Marcus Bingenheimer 馬德偉, Chang Po-Yung 張伯雍 (eds.): <em>Four Early Chan Texts from Dunhuang – A TEI-based Edition</em> 早期禪宗文獻四部 —— 以TEI標記重訂敦煌寫卷:楞伽師資記,傳法寶紀,修心要論,觀心論. Taipei: Shin Wen Feng 新文豐, 2018.<br> (Vol. 1: Facsimiles and Diplomatic Transcription 摹寫版 (ISBN: 978-957-17-2274-0), Vol. 2: Parallel, Punctuated and Annotated Edition 對照與點注版 (ISBN: 978-957-17-2275-7), Vol. 3: Calligraphy Practice 抄經版 (ISBN: 978-957-17-2276-4).) See the included README.txt for further information.

Institute of Buddhist Studies at the Graduate Theological UnionThe Indian religious traditions, including Buddhism, are generally characterised by an understanding of the problematic character of the human condition as ignorance (avidya) instead of sin, as in Christianity.1 The centrality of ignorance in defining the problematic character of the human condition creates a dramatically different religious dynamic—a religious dynamic that is fundamentally concerned with epistemological issues rather than with moral ones. In Indian discussions of the limits of religious knowledge, the shared intellectual framework was the idea of means of valid knowledge (pramāṇa). While other religio-philosophic traditions in India accepted testimony (śabda) as an autonomous (i.e., irreducible) means of valid knowledge, Buddhist epistemologists rejected it. Having rejected the idea that testimony is an autonomous means of valid knowledge (śabdapramāṇa), an alternative explanation for the authority of the Buddha had to be created. Against this background of epistemological discussion, particular attention is given here to Dharmakīrti’s views on the authority of the Buddha as a means of valid knowledge regarding the ground of human existence, the path of religious practice, and the goal of awakening.