Cause and Effect: A Study on the Concept of Karma in the Buddhist Tradition

The purpose of this research is to trace the existence of the concept of Karma in the lives of the South Asians and the role it played in shaping the history of this land. As, it seems difficult to separate this concept from the religious ideologies of the people who belonged to this area. The term Karma in Hindu, Buddhist and Jain philosophy means somebody’s current and future lives are determined by that person’s behavior in this and previous lives. In other words, Karma is the sum of a person's actions in this and previous states of existence and is viewed as the deciding factor for their fate in the existing and future lives. This concept of Karma was prevalent over a wider geographical area, as we know that there is a common world myth about the ‘Immortal Soul’. Hence, it can also be easily linked to the concept of immortality, which is also part of the three monotheistic religions of the world and can be traced in the history of every land, nation and civilization. Moreover, when we trace the religious history of this land, this is the one and only element that is similar between all the indigenous religions (Hinduism, Buddhism or Jainism) of this land and which in a way also binds all the religions together, despite of many dissimilarities. This concept of Karma can also be traced back to the time of the Indus Valley Civilization with the help of their archaeological remains in the absence of decipherable script.

Thailand is known for its long association with Buddhism. In the past, Buddhist doctrines might be the most significant values which dominated Thai society for centuries Despite experiencing the modernization and the secularization during the reign of King Rama IV- VI, Thai Buddhism did not essentially lose its influence over society. However, secular values gradually took root in the Thai socio-political sphere through the processes of modernization and secularization. Following the Democratic Revolution in 1932, these values were formally introduced as part of the new regime. Core secular principles, especially rights and liberties, have been endorsed in the Constitutions of the Kingdom of Thailand since 1932. Nevertheless, the development of secular values in Thailand have faced significant constraints, including political norms, legal interpretations, and the dominance of Buddhist value. In particular, Theravāda Buddhism has dominated other belief systems and Buddhist morality has an impact on constitutional practice. As a result, the tension between secular and Buddhist values will be considered through the perspective of constitutional development in Thailand. This article aims to explore the development of secular values within the framework of Thai constitutions and examine how these values have come into tension with Buddhism in the context of Thai political society. Furthermore, it argues that the concepts of karma and Buddhist moralities in the Thai Buddhist framework have repeatedly been used to justify both social injustice and inequality in Thai society. Highlights The study explores the development of secular values within the framework of Thai constitutions and examine how these values have come into tension with Buddhism in the context of Thai political society. The coexistence of secular and Buddhist values create persistent tensions, especially where rights and liberty might conflict with Buddhist doctrine. A sustainable balance depends on reaffirming the universal basis of rights and liberties without utilizing the enduring role of Buddhism in shaping the moral practice of Thai society.

Our aim in the present study was to identify key components of physical appearance among young Thai women. Free listings, focus groups and pile sorting were used. One-hundred twenty young women generated 78 unique physical appearance characteristics. Ninety-four nursing students validated these characteristics in focus groups and then sorted them into piles that reflected separate domains of physical appearance and labeled them. Salience analysis revealed that facial appearance (e.g., bright facial skin, high nose bridge, big eyes) was the most important domain, followed by body weight and shape, skin color and texture, hair (color, texture, length), and ‘other’ physical appearance (e.g., slender neck, slim fingers). This is the first study to identify aspects of physical appearance that are most salient to young Thai women and that may differ from women in other cultural contexts. These findings could be used to develop culturally grounded measures of physical appearance in Thai women.

Some have referred to relatively recent forms of popular Buddhism as an ‘engaged’ Buddhism that has revived or redirected traditional Buddhist ideas and practices found in meditation texts to reflect a greater social or worldly emphasis than suggested in earlier historical moments. One of these ideas is the quadripartite framework of the ‘immeasurable states’ (aprameya/appameya) or ‘divine abidings’ (brahmavihāra), the most prominent of which in popular Buddhism is mettā (friendliness/loving-kindness). This article traces the philosophy of the ‘immeasurable states’ found in meditation texts from various Indic traditions (Buddhist, Jain, and Hindu) and then presents the ways in which these traditional ideas (especially mettā) have informed popular Buddhist movements in the twentieth century. Points of discussion include: ‘engaged’ Buddhism's relationship with traditional Buddhist ethics; arguments concerning the coalescence of monastic-centred meditation practices with popular Buddhist notions of social service; and the distinct utilization of mettā in contemporary Buddhist societies in contrast to the mobilizing impulses of comparable religious communities (Hindu and Jain) with a similar heritage of mettā discourse in South Asia.

Like Buddhist traditions, Jain traditions preserve many stories about people’s past lives. Unlike Buddhist traditions, relatively few of these stories narrate the past lives of the tradition’s central figure, the jina. In Jainism there is no equivalent path to the bodhisatt(v)a path; the karma that guarantees jinahood is bound a mere two births before that attainment, and the person who attracts that karma cannot do so willfully, nor is he aware of it being bound. There is therefore no Jain equivalent to the ubiquitous j?taka literature. In this paper I will explore what the absence of a j?taka genre in Jain traditions tells us about the genre’s role in Buddhism. Focusing upon the multi-life stories of Gautama Buddha and Vardham?na Mah?v?ra, I will ask how these two strikingly similar narratives betray some fundamental differences between Buddhist and Jain understandings of the ultimate religious goal and the method of its attainment.

Despite the fundamental dissimilarities between Islam and Buddhism, the two traditions have intermingled, often to the surprise of their adherents. The appearance of the legendary story of the Buddha in Muslim sources shows the exchange of wisdom between Buddhism, Islam, and Iran, even if that exchange was an accidental one. In Muslim historical and Shi'i writings, Buddha (Budāsef) is introduced as a saint and a wise man alongside the Islamic Prophet and holy figures. The legend of the historical Buddha was presented chronicling his life, his spiritual search, and his enlightenment. However, the early transmitters of the legend avoided mentioning directly that the story was from the Buddhist tradition, instead manipulating and Islamizing it. The traditional story of the Buddha as a prince subsequently appeared in Islamic and Persian literary sources, as well as in the Christian and Judaic traditions. The infiltration of this exemplary legend in Iran points toward the crystallization of a type of asceticism and morality that exploited Buddhist models. In the first part of this chapter we will put the transmission of the Buddha legend in perspective chronologically and expose the exploitation of this Buddhist story, which has symbolized the teaching of wisdom in the Shi'i and Persian literature. In the second part of this chapter a story of one of the Buddha's previous births, a jātaka, will be paraphrased in an abridged version and put in perspective. It is a story that is told by the Buddha about his past life, which was adapted to the Iranian pre-Islamic religious culture and written in the Soghdian language, one of the Iranian languages of Central Asia.KeywordsGreek VersionArabic TextGray HairLiterary CircleIran PointThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Secular Buddhism and the Quest for a Lived Ethics

Oil spill events are one of the major risks to marine and coastal ecosystems and, therefore, early detection is crucial for minimizing environmental contamination. Oil spill events have a unique appearance in satellite images created by Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) technology, because they are byproducts of the oil’s influence on the surface capillary, causing short gravity waves that change the radar’s backscatter intensity and result in unique dark formations in the SAR images. This signature’s appearance can be utilized to monitor and automatically detect oil spills in SAR images. Although SAR sensors capture these dark formations, which are likely connected to oil spills, it is hard to distinguish them from ships, ocean, land, and other oil-like formations. Most of the approaches for automatic detection and classification of oil spill events employ semantic segmentation with convolutional neural networks (CNNs), using a custom-made dataset. However, these approaches struggle to distinguish between oil spills and spots that resemble them. Therefore, developing a tailor-made sequence of methods for the oil spill recognition challenge is an essential need, and should include examination and choice of the most effective preprocessing tools, CNN models, and datasets that are specifically effective for the oil spill detection challenge. This paper suggests a new sequence of methods for accurate oil spill detection. First, a SAR image filtering technique was used for emphasizing the unique physical characteristics and appearance of oil spills. Each filter’s impact on leading CNN architectures performances was examined. Then, a method of a model ensemble was used, aiming to reduce the generalization error. All experiments demonstrated in this paper confirm that using the sequence suggested, in comparison to the common formula, leads to a 4.2% of improvement in the intersection over union score (IoU) for oil spill detection, and a 9.3% of improvement in the mean IoU among several relevant classes.

Books on Buddhism for general readers rarely mention miracles. Instead, the emphasis is usually on the life of the Buddha, his teachings, and the monastic order, the so-called “Three Treasures.” This is a heritage left by the European scholars who first became interested in Buddhism in the 19 century. Take the example of T.W. Rhys Davids, who founded the Pali Text Society in 1886 in England, and his wife Caroline A.F. Rhys Davids, who was its president. Steeped in Enlightenment values, they favored the Theravada Buddhist tradition, which has been practiced in Sri Lanka and southeast Asia, and its canonical language is Pali. They presented Buddhism as primarily a rational and ethical teaching, sharing similarities with Protestant Christianity. In contrast, they gave short shrift to the Mahayana Buddhist tradition of Tibet and East Asia because of its emphasis on the buddhas and bodhisattvas, who act as saviors for the faithful. They put more emphasis on Buddhist ethics than its rich mythology. But this is contrary to what Buddhists themselves believe. The life of Buddha is full of miracles. Eight events isolated from his life are called “great” miracles. They are his birth, enlightenment, first sermon, passing away or nirvana, as well as four other events at which he showed his supernatural powers to demonstrate the truth of his teaching. The places where the eight events took place came to be celebrated as the eight pilgrimage sites. For instance, in Lumbini, it is said that he emerged from under his mother’s right side instead of the normal birth channel. The infant immediately took seven steps and declared, “I am born for enlightenment for the benefit of the world; this is my last birth in the world.” Two streams of water–one hot and one cold–poured forth from the sky and fell on his head. The earth trembled and from the cloudless sky a shower perfumed with sandalwood, along with blue and red lotuses, fell. At Bodhgaya, during the night before his enlightenment, there was the famous story of Buddha’s defeat of Mara, the Buddhist Satan. When Mara’s demonic army attacked the Buddha, the rocks, trees, and axes that were discharged rose into the sky and remained suspended in midair. When a blazing log as large as a mountain was hurled at the Buddha, as soon as it was thrown, it hung suspended in the sky and burst into a hundred fragments through his magical power. Another group of miracles performed by the Buddha concern his teaching career. In India, there was a long tradition of gauging someone’s spiritual level by the supernormal powers (siddhi) he possessed. To make the audience willing to listen to him and thus benefiting from the Dharma, the Buddha found it necessary to exhibit his powers. Famous disciples were often recruited as a result of the demonstration. For instance, at Śravasti, he defeated the leaders of six heretical sects in front of the king in debate. To celebrate his victory, he performed the Twin Miracle or the Miracle of the Pairs. He levitated into the air, producing alternating streams of water and fire from different parts of his body. He also created multiple images of himself and had them preach the Dharma. These miracles were frequently depicted in stupas or memorial mounds. Belief in miracles has similarly been an integral part of the lives of devotees in other parts of the Buddhist world. I would use examples from the Chinese Buddhist tradition. Here, instead of using miracles to demonstrate the extraordinary nature of the Buddha as we read above, writers of the miracle stories are more interested in testifying to the efficacy of Buddhist deities in saving humankind from suffering. I begin with a story recorded by a Buddhist writer about 1500 years ago. Fu Liang, 374–426, the compiler of this earliest collection of seven miracle stories about the Buddhist savior deity known as Guanyin or Kuangshiyin (as the name appears in the story below), came from the elite educated class. He served as a government official, reaching the position of president of the Department of the Affairs of State under Liu Song. (420– 479). He was a scholar of Confucian classics, but like many of his contemporaries, he was also attracted to Buddhism, which was introduced into China some three hundred years earlier from India:

In recent decades, there has been growing interest among philosophers in what the various Buddhist traditions have said, can say, and should say, in response to the traditional problem of free will. This article investigates the relationship between Buddhist philosophy and the historical problem of free will. It begins by critically examining Rick Repetti'sBuddhism, Meditation, and Free Will(2019), in which he argues for a conception of “agentless agency” and defends a view he calls “Buddhist soft compatibilism.” It then turns to a more wide‐ranging discussion of Buddhism and free will—one that foregrounds Buddhist ethics and takes seriously what the various Buddhist traditions have said about desert, punishment, and the reactive attitudes of resentment, indignation, and moral anger. The article aims to show that, not only is Buddhism best conceived as endorsing a kind of free will skepticism, Buddhist ethics can provide a helpful guide to living without basic desert moral responsibility and free will.

In Sepehri's view, the entire universe, even nature, is alive and active. Nature has not only physical appearance, but also spiritual essence and soul. Looking at nature monotheistically, we can even see mud and bur as containers of the truth and signs of God. Sepehri believes that nature is the embodiment of God's grace and grandeur. Hence, looking at and meditating on it, man may be led to meet God and reach spiritual worlds. In Sepehri's poetry, nature and phenomena in the universe, as well as their living, beauty, and meaningfulness, are treated as manifestations of the Truth and inspiration.

The Introduction begins by laying out the methodological and theoretical foundations of the book. It explains that, currently, religious studies research on this topic has been limited, only conducted on select aspects such as mindfulness practices. Methodologically, ethnographic observation and interviews add significant texture to historical and discourse analysis and reveals the full diversity of ways therapists have related to Buddhist traditions. Further, at a theoretical level, previous studies often present binary interpretations of psychotherapists’ approaches to Buddhist traditions as either cases of secularization or religious transmission. These totalizing interpretations do not take account of research on the social construction of classifications of the religious and not-religious (the secular, science, medicine, etc.). The Introduction then outlines six major sets of approaches that clinicians have taken to Buddhist traditions: clinicians (1) therapize, (2) filter, (3) translate, (4) personalize, (5) adopt, and (6) integrate those aspects of Buddhist traditions that they view to be religious. These categories, though highly artificial, are a useful method for mapping therapists’ approaches to Buddhist traditions because they illustrate how they arise out of the relational configurations clinicians believe they make between the religious and the not-religious. And yet, these configurations always prove unstable.

The belief that humans are more than their bodies is to a large extent represented in the Hindu and Buddhist traditions by the notion of rebirth, the main difference being that the former envisages a more corporeal continuing entity than the latter. The author has studied the manner in which exposure to science at a postgraduate level impinges on belief in rebirth at universities and institutes in India and Thailand. Many Hindu and Buddhist scientists tend to believe less in a reincarnating entity because of their scientific work, but Buddhists can point to their empty self doctrine, which has resonances with models of an extended self, rejecting the notion of a core self (anattā) and replacing it with a system of interdependent parts (paṭicca samuppāda), which governs previous and future lives.

AOIR 2021 conference theme “independence” of the internet provides an opportunity for researchers to reevaluate internet development in the global south by applying theories of “informational capitalism” (Castells, 2000; Schiller, 2000) and “surveillance capitalism” (Suboff, 2019). This paper aims to trace the development of informational society in Mongolia, a 30-year-old democracy in the Central Asian steppe. With a nomadic culture, a Buddhist tradition, and a communist past, Mongolia’s information society has unique encounters with global corporations such as Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft (GAFAM). The paper focuses on juxtapositions of information society with traditional, cultural, political, and social aspects of Mongolian life. I establish how Mongolia is positioned in various global information society perspectives, by investigating tensions that have not been addressed in this nation’s context of a communist past and an ongoing nomadic lifestyle. I also trace the historic development of information and communication technology (ICT) initiatives during the socialist and post-communist eras. Online speech controversies, misinformation, and commercial speech on social media all tested Mongolia’s new Constitution of 1992. The constitution promulgates a free press and the freedom of speech in the zeitgeist of the 1990s to prioritize the eradication of communist-era political censorship and communist party control. One cannot help but notice the gap in the legal frameworks of Mongolian institutions between the current and the “aspired to” states of democratization and protection of human rights and cultural experiences.

This study deals with a study of moral values in Jodi Picoult’s Novel My Sister’s Keeper, published in 2004. Moral values are human actions in carrying out their life activities. It is raised through the characters in the novel. The purpose of this study is to find out the elements of moral values contained in the novel. The elements are basic moral principles and moral personality attitudes. The theory used to analyze this topic was put forward by Suseno. The qualitative research method is used in this study. It is a research procedure that produces descriptive data in the forms of written words. After doing the research, it is found that two elements of moral values are found in the novel, they are basic moral principles and moral personality attitudes. Basic moral principles cover good attitude and justice. These basic moral principles can be portrayed through the character, Anna. Furthermore, moral personality attitudes include willingness to take responsibility and moral courage. These personality attitudes are also presented when Anna wants to defend her rights.