ākāra in Buddhist Philosophical and Soteriological Analysis: Introduction

Abstract

The articles in this issue of the Journal of Indian Philosophy arose from a panel on the concept of ākāra in Buddhist soteriological and philosophical analysis at the 16th Congress of the International Association of Buddhist Studies (Dharma Drum College, Jinshan Mountain, Taiwan, 20–25 June, 2011). For practical reasons, the articles are arranged in alphabetical order according to their authors’ names and not according to any structured progression. The increasing access to academic journals online is now in any case beginning to obliterate the importance of such arrangements of thematically linked articles in the printed journals. Readers often come across individual articles through search engines, or through cross-references in other online resources, and then proceed according to the logic offered by the interfaces in which the article files are embedded. This is similar to the ways in which, in the domain of music, collections of music files are beginning to render obsolete the concept of an album with a carefully designed sequence of tracks aimed to articulate a particular artistic vision. Music listeners can now freely and at the press of a button or the click of a mouse move through music collections according to their own preferences and tastes, oblivious to whatever designs artists might have had for them. Still, readers of the printed issue may wish for some guidance with reference to the connections among the individual articles, and this brief introduction is thus designed to sketch a path that connoisseur readers may wish