In the leadup to the Buddha's enlightenment, Sujātā, a woman from a wealthy family, helped break the Buddha-to-be's fast by offering him milk-rice in the mistaken belief that he was the banyan tree spirit-deity who granted her wish for a son. Wishing for children in front of special trees was and remains part of a wider popular practice of making wishes before wishing-trees, originating in the tree cults of ancient India. This paper explores wishing-for-children rituals in the Buddhist scriptures and in contemporary Myanmar, as well as beyond its borders. It pays special attention to the range of terminology used in wishing rituals and highlights the myriad of ways that a woman's act(s) of wishing for a child—whether at a banyan tree, at a pagoda, or in other spaces—helps pave the Buddhist path to becoming a mother. However, it also shows that laymen participate extensively in wishing-for-children rituals, and that monks in Burmese Buddhism may engage with tree spirit-deities, special trees, and the practice of adhiṭṭhān. I argue that a clear understanding of the reality of lived Buddhism will elude us if scholars continue to ignore the blurring of the lines between male and female practices and between monastic and lay practices.

This book review essay explores two works that examine new hybrid genres of Western Buddhist autobiographical writing: John D. Barbour’s Journeys of Transformation (2022) and Ben Van Overmeire’s American Koan (2024). In Barbour’s exploration of Western Buddhist travel narratives and Van Overmeire’s examination of American Zen autobiographies based on koan, the scholars face an inherent paradox: Buddhist doctrine teaches no-self, yet autobiographical narratives are fundamentally self-centered. Both scholars demonstrate that Western Buddhist autobiographical narratives succeed precisely by refusing to resolve this tension. This essay examines how both scholars define these emerging genres, explains how they navigate narrating self-dissolution, and assesses how they survey the ways in which marginalized authors strategically foreground oppressed identities as a necessary foundation for spiritual transformation. Barbour and Van Overmeire illuminate how genre innovation serves both literary and soteriological purposes, while broadening the study of Buddhism, as well as religion and literature.

As a subgroup of the environmental movement “Extinction Rebellion,” “Extinction Rebellion Buddhists” are a unique religious community in the United Kingdom. While at first glance the group might seem to align with broader trends occurring in the religious landscape, where Buddhists are increasingly involving themselves in political issues, they in fact encapsulate a distinct phenomenon in contemporary Buddhism: participation in direct-action activism. Through public, collective meditation, the group brings a distinctive emphasis to “mass civil disruption.” Built on nearly two years of ethnographic fieldwork, this paper explores the ways in which Extinction Rebellion Buddhists challenge the perceived limits of Buddhism’s involvement in social concerns, pushing the boundaries of how “engaged” an “engaged Buddhist” can be. This paper aims to situate the group’s practices within the ongoing dialogue surrounding the limits and parameters of engaged Buddhism, arguing that XRB exemplify the ever-diversifying relationship between Buddhism and social change.

This article examines the environmental impact of popular offerings to Buddhist monks in contemporary Thailand. The two most common types of offerings to monks, morning food donations (pindapata) and monastic gift sets (sanghadāna), are analyzed from the perspective of environmental sustainability. While these offerings constitute important material interactions between the laity and Thai Buddhist monks, they are also significant sources of plastic waste. This research estimates, for example, that every year approximately 750 million single-use plastic bags are donated to Thai monks in morning food offerings. The relationship between these offering practices and the Thai Buddhist monastic code (Vinaya) is examined through the lens of sustainability. Efforts to reduce the negative environmental consequences of Thai Buddhist offering practices are also presented in this research. Methods to address these problems include increased use of tiffin and leaf wrappers, donation of food directly to temples, and other more sustainable options to current practices.

English-language studies of the global humanitarian Buddhist Tzu Chi Charity Foundation, founded in 1966 by Taiwanese bhikkhunī Shih Cheng Yen, tend to focus on its structure and functions as a non-governmental organization rather than examine the sūtras, ceremonies, and rituals integral to it as well. Tzu Chi’s “Buddhist” identity is thus usually discussed in terms of renjian fojiao, “Humanistic Buddhism.” But to confine study of Tzu Chi within the boundaries of “Humanistic Buddhism” does not provide deeper insights into what kind of “Buddhism” Tzu Chi promotes and practices. To break this impasse, this article explores the “Buddhism” of Tzu Chi through a study of Cheng Yen’s teachings called “The Great Lesson of our Times,” which she presented in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. In these lectures, she explains why vegetarianism is the heart of the teaching, inter-related with centuries-old traditions of jiesha, fangsheng (prohibit killing, release life) and husheng, protection of life, and eschatological concerns about mofa,“Age of the Final Dharma,” and collective karma, gongye. In sum, this study responds to Natalie Quli’s call to uncover the limitations and biases of the “Buddhist modernism paradigm” and its tendency to privilege the “new and improved.”

This critical note outlines research to date on the history of John Mathews James, part of an ongoing project. During my research so far, I have found only one published article in the UK and further private research undertaken by Nichiren Shu Buddhists in Japan and the UK. Captain James seems to be unknown to academic researchers in the field of Buddhist studies. I shall outline the life events that led Captain James towards embracing Nichiren Shu Buddhism in Japan and highlight some of the social and political contexts of his life. He does not appear to have participated in international Buddhist networks, and possibly this is the reason why he does not appear in English-language discussions of early Western converts. However, his memory has been kept alive and honoured by the Nichiren Shu community, who always refer to him respectfully as ‘Captain James,’ and I shall refer to him similarly throughout this article.