Buddhist Practice Research Articles

Loving Attention: Buddhaghosa, Katsuki Sekida, and Iris Murdoch on Meditation and Moral Development

According to Iris Murdoch, one of our central moral capacities is the capacity to direct our attention in a way that is just and loving. In Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals , Murdoch explores the prospects for strengthening this capacity through engaging in Zen Buddhist practices, particularly zazen meditation as Katsuki Sekida describes it in Zen Training: Methods and Philosophy . Murdoch has a mixed view of whether zazen could really contribute to our moral development, expressing both some optimism and some reservations. I argue that a stronger version of Murdoch’s project, by her own lights, would have looked to the Theravāda Buddhist philosopher Buddhaghosa’s instructions for taking up loving-kindness, compassion, gladness, and equanimity as meditation subjects.

Contesting Religious Boundaries with Care: Engaged Buddhism and Eco-Activism in the UK

The word “Buddhism” conjures up a variety of images and connotations: monks meditating on hilltops, mindfulness, cheerful Buddha caricatures. It is unlikely that these depictions suggest engagement with societal issues. And yet, this is precisely what many Buddhist communities and traditions are involving themselves in around the world. Often referred to as “engaged Buddhism”, this development in the Buddhist tradition refers to the application of Buddhist principles and practices to situations of social and environmental suffering. Nevertheless, there are critics of this emerging trend who contend that Buddhists should refrain from engaging in societal issues, believing that such involvement contradicts the teachings of the Buddha and distracts from the ultimate goal of liberation. Built on two years of ethnographic research, this paper explores the ways in which a particular environmentally engaged Buddhist group known as “Extinction Rebellion Buddhists” adapt their religious beliefs and practices in response to the challenges posed by the Anthropocene, where concerns for our collective world have resulted in increasing interest in the ways in which humans actively care for the environment. In reformulating Buddhist principles and meditation as a “politics of care”, care becomes a tool for change, with the group not only confronting the pressing issues of the Anthropocene but also disrupting Buddhism’s traditionally inward-looking, other-worldly tendencies, carving out space for autonomy and transformation within the broader landscape of UK Buddhism.

How Western Buddhists Combine Buddhism and Climate Activism

ABSTRACT Previous research emphasises congruences between Western Buddhism and environmentalism, with both presented in juxtaposition to overconsumption, hedonic values, and anthropocentric worldviews. Nevertheless, incongruences also occur, including Buddhist tendencies for social disengagement, avoidance of conflict, and disinterest in the non-sentient world. Yet, virtually no empirical data exist on how Western Buddhist environmentalists negotiate tensions arising from combining the two elements. Here, we address this knowledge gap by exploring interview data from 13 Western Buddhist climate activists. We identify four major themes of negotiation: engagement, confrontation, Buddhist praxis and efficacy. Our findings show that Buddhist philosophy and practice often underwent biospheric reformulation, while the intentions, modes and outcomes of climate activism were often approached in terms of compassion and equanimity. Environmentalism was combined flexibly with Buddhism to justify individual emphases, ranging from solitary meditation practice to radicalised collective activism. Moreover, the negotiations were dynamic and featured unresolved tensions, demonstrating that combining the two elements involves major ongoing negotiation. The study findings have implications for understanding interrelationships between the climate crisis, religion, activism and identity work.

Corporate Religion and Spiritual Tourism at a Luxury Tibetan Buddhist Resort

ABSTRACT This article analyses how spiritual tourism and the corporate form of religion are contributing to the rapid spread of Tibetan Buddhism in Vietnam. Specifically, we place the newly established Samten Hills, a Buddhist luxury resort, in two scholarly contexts. First: ecological discourses about Đà Lạt. Once a French hill station, Đà Lạt in the Central Highlands is famous for natural beauty and spiritual possibilities. Samten Hills is dedicated as a Drikung Kagyu spiritual area, and many of the resident monks are from Ladakh (North India). We highlight the transposition of Ladakhi Buddhist branding to a novel Vietnamese context. Through tour packages, advertising, spiritual practices, camping, and discourses about Buddhist mountain hierophanies, we consider this new iteration of spiritual tourism. Second: a spiritual business model that blurs the distinction between economic and religious activity and negotiates state surveillance. With Vietnam Federation of United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Associations (VFUA) and Guinness recognition and plans to construct a 2000-person Buddhist university, Samten Hills is the most public-facing, large-scale Vajrayana site in Southeast Asia. We analyse Samten Hills’ operational model – a for-profit business licence allied with discourses of heritage preservation and regional tourism initiatives but concealing Tibetan Buddhist practices – as an increasingly popular strategy for navigating state surveillance of religious activity.

Unraveling depression: Principles and practices of clinical hypnosis

ABSTRACT People struggling with depression are burdened by losses they can’t and won’t accept. They find themselves at odds not only with their circumstances, but also with symptomatic expressions of their exhausting efforts to shelter from, gird against, and contend with their pain and desolation. Their embattled sense of self gets no respite: Everything, including the depression itself, feels threatening, a violation, other. This article investigates why, and demonstrates how, hypnosis is particularly well suited for treating such self-referential, adversarial entanglements. Fundamentally associational in both structure and function, hypnosis resonates with other long-established, connection-based traditions for altering suffering. In keeping with Taoist, Sufi, and Buddhist ideas and practices, hypnosis introduces a quality of acceptance into the relationship between self and other, between self and pain. Clinical hypnosis establishes and maintains a context of interpersonal and intrapersonal security, a protective space and a relationship in which avolitional experience is not felt to be out-of-control or uncontrollable, but rather not-in-need-of-being-controlled. It thus becomes safe for clients to become curious about, approach, and engage with what in other settings would have the potential of producing a fearful, even panicky, reaction. By altering the boundary between clients and their suffering, clinicians facilitate an effortless rapprochement, making possible the shifting, repurposing, and unraveling of symptoms.

The Reception of the Mantra of Light in Republican Period Chinese Buddhism

This paper examines the utilization of the mantra of light and its associated maṇḍala practices by Wang Hongyuan 王弘願 (1876–1937), a Chinese Buddhist during the Republican Period, and his adherents, which has not yet been noticed by previous scholars. With the import of esoteric Buddhist doctrines and practices from Japan, the mantra of light, which was a rarely used mantra in pre-modern China, gained renewed significance. This led to the widespread adoption of the ritual practices of this mantra by Wang Hongyuan and his surrounding Buddhist groups in early modern China. The rituals of this mantra were used as a supplement or substitute for near-death Pure Land practices. This paper presents Pure Land Buddhist practices intertwined with esoteric Buddhist elements or “esoteric” approaches to Pure Land rebirth in modern Chinese Buddhism which have been overlooked by previous scholars.

Sword and Lotus: The Life of a Confucian Buddhist Woman Warrior in Seventeenth Century China

This paper focuses on the life of Liu Shu (1520–1657), a woman warrior who lived through the social and political turmoil of the violent dynastic transition from the Ming (1368–1644) dynasty to the Qing (1636–1911) dynasty. Drawing on the writings of Liu Shu and on different versions of accounts of her life written by male literati in different time periods, this paper intends to reveal the multiplicity and complexity of how a woman could exert her agency and interact with the dominant structure. Commonly, women’s agency has been understood as resistance against the male-dominant patriarchal system. However, recently, scholars such as Saba Mahmood have problematized universalizing overtly resistant acts against the patriarchal society to bring radical changes as demonstrations of women’s agency. These scholars argue that this approach fails to recognize that through their autonomy and while living a life of self-fulfillment, women have the capacity to reproduce, sustain, or subtly change the social norms and views of values that justify and support the patriarchal structure. In light of these scholars’ studies, this paper explores Liu Shu’s engagement in political and military activities and her Buddhist practices to analyze how she transgressed established gender norms in order to uphold rather than reject the virtues promoted by patriarchal ideology. The paper also discusses how conflicting demands on women by a male-centered society in the drastic dynastic transition enabled her to negotiate with or challenge the dominant structure. It also considers how her disobedient acts were accepted and applauded by some male literati to address their own agenda in different cultural, historical, and political contexts.

The flower, then the sword: The militarisation of Burma's most beautiful book

This article examines the highly ornamented Burmese manuscript known as the Kammavāca to understand what its luxurious materials and distinctive illustrations reveal about Buddhist practice and politics in Burma's last kingdom, the Konbaung dynasty (1752–1885). This article shows that the illustrations on Kammavāca manuscripts transformed during the Konbaung dynasty to feature new sword-wielding guardians. This article argues that this militarisation was part of the Burmese kingdom's increasing reliance on ritual practices and religious materials to fortify a kingdom at war with the British and threatened by ethnic divisions.

New life in Japan's ‘endingness’ business

The Japanese deathcare and Buddhist goods industry is a growing field, emerging out of radical shifts in the socio‐economic conditions of everyday life: smaller households, an ageing population and more irregular employment/lifestyle patterns. Based on fieldwork, this article reports tectonic ruptures within Japan’s household‐based mortuary system and Buddhist practice. It takes readers to ENDEX, the premier convention for Japan’s ‘ending industry’, where new ‘life’ emerges from the falling away of older death rites that get remixed and remade into newer experimental practices, businesses and business subjectivities. Examples range from high‐tech gravestones and drones to competitions for the ‘Hottest Priest’ and best encoffiner. This article engages with these new necro‐technologies and asks why the old deathcare system is falling apart. What are the socio‐material effects of its unravelling? And what does the futurity of necro‐praxis look like in Japan (and elsewhere) when the existential fabric of mortality may be torn apart?

Leading Without a Self: Implications of Buddhist Practices for Pseudo-spiritual Leadership

This paper extends Being-centered and spiritual leadership theory using non-self from the Buddhist philosophy to further our understanding of how inner life functions as the source of spiritual leadership. While spiritual leadership theory has received widespread acceptance and considerable empirical support, its developmental process and potential for being used to pursue self-centered ends remain underdeveloped. Drawing on non-self from the Buddhist emptiness theory, we identify different egoistic forms of attachment at each level of being that can lead to forms of suffering in spiritual leadership. Then we show how leaders operating at lower levels of being can fall into the trap of practicing a form of pseudo-spiritual leadership that is overly focused on self-centered or instrumental purposes and economic rationality. We then introduce mechanisms to move beyond pseudo-spiritual leadership practices and discuss implications for future theory, research, and practice.

An unwelcome minority: banning Buddhist practices, marginalising itinerants, and constructing heritage in a Japanese pilgrimage

ABSTRACT The Shikoku Pilgrimage is nowadays esteemed as a symbol of cultural heritage and tradition in Japan. Its origins are in the ascetic travels of itinerant devotees of the Buddhist figure Kōbō Daishi, who is the central focus of pilgrim devotion and is depicted in pilgrimage lore as a mendicant. These early ascetics relied on the Buddhist practice of mendicancy and were supported by the Shikoku custom of settai (almsgiving). However, in 2007, the pilgrimage temples banned pilgrims from alms solicitation within their precincts, claiming that those doing it (mostly itinerants who are a tiny minority among the pilgrim community) were not genuine pilgrims – even though they were following a practice central to the origins of the pilgrimage. This ban reflects historical patterns in different eras of pilgrims being marginalised, decried as antithetical to the ethos of the society, harassed, and even banned. In discussing the underlying reasons for the recent mendicancy ban, I show how it reflects a wider pattern of marginalising minorities within the pilgrimage community and reveals how religious and political authorities perceive the pilgrimage in any given era.

Zen Tea Practice as Mundane Performance

Chan tea practice is a Chinese Buddhist practice (Zen in Japanese and English) that stresses the value of simple utensils, humble spaces and anti-performative values such as avoidance of self-consciousness, display or theatrical effects. Since 2019 I have been practicing under the guidance of a Chinese monk, VK, within a group of sangha members from a local Buddhist priory. In this essay, I first describe the practice as I have learned it and in the context of the larger Chinese history of Chan and Cha (Buddhism and tea). The emphasis on the humble and everyday nature of the practice contrasts with better known tea ceremonies that are often deliberately theatrical. The effort to retain the most simple and unpretentious aspects of drinking tea while refining the activity and movements to their most economical and useful produces its own beauty. Aesthetics are not, however, the concern of the practitioner but rather they seek to experience the silence, focus and insight that drinking tea in this manner can offer. This practice can be done alone or with others. It cultivates harmony, respect, purity and tranquility as well as other virtues associated with meditative practices. The theoretical question that interests me is whether or not one can consider this Chan practice a performance or whether the emphasis on no self, no ‘show’(ing), no-thing means it cannot really qualify as performance. From the point of view of performance scholars, ‘repetition with a difference’ is exactly what the tea practice ‘does’, but on the other hand, the showing of a doing implies a form of self-consciousness that is arguably absent in the tea-master as it would also be troubling to call the other participants ‘audience’. I attempt to trouble the founding definitions of performance studies with the nuanced particulars of this spiritual practice.

Evolution of Flower Symbolism in Japan: An Amplified Significance in Japanese Civilization through Manipulations

Flowers are an important element of nature, especially in expressing a sense of fragility and impermanence. As peoples appreciation of the beauty of flowers rise, different forms of floral arranging appeared around the world. Japanese people have long-valued Ikebana, the traditional Japanese floral arranging art from aspects not merely observing its beauty. In this work, Ikebanas functions as media to express sentiments, to assist Zen Buddhism practice which helps practitioners to achieve inner peace, and to reveal gender-related problems throughout history are being explored and analyzed. Ikebana is widely related to many areas of Japan, and with its importance in Japanese history, popular culture, and religion, its symbolistic value can be extended further.

Humanistic Buddhism: Noble Eightfold Path and Eight Pagodas

Master Hsing Yun advocated Humanistic Buddhism in the hope that people can apply Buddhist teachings and practice methods in real life to solve various problems in real life. The concepts of Humanistic Buddhism are embodied in the Eight Paths Pagoda of the Buddha Memorial Hall in Taiwan. The eight pagodas of the Buddha Memorial Hall in Fo Guang Shan, Taiwan are named: (1) One Teaching, (2) Two Assemblies, (3) Three Goodness, (4) Four Givings, (5) Five Harmonies, (6) Six Perfections, (7) Seven Admonishment, and (8) Eightfold Path. However, the Eight Towers in Mahaparinirvana Temple, India have different meanings. Firstly, the Tower of Birth symbolizes the birth of the Buddha. Secondly, the Bodhi Tower represents the time when the Buddha became enlightened. Thirdly, the Tower of the Wheel of Dharma indicates the time when the Buddha taught the Dharma. Fourthly, the tower of Sangha Vini stands for the time when the Buddha taught the Dharma. Fifthly, the Tower of Relics signifies the Nirvana of the Buddha. Sixthly, the Tower of Turning the Wheel of Dharma symbolizes the time when the Buddha turned the wheel of Dharma for the first time. Seventhly, the tower of the second turning of the Dharma wheel denotes the time when the Buddha turned the Dharma wheel for the second time. Finally, Tower of Nirvana symbolizes the time of Buddha's Nirvana.

Whiteness is a Sankhara”: Racial Justice as Buddhist Practice

Whiteness is a Sankhara”: Racial Justice as Buddhist Practice

Female Practitioners’ Religious Lives: The First Generation of Female Wŏn Buddhist Clerics

For Korean women, the Japanese colonial period was a transitional period in which Confucian patriarchal culture still prevailed, but some options for a social identity outside the home as “new women” were beginning to emerge. In this era, Sot’aesan, the founder of Wŏn Buddhism, put forward the teaching of “equal rights for men and women” as one of the core doctrines of Wŏn Buddhism and opened the way for many women to find their true selves through Buddhist teachings and practices. This path was that of becoming a kyomu (Wŏn Buddhist ordained clerics). By analyzing the biographies of the first 146 female kyomus, this paper sheds light on how these devotees were transformed from women with no identities outside the home into Buddhist masters or mothers of the world.

Ислам: монгольский мир и сопредельные территории

The article presents Islamic enclaves in the adjacent territories of the Mongolian world. In addition, although historically there were no significant ethnic adherents of Islamic culture within the Mongol sphere, mosques have already appeared in modern Mongolia, Buryatia and Kalmykia, and therefore adherents of Islam. However, the moral categories and ethical priorities of the Mongolian people remain in the context of Buddhist ideas and practices. In our opinion, the results of the historical creative activity of Muslim traditions in the adjacent territories of the Mongolian world manifest themselves in the behavioral mood of some (small) modern Mongolian societies, significantly changing the stereotypes of their confessional competence and blurring traditional ethnic values and guidelines.

“Just Do It!” The Art of Teaching Enlightenment: A Study of a Korean Ganhwa Seon Master

This study examines the teaching practices of a Korean Ganhwa Seon master to shed light on an effective approach to helping practitioners engage in Seon practice. Few prior studies have analyzed methods of teaching Ganhwa Seon, which is a traditional Buddhist practice for achieving sudden enlightenment. Using the CRISPA framework, which entails connection, risk-taking, imagination, sensory experience, perceptivity, and active engagement, we conducted a single intrinsic case study by observing and interviewing a Korean Ganhwa Seon master during a seven-day retreat program. The participating Ganhwa Seon master incorporated all six CRISPA elements, with an emphasis on active engagement, connection, and risk-taking. In addition, compassion was an essential component of Ganhwa Seon teaching. The findings distinguish the teaching of Korean Ganhwa Seon from the teaching of Chinese Chan, highlight the unique features of instruction in Korean Ganhwa Seon, and provide insight into effective ways to teach Seon practice.

The Emerald Tablets of Thoth to The Cosmic Power Protocol by using Buddhist and Taoist Meditation Practices

The Emerald Tablets of Thoth to The Cosmic Power Protocol by using Buddhist and Taoist Meditation Practices

Incense Seals and Stamps in Chinese and Korean Culture: Typology and Context

This article analyzes artistic seals and stamps as a special tool in incense culture of China and Korea, used from the early Middle Ages to the present day. These tools of varying look and shape are analyzed in a historical and cultural context, using high quality materials and sources drawn from ethnographic sources and anthropological research of the authors. The use and evolution of such tools in China can be traced back as far as the early Esoteric Buddhist practices of the 7th – 8th centuries (and their prototypes in the form of Taoist ritual talisman-seals 符 fu or 印 yin can be dated as far back as the 4th – 5th centuries). In Korean culture however, the use of these tools can be traced back, presumably, only to the Goryeo era (918–1392), after which a long gap in terms of findings follows. The historical and typological analysis of the development of cultural traditions using these tools, in this particular case, could only be completed using predominantly current material. As a result of comparative study, this article identifies the most representative types of patterns, and determines the functions and applicability of such tools.