Search Results

The Maṇimēkalai's Buddhist Community Envisioned

Anne E. Monius

in Imagining a Place for Buddhism: Literary Culture and Religious Community in Tamil-Speaking South India

The community of Buddhists imagined within the narrative world of the Maṇimēkalai itself is considered – a community whose locus is not the geographical region of Tamil‐speaking southern India in the ... More

The community of Buddhists imagined within the narrative world of the Maṇimēkalai itself is considered – a community whose locus is not the geographical region of Tamil‐speaking southern India in the narrative present, as might be expected, but rather that of all India and the far‐flung reaches of South‐east Asia in the era of the future Buddha's earthly birth. Focusing on the central role played by the begging bowl that never empties if used in service to the poor, it is argued that the bowl itself signals the coming of the future Buddha and embodies those moral values that will enable the Maṇimēkalai's audience to participate in that glorious community to come. Attention to the central locations of the narrative similarly reveals the text's expansive vision of Buddhist community that involves not only the subcontinent but also an island kingdom somewhere in South‐east Asia. Through reference to other Buddhist literature of this early medieval period, it is argued that the Maṇimēkalai participates in larger Asian patterns of redrawing the Buddhist world, relocating its centers away from the cities of northern India associated with Gautama Buddha and toward new foci of Buddhist activity in South India, Sri Lanka, China, and South‐east Asia.Less

The Maṇimēkalai's Community of Readers and Listeners

Anne E. Monius

in Imagining a Place for Buddhism: Literary Culture and Religious Community in Tamil-Speaking South India

The nature of the Maṇimēkalai's textual or reading community is considered through an examination of the narrative as a literary work produced in the context of a diverse and multilingual South ... More

The nature of the Maṇimēkalai's textual or reading community is considered through an examination of the narrative as a literary work produced in the context of a diverse and multilingual South Indian literary culture. Through careful reading of the intertextual allusions in the Maṇimēkalai, particularly in relation to the principal themes of an earlier Tamil narrative from which the Buddhist text borrows its central characters and settings, a picture begins to emerge of a textual community of literary connoisseurs who are multilingual, well versed in world views and the literature of various religious communities, and thoroughly engaged in the project of articulating religious identity in a literary and religious landscape of extreme diversity through the medium of ornately sophisticated poetry. The Maṇimēkalai's free appropriation and translation into Tamil of Buddhist narratives and philosophical concepts found in earlier Pāli and Sanskrit transregional sources provides a glimpse of the processes of transmission of a tradition for which no other record exists. In a literary‐cultural context that includes the vehemently anti‐Buddhist invective of the earliest Hindu poet‐saints, such easy switching from transliterated Sanskrit to translated Pāli in the Maṇimēkalai bespeaks a moment in Tamil literary history when language choice did not entail the same cultural, political, or religious allegiance that it would assume by the time of the eleventh‐century Vīracōliyam.Less

Introduction

Anne E. Monius

in Imagining a Place for Buddhism: Literary Culture and Religious Community in Tamil-Speaking South India

The modern religious landscape of Tamil‐speaking South India is dominated by the Hindu tradition, but as this introduction to the book explains, non‐Hindu religious communities played a significant ... More

The modern religious landscape of Tamil‐speaking South India is dominated by the Hindu tradition, but as this introduction to the book explains, non‐Hindu religious communities played a significant role in shaping the religious history of the region. There are still minority populations of Muslims, Christians, and Jains, but the literary and historical record of the region tells a far more complex story, and includes Jains, Ajivikas, and Buddhists. There has been a recent study on the Tamil‐speaking Jains, but relatively little study of the Buddhists, who are little understood because of the scarcity of remnants of Tamil‐speaking Buddhist culture; this fragmentary Buddhist record is examined. The introduction goes on to discuss the two extant Buddhist texts in Tamil that are complete – the Maṇimēkalai, and the Vīracōliyam, which are the subject of the book, and provide, in very different ways, compelling evidence for the existence of Tamil‐speaking Buddhists in the region. The literary culture that they represent is used to reach an understanding of the (religious) Buddhist communities of the times.Less

Reading Maṇimēkalai as Buddhist Literature

Anne E. Monius

in Imagining a Place for Buddhism: Literary Culture and Religious Community in Tamil-Speaking South India

Chapter 1 (and Chs. 2‐3) addresses the earlier of the two extant Tamil (South Indian) Buddhist texts, the Maṇimēkalai, by building on the work of Richman, and reading the text as a consummately ... More

Chapter 1 (and Chs. 2‐3) addresses the earlier of the two extant Tamil (South Indian) Buddhist texts, the Maṇimēkalai, by building on the work of Richman, and reading the text as a consummately literary whole that resonates not only with the earlier themes of the classical Caṅkam corpus, but also with Sanskrit‐influenced poetic theory, and a variety of themes found in other Buddhist literature. Pinpointing as a central motif in the main narrative, the arising of those conditions conducive to Maṇimēkalai's enlightenment (signaled by the technical term ētunikalcci), the narrative and doctrinal portions of the text are shown to be intimately connected through concern with the interdependently arising nature of the world and human relationships. Focusing on the overall structure of the narrative, as well as its thematic content, it is suggested that the labyrinthine character of the text, filled with subplots and stories within stories, is meant to evoke subtly the particularly Buddhist theory of causation, which is given formal structure only at the very end of the text. Careful attention is also paid to the Maṇimēkalai's obvious concern with the moral human life, focusing on the Sanskrit and Tamil literary theories of emotional evocation. The emotional experience that the text seeks to elicit from its audience is that of pity or compassion, a central organizing principle in the Maṇimēkalai's moral vision of concern and compassion for the suffering of all living beings.Less

A Revolution of Ink: Chinese Buddhist Periodicals in the Early Republic

Gregory Adam Scott

in Recovering Buddhism in Modern China

Gregory Scott’s chapter on the first modern Chinese Buddhist periodicals illuminates a founding process for a new genre in the 1910s that was critical to a range of “Buddhist circles” for decades.

Buddhist Women and Teaching Authority

Rita M. Gross

in A Garland of Feminist Reflections: Forty Years of Religious Exploration

The primary feminist criticism of Buddhism is that, most often, dharma teachers are men. Feminists have responded with two solutions to this problem. One obvious solution would be to make structural ... More

The primary feminist criticism of Buddhism is that, most often, dharma teachers are men. Feminists have responded with two solutions to this problem. One obvious solution would be to make structural changes to ensure that women are trained as teachers, and then to make sure that women are promoted as teachers. The authority of dharma teachers pertains to dharma, to the teachings and practices of Buddhism, not to a sangha's institutional life, which can be decided by the community. Because dharma teaching is so important in Buddhism, the acid test for whether Buddhism has overcome its male-dominant heritage is the frequency with which women become dharma teachers. This chapter explores that in most Buddhist cultures, the path to teaching authority lies in monastic institutions; thus, if women's path to monastic life is blocked, as was the case in many forms of Asian Buddhism, women usually will not become teachers.Less

Land of No More Hope

Aihwa Ong

in Buddha Is Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, the New America

This chapter studies the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, which greatly desacralized and overturned all aspects of social life, such as gender relations and family. It looks at a Buddhist-Khmer culture ... More

This chapter studies the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, which greatly desacralized and overturned all aspects of social life, such as gender relations and family. It looks at a Buddhist-Khmer culture that was based on ritual and political subordinated tempered by the Khmer-Buddhist emphasis on kindness, mutuality, and compassion. The first section is on refugee studies and the concept of the human, while the second section looks at the air attacks during the 1970s and the rise of the Khmer Rouge, the armed forces of Pol Pot. A description of Cambodia before and during the Pol Pot regime is also provided in this chapter.Less

Filial Sons: The Southern Tang

Benjamin Brose

in Patrons and Patriarchs: Regional Rulers and Chan Monks during the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms

Chapter 4 discusses how the descendants of Yicun and Shibei rose to become the preeminent clerics of the Southern Tang. As clerics from Min assumed control of well-established monastic institutions ... More

Chapter 4 discusses how the descendants of Yicun and Shibei rose to become the preeminent clerics of the Southern Tang. As clerics from Min assumed control of well-established monastic institutions with large resident populations, rather than transform the character of the region’s normative Buddhist cultures, they embraced and embodied it. The activities of these monks in the capital of the Southern Tang, particularly those gathered around the eminent cleric Fayan Wenyi, suggest that they were able to differentiate themselves from other monks by means of both their distinguished pedigree and their ecumenical approach to teaching and practice. As abbots of major monasteries and advisors to the ruler and his court, these monks promoted a range of regional Buddhist traditions while fulfilling the responsibilities of court clerics. Their teachings thus took on a catholic, literary, and conservative quality that was well suited to the urbane audiences of the capital.Less

Bringing the Treasury of Dohā Verses to Tibet

Kurtis R. Schaeffer

in Dreaming the Great Brahmin: Tibetan Traditions of the Buddhist Poet-Saint Saraha

This chapter examines the history and development of Saraha's Treasury of dohā Verses for which he is best remembered in Tibet. It analyses the reception of this work in Tibet and the transformations ... More

This chapter examines the history and development of Saraha's Treasury of dohā Verses for which he is best remembered in Tibet. It analyses the reception of this work in Tibet and the transformations of the work itself as it was integrated into the burgeoning Tibetan Buddhist literary culture from the 11th through the 13th century. It traces the transmission of the dohākosa from Saraha to his students, and thence from India to Nepal and on to Tibet.Less