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Buddhist ethical views have much in common with certain modern ethical theories, and contain many insights relevant to contemporary moral problems. This book examines the theoretical structure of the normative views found in a number of Indian and Tibetan Buddhist texts. Teachings from all three major traditions of Buddhism, the Theravāda, Mahāyāna, and Vajrayāna, are considered. Although Buddhist philosophy is quite diverse, and these traditions differ in their ethical perspectives, they can all be understood as versions of a general moral outlook known as welfarist consequentialism. Buddhist versions of consequentialism regard virtue as an intrinsic component of the good life. They range from the cautious indirect approach of the Theravāda, which focuses on following rules that lead to the welfare of many, to the bold and often shocking direct approach of the Vajrayāna. Buddhists can respond convincingly to certain often-discussed criticisms of consequentialism, including several powerful arguments due to Kant. Buddhist texts offer an interesting approach to the problem of the demands of morality. These texts also contain a powerful critique of what we would identify as the concept of free will, a critique which leads to a hard determinist view of human action. This view supports Buddhist values of compassion, nonviolence and forgiveness, and leads to a more humane approach to the justification of punishment.

Vamsa is a dynamic genre of Buddhist history filled with otherworldly characters and the exploits of real-life heroes. These narratives collapse the temporal distance between Buddha and the reader, building an emotionally resonant connection with an outsized religious figure and a longed-for past. The fifth-century Pali text Mahāvamsa is a particularly effective example, using metaphor and other rhetorical devices to ethically transform readers, to stimulate and then to calm them. Reading the Mahāvamsa advocates a new, literary approach to this text by revealing its embedded reading advice (to experience samvega and pasada) and affective work of metaphors (the Buddha's dharma as light) and salient characters (nagas). Kristin Scheible argues that the Mahāvamsa requires a particular kind of reading. In the text’s proem, special instructions draw readers to the metaphor of light and the nagas, or salient snake-beings, of the first chapter. Nagas are both model worshippers and unworthy hoarders of Buddha’s relics. As nonhuman agents, they challenge political and historicist readings of the text. Scheible sees these slippery characters and the narrative’s potent and playful metaphors as techniques for refocusing the reader’s attention on the text’s emotional aims. Her work explains the Mahāvamsa’s central motivational role in contemporary Sri Lankan Buddhist and nationalist circles. It also speaks broadly to strategies of reading religious texts and to the internal and external cues that give such works lives beyond the page.

Theravada is one of the three main branches of Buddhism. In Asia it is practiced widely in Thailand, Laos, Burma, Sri Lanka, and Cambodia. This ethnography opens a window onto two communities of Theravada Buddhists in contemporary America: one outside Philadelphia that is composed largely of Thai immigrants and one outside Boston that consists mainly of white converts. The book first provides a historical overview of Theravada Buddhism and considers its specific origins here in the United States. It then brings the findings to bear on issues of personal identity, immigration, cultural assimilation, and the nature of religion in everyday life. The work is a systematic comparison of the ways in which immigrant and convert Buddhists understand, practice, and adapt the Buddhist tradition in America. The men and women in this story speak directly to us in this work, both in their personal testimonials and as they meditate, pray, and practice Buddhism.

Educating Monks examines the education and training of novices and young Buddhist monks of a Tai minority group on China’s Southwest border. The Buddhists of this region, the Dai-lue, are Chinese citizens but practice Theravada Buddhism and have long-standing ties to the Theravāda communities of Southeast Asia. The book shows how Dai-lue Buddhists train their young men in village temples, monastic junior high schools and in transnational monastic educational institutions, as well as the political context of redeveloping Buddhism during the Reform era in China. While the book focuses on the educational settings in which these young boys are trained, it also argues that in order to understand how a monk is made, it is necessary to examine local agenda, national politics and transnational Buddhist networks.

Remembering the Present examines the contemporary meanings, practices, and purposes of mindfulness in the countries of Thailand, Sri Lanka, and Myanmar (Burma), which together make up a large part of what is known as the “Pali imaginaire” that spawned today’s global mindfulness movement. Drawing from the experiences of over 600 monks, psychiatrists, students, and villagers in the Buddhist monasteries, hospitals, markets, and homes in the region, Remembering the Present shows how an attention to memory informs how people live today, and how mindfulness, as understood through its Buddhist Pāli-language term of sati, is intimately tied to local constructions of time, affect, power, emotion, and selfhood. With a focus on lived experience and the practical matters of people for whom mindfulness is a central part of everyday life, the book offers an engaged ethnographic investigation of what it means to ‘remember the present’ in the meditative practices, interpersonal worlds, and psychiatric hospitals for people in a region strongly influenced by Buddhist thought. The book will speak to an increasingly global network of psychological scientists, anthropologists, Buddhist studies scholars, and religious practitioners interested in contemporary Buddhist thought and the cultural phenomenology of religious experience.

This book contributes to the understanding of religious culture in Laos and Southeast Asia. This book brings this nation into focus. With its overview of Lao Buddhism and analysis of how shifting political power has impacted Lao religious culture, the book offers an integrated account of the entwined political and religious history of Laos from the fourteenth century to the contemporary era. The book advances the argument that common Lao knowledge of important aspects of Theravada Buddhist thought and practice has been heavily conditioned by an indigenous religious culture dominated by the veneration of phi, spirits whose powers are thought to prevail over and within specific social and geographical domains. The enduring influence of traditional spirit cults in Lao culture and society has brought about major changes in how the figure of the Buddha and the powers associated with Buddhist temples and reliquaries have been understood by the Lao. Despite vigorous attempts by Buddhist royalty, French rationalists, and most recently by communist ideologues to eliminate the worship of phi, spirit cults have not been displaced; they continue to persist and show no signs of abating. Not only have the spirits resisted eradication, but they have withstood synthesis, subordination, and transformation by Buddhist political and ecclesiastical powers. Rather than reduce Buddhist religious culture to a set of simple commonalities, the book takes a comparative approach to elucidate what is unique about Lao Buddhism.

This book brings to life the age-old religious tradition of Theravada (literally, “view of the elders”) Buddhism as it is found in ancient texts and understood and practiced today in South and Southeast Asia. Following a brief introduction to the life of the historical Buddha and the beginning of his mission, the book examines the Triple Gem (the Buddha, his teachings, and the community of monastic followers) and the basic teachings of the Buddha in the earliest available Pali sources. Basic Buddhist concepts such as dependent co-origination, the four noble truths, the three trainings, and karma and its result are discussed in non-technical language, along with the Buddha's message on social wellbeing. The author goes on to chronicle his own involvement as an observer–participant in “the Theravada world,” where he was born and raised. This is a rare first-hand account of living Theravada Buddhism not only in its traditional habitats, but also in the world at large at the dawn of the twenty-first century. The book concludes with a discussion on what is happening to Theravada today across the globe, covering issues such as diaspora Buddhism, women's Buddhism, and engaged Buddhism.

For centuries, Burmese have looked to the authority of their religious tradition, Theravada Buddhism, to negotiate social and political hierarchies. This book examines those moments in the modern history of this Southeast Asian country when religion, culture, and politics converge to chart new directions. The book shows that Buddhist practice necessitates public validation within an economy of merit in which moral action earns future rewards. The intervention of colonial modernity in traditional Burmese Buddhist worldviews has created conjunctures at which public concerns critical to the nation's future are reinterpreted in light of a Buddhist paradigm of power. The book begins by focusing on the public role of Buddhist practice and the ways in which precolonial Buddhist hegemonies were negotiated. The discussion then traces the emergence of modern Buddhist communities through the colonial experience. The continuing discourse and cultural negotiation of these themes draw Buddhist communities into political arenas, either to legitimate political power or to resist it on moral grounds. The book concludes with an examination of the way in which Buddhist resistance in 2007, known in the West as the Saffron Revolution, was subjugated by military secularism and the transnational pressures of a global economy.

This book treats systematically the ethical thought of the fifth-century CE Theravāda Buddhist thinker Buddhaghosa. It focuses on an important equivalence in Buddhist thought that identifies intention (cetanā) as the principal component of action (karma), and how this idea is interpreted in the four main genres of Pāli Buddhist literature: Suttanta, Abhidhamma, Vinaya, and narrative. Attentive to Buddhaghosa’s commentarial guidance in learning how to read each of these genres, it explores canonical and commentarial discussions of intention, agency, and moral psychology. In contrast to many studies that assimilate Buddhist moral thinking to Western theories of ethics, the book attends to distinctively Buddhist ways of systematizing and theorizing its own categories—charting new territory in Buddhist ethics and reading Buddhist commentary.