BSR - Latest Issue (Equinox)

Book Review: Korean Buddhist Nuns and Laywomen: Hidden Histories, Enduring Vitality, edited by Eun-Su Cho. State University of New York Press, 2011. 210 pp., £50.00 ISBN-13: 9781438435114.

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Book Review: Buddhavacana: A Pali Reader by Glenn Wallis. Onalaska: Pariyatti Press, 2010. 341 pp., US$21.95, ISBN 9781928706854

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Buddhism in Crisis? Institutional Decline in Modern Japan

Concerns that established temple Buddhism in Japan is in a state of crisis have been voiced by priests in various sectarian organizations in recent years. This article shows that there is a very real crisis facing Buddhism in modern Japan, with temples closing because of a lack of support and of priests to run them, and with a general turn away from Buddhism among the Japanese population. In rural areas falling populations have led to many temple closures, while in the modern cities people are increasingly turning away from the prime area in which Japanese people have traditionally engaged with Buddhist temples — the processes of death and their aftermath. Partly this is due to competition from new secular funeral industries, but partly also it is because public perceptions of Buddhism — which has become over-reliant on death rituals in Japan — have become highly negative in modern times. Even practices which have often been seen as areas in which Buddhist temples have been able to attract people — such as pilgrimages — are proving less successful than in the past, contributing further to a sense of crisis that threatens to undermine Buddhism’s roots in Japan.

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Is the Buddhist Doctrine of Non-Self Conceptually Coherent?

Virtually all schools of Buddhism do not accept a permanent, substantial self, and see everything as non-self (anatta). In the first part of this article I recall some arguments traditionally given in support of this perspective. Descartes’ cogito argument contradicts this, by suggesting that we know infallibly that the self, understood as a substantial enduring entity, does exist. The German aphorist Lichtenberg has suggested that all Descartes could claim to have established was the impersonal ‘There is thinking’ (Es denkt), which would support the perspective of non-self. Bernard Williams has argued that Lichtenberg’s impersonal version of the cogito is conceptually incoherent, which would entail that the Buddhist perspective of non-self is also incoherent. I propose to defend the coherence of the Buddhist perspective of non-self against Williams’s argument.

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Vakkali’s Suicide in the Chinese Āgamas

The present article offers a translation of the Saṃyukta-āgama and Ekottarika-āgama parallels to the Vakkali-sutta of the Saṃyutta-nikāya, which describes the suicide of a monk who passed away as an arahant.

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Reforming the Priests of Manipe: Reflections on the “Buddhist Modernist Monk” in Euro-America

From the late nineteenth century onwards, Asian Buddhist monks have been associated in American thought with science, rationality and anti-colonialism. Though the narrative of nineteenth century ‘Buddhist Modernism’ is routinely invoked to explain this, a more illuminating genealogy of this ‘modernist monasticism’ identifies deeper roots in anti-Catholicism. This paper explores these roots through a genealogy of the Buddhist Modernist Monk. Beginning with the seventeenth century travel journals of Jesuit missionaries, it winds its way through varied British rhetorics to nineteenth century Sri Lanka, and ends in Chicago, at the World’s Parliament of Religion of 1893. There, these intertwined discourses coalesced in the form of the Buddhist Modernist Monk: a figure now familiar and beloved in American culture as an embodiment of compassion and rationality, yet with a history of prejudice and politics that has yet to be meaningfully explored. As we acknowledge anti-Catholicism’s centrality to the history of the Modernist Monk, we are necessarily reminded of the moral ambivalence of the ‘science-religion’ dichotomy that fuels his mystique. At minimum, future analyses must critique the presumption of such supra-historical binaries, and deploy an open framework attentive to the contradictions and relations of reciprocal determination that characterize his genealogy.

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Compassion in the Lotus Sutra and Benevolent Love in the Analects: A Reflection from the Confucian Perspective

This article is intended to examine and then compare ci bei (‘compassion’) in the Lotus Sūtra and ren (‘benevolent love’) in the Analects of Confucius. Despite many similarities, compassion and benevolent love have shown a difference between Mahāyāna Buddhist ethics and the Confucian moral system. This difference is revealed in the content and meaning of compassion and benevolent love, but more importantly through the ways they are practised, followed and expanded. Through different ways or paths, compassion and benevolent love have nevertheless established two different and yet mutually supplementary ideals that guide the spiritual and moral world of China and other parts of East Asia.

view article | [Buddhist Studies Review]