站內檢索
Bodhisattva Precepts and Their Compatibility with Vinaya in Contemporary Chinese Buddhism: A Cross-Straits Comparative Study (Part 1)
Bodhisattva ideas have steadily developed since medieval times, to become key characteristics of Chinese Mahāyāna Buddhism. Monks and nuns in the Mahāyāna tradition generally have bodhisattva precepts conferred upon them while undergoing the Triple Platform Ordination, and adhering to both these precepts and the bhikṣu/ bhikṣuṇī precepts is a conspicuous feature of Mahāyāna monastic practice. Against this backdrop, it is worth exploring Chinese monastics’ perceptions of the bodhisattva precepts and ideal, and the practices surrounding them, in the current sociocultural contexts of Taiwan and Mainland China. Though both these regions share the same tradition of Chinese Mahāyāna Buddhism, it has very different manifestations. This long-term, cross-Straits comparative study also reveals a hitherto under-theorized conflict between vinaya rules and the bodhisattva ideal.
Bodhisattva Precepts and Their Compatibility with Vinaya in Contemporary Chinese Buddhism: A Cross-Straits Comparative Study (Part 2)
Bodhisattva ideas have steadily developed since medieval times, to become key characteristics of Chinese Mahāyāna Buddhism. Monks and nuns in the Mahāyāna tradition generally have bodhisattva precepts conferred upon them while undergoing the Triple Platform Ordination, and adhering to both these precepts and the bhikṣu/ bhikṣuṇī precepts is a conspicuous feature of Mahāyāna monastic practice. Against this backdrop, it is worth exploring Chinese monastics’ perceptions of the bodhisattva precepts and ideal, and the practices surrounding them, in the current sociocultural contexts of Taiwan and Mainland China. Though both these regions share the same tradition of Chinese Mahāyāna Buddhism, it has very different manifestations. This long-term, cross-Straits comparative study also reveals a hitherto under-theorized conflict between vinaya rules andthe bodhisattva ideal.
Sacred Secularities: Ritual and Social Engagement in a Global Buddhist China
Surrounded by greenery and build on a quiet hillside in an unincorporated suburban community of Los Angeles County lies a brightly colored Chinese Buddhist temple. This Temple, Hsi Lai Temple xilai si 西來寺 or ‘Coming West Temple’ in English, is one of the biggest Chinese temples in the US and serves as the North American headquarters of the modernist Han Buddhist order Fo Guang Shan 佛光山 (Buddha’s Light Mountain). The Buddhist tradition promoted by Fo Guang Shan is renjian 人間or Humanistic Buddhism.1 It is a modern Buddhist tradition with its roots in late 19th and early 20th century China that has become Buddhist mainstream in Taiwan today (Long 2000). Fo Guang Shan is one of the biggest promoters of this tradition, not only in Taiwan but on a global scale, and while different groups have adapted different interpretations of renjian Buddhism, one of the primary characteristics of this modern tradition is a new esteem for society, or, in other words, the sphere of ‘the secular’.
National Recognition of a Religious Festival: Comparing Buddha’s Birthday Celebration Organized in Taipei to the Northern Wei Buddha’s Birthday Parade
Festivals make up a major feature of all religions1 and human societies. A festival means to most people a “special day or period, usually in memory of a religious event, with its own social activities, food and eremonies,” or an “organized set of special events, such as musical performances.” A religious festival presents a unique opportunity to gain insight into the confluence of religion, culture, and politics. Among Buddhist festivals, Buddha’s birthday stands out as the most popular and most public. When religious celebrations go outside the temple gates, it is an indication of wide acceptance of Buddhism by its host populace. In this paper, I shall compare two significant Buddha’s birthday celebrations: one in antiquity and one in recent times. These two circumstances are significant because the heads of state are conspicuously present outside their symbols of power and the entire capital city observed the occasion. By comparing large-scale commemoration of Buddha’s birthday celebrations held before the Office of the President in contemporary Taipei with a city-wide parade held in Luoyang during the Northern Wei Dynasty (386–534), this paper will identify the factors critical to indigenous Chinese people accepting major festivals of a foreign religion.
The Influence of Indian and Buddhist Elements in Medieval China: A Study of Buddha’s Birthday Celebrations In Luoyang during the Northern Wei dynasty
The Buddha’s birthday festival reached an unprecedented level of grandeur during the rule of Northern Wei when its capital was at Luoyang (495 to 534 CE). Buddhism was indigenous to neither the rulers nor the native Han Chinese. Yet, the Buddha’s birthday celebration on the eighth day of the fourth lunar month became a popular ritual in which the entire city participated. This paper studies a particular phenomenon in this public ritual, the use of carriages in image processions, tracing the heritage of these carriages back to the religion’s land of origin, India, and their literary sources. The intention of this paper is to study the reasons for such phenomenal success, in particular as they relate to the functional role of a religious festival and how the tenets of a religion can enable itself to be popular and sustainable. The Buddha’s birthday is a relevant case study because over 1,500 years later, countries such as Cambodia, Hong Kong, Macau, Malaysia, Myanmar, Nepal, Singapore, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam continue to celebrate it as their public holiday.
Geneaology and Taxonomy of the “Twentiethcentury Renjian Fojiao 人間佛教” Mapping a famen 法門 from Mainland China and Taiwan to Europe
Since the late Qing, Chinese Buddhists had been rethinking and restructuring Buddhist institutions and practices in order to fit a new historical period, the challenges posed in 1898 by the Hundred Days Reform and the movement (Goossaert 2006), and the framework created by the recent new phase of globalization (which includes, first of all, the successful spread of Christianity in Asia) (Tze Ming Ng 2012).
【Buddhist Encounters: Finding a Home in the Human Condition】Introduction
Since the outbreak of the global COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Dr. Lewis R. Lancaster, Emeritus Professor of the University of California, Berkeley, USA, has been giving online lectures for the Department of Religious Studies at University of the West, USA (one of the universities established by Fo Guang Shan). Through his engaging teaching approach, he has guided students to explore the depths of Buddhist teachings and its application. In the hope for more people to benefit from his lectures, they will be featured as a column series in the Humanistic Buddhism: Journal, Arts, and Culture journal, which will be published in both Chinese and English. Dr. Lancaster has granted permission for the FGS Institute of Humanistic Buddhism to translate the content into Chinese. We included an introduction written by Dr. Lancaster in this current issue of the journal to set the stage for this unique column series.
Transcending Borders: Using Regional and Ethnographic Studies to Envision the Future of Humanistic Buddhism
Arizona is a region where the population of Chinese Buddhists is low and the general populations of both Asian-Americans and Buddhists are small. Thus Buddhist communities find themselves not only distant from large centers of Buddhism in California, but also isolated from each other. A study of two very different approaches to Buddhism in Arizona may shed light on the future of Humanistic Buddhism (literally “Buddhism in the midst of people”) in similarly sparsely- populated regions of the United States.
Remarks on Current Research on Taixu and the Pure Land in the Human Realm
One could translate the Chinese term commonly rendered “Humanistic Buddhism” more literally as “Buddhism in the Human Realm” (renjian fojiao 人間佛教). The term “human realm” (renjian 人間) has both an everyday meaning in modern Chinese and a more expansive technical Buddhist meaning. In everyday parlance, it means “the human world,” “humanity,” or “social relations,” and within a modern scientific world view, humanity exists in only one place—the planet Earth. Hence, English-language texts sometimes render the term “Humanistic Buddhism” as “Earthly Buddhism.” In traditional Chinese Buddhist texts, however, the term has a more specialized, technical meaning arising from premodern Buddhist cosmology. In this context, it indicates one in a list of five or six possible paths of rebirth. To be reborn in the human realm means that one’s past karma has led to rebirth as a human being, and in Buddhist cosmology, the Earth is not the only place where humans reside. The fact that the term renjian has different definitions in these two contexts has led to some confusion when scholars confront the terms “Humanistic Buddhism” and “The Pure Land in the Human Realm” (renjian jingtu 人間淨土). Variations in the way Buddhists and scholars understand the meaning and purpose of Humanistic Buddhism only compound the confusion.
