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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.
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.
Recrafting Role Models: A Discussion of the Contemporary Application of Buddhist Life Education Through the Comic—The Ten Great Disciples
As an aspect of social life, religion has the adaptive function of helping humans overcome psychological and daily obstacles, attaining inner stability and peace of mind; the integrative function of consolidating group cohesion through common beliefs, bringing out the organizational power of human communities; and the cognitive function of solving the enigma of ultimate meaning, answering fundamental questions on life, the universe, existence, and morality for humans. These three functions of religion imply its capacity to meet the three essential needs of survival, community integration, and addressing the ultimate concern in life, hence its importance cannot be understated.
Situating Buddhist Modernism within a Global Context: The Global Spread of Fo Guang Shan
Only in the last decades has modern Buddhism become a serious topic of academic investigation. Today, however, the field is flourishing. Modern Buddhism in its many forms is studied in many languages and disciplines. Despite this recent advancement, the subject of investigation is not always that clear. What are we talking about when we are speaking of modern Buddhism? This paper aims to tackle this question by considering the global spread of Fo Guang Shan from a transnational perspective. Transnationalism describes a recent advance within the social sciences and humanities to move away from a research approach that examines its object of interest solely by placing it within the context of one nation state. In contrast to the notion of “international,” which according to the transnational perspective refers to the relationship between states, “transnational” refers to the sustained linkages and ongoing exchanges among non-state actors that cross national borders. Thus, if we apply the transnational lens to the study of modern Taiwanese Buddhism, it follows that instead of examining the religion by solely placing it within the boundaries of the ROC, we also consider the many border-crossings, linkages, and movements between Taiwan, China, Japan, Southeast Asia and the rest of the world that have together shaped its current state.
Historic Achievements of the Hsing Yun Model
At the core of religion is faith. Rebuilding faith is key to reversing the decline of traditional religion and to successfully realize modernization. True faith comes from the heart. In recent times, there have been two paths by which Chinese Buddhism has been rebuilding faith. The first method focuses on reconstructing Buddhist faith based on sūtras, i.e., on the authority of scripture. This has been adopted by the Faxiang school, among others.
Humanistic Buddhism in the Digital Age: Make Truth Great Again!
The new religion of the 21st century is turning out to be dataism. First mentioned by New York Times columnist David Brooks in 2013, the data revolution enables human cognition to be augmented by algorithms that could work on all kinds of information (Brooks 2013). In dataism, the value of humans or an enterprise is assessed by their ability to contribute to data processing. This may seem surprising to some of you in the audience but perhaps, a question may confirm this fact. If you were to employ an administrative assistant, would you choose one who can use the mobile phone to help you manage your busy calendar, employ the latest software to turn your ideas into stunning presentations, and churn out reports as you speak with voice-recognition technology or one who slowly punches on a keyboard and still rely on shorthand to take minutes? Alright, you may say that history has seen many jobs being replaced and people simply must learn new skills. However, what we are about to experience in the Fourth Industrial Revolution or Digital Age is not only a simple paradigm shift.
Modern Buddhism Without Modernity? Zhaijiao (“Vegetarian Sects”) and the Hidden Genealogy of “Humanistic Buddhism” in Late Imperial China
The concept of “Humanistic Buddhism” as it came into being in the past century is generally acknowledged as a leading feature of the modern transformation of Buddhism in Chinese societies. It has been understood as an answer to the urgent task of adopting Buddhism to the profound and unprecedented political, social, and economic changes that the Chinese world had to face since the late nineteenth century. Therefore, Humanistic Buddhism may be interpreted as a way to fit into the “national body” of the evolving nation-state in the first half of the twentieth century. Particularly during the 1920s and 1930s, countless Buddhist as well as other temples and monasteries were object to large-scale acts of confiscation and expropriation for the aim of building a new China. The KMT government imagined Buddhism in particular and religion in general to contribute financially, socially, and morally to their project of modernity. On the other side, Humanistic Buddhism may be seen as part of a larger reform movement which has been initiated in the late nineteenth century by such notables as Buddhist layman Yang Wenhui 楊文會 (1837–1911). This development too can be traced back to the encounter of clerics and laymen with modern Western notions of how to define the proper place of religion in both the state and society as well as in the life of the people.
The Relationship between Buddhism and Life
There are two main schools of Buddhism, Theravāda and Mahāyāna. The former spread from southern India to Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, and the island of Java during King Asoka’s reign in ancient India. The latter spread from northern India to Tibet, China, Korea, Japan, and the Ryukyu Islands during the reign of the Chinese Emperor Ming of the Han dynasty. It has since disseminated into all parts of Malaysia in the last two or three hundred years. Buddhism has spread throughout the world in two thousand and five hundred years. Today, it is distributed vastly, found not only in the Southeast Asian countries, but also Europe and the United States. The religion is practiced by people in the East and West, and has a significant number of devotees.
The Localization and Spread of Japanese Buddhism
It is well-known that Japanese Buddhism came from China, and in the course of its acceptance and accommodation into Japanese society, it underwent many changes, whether planned or unintentional. Are these changes original innovations or complacent degeneration? The distinction may be subtle. It is certainly not our role here to resolve this question by passing value judgements, as there might be necessary reasons behind these changes. Rather than simply making a value judgement, the researcher prioritize the pursuit of truth. Having said that, when considering the nature of religion, we must necessarily be concerned with how changes affect the vitality of religion.
The Buddhist Maritime Silk Road Online Book Launch: the Long-Forgotten Voyage of Trade and Religion Back to Life
Prominent Buddhist Masters such as Faxian, Bodhidharma, Yijing, and Atiśa took sea routes to learn and propagate Buddhist teachings. Viewers’ comments and reflections: The Buddhist Maritime Silk Roa.....