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When Mahāyāna Meets Theravāda: Humanistic Buddhism’s Challenges and Opportunities in Myanmar
From the early Buddhist era to the present day, antagonism between the Mahāyāna and Theravāda schools has existed, and will not be easy to resolve. In the past few decades, however, an increasing number of religious activities and cultural-exchange events have involved union between practitioners of Mahāyāna and Theravāda Buddhism, to the point that one can cautiously hail a breakthrough in cross-traditional understanding and communication. Against this backdrop, my paper has aimed to paint a broad-brush picture of Humanistic Buddhism’s challenges and potential opportunities in Myanmar, based on my latest fieldwork data as well as the relevant prior literature.
Chinese Origin of Humanistic Buddhism and Venerable Master Hsing Yun’s Contribution in the Contemporary Humanistic Buddhist Movement in Taiwan
Humanism has been defined in various ways. It is a contemporary cult or belief calling itself religious but substituting faith in man for faith in god.1 Similarly, humanism is also explained as the faith in the supreme value of self-perfectibility of human personality. However, humanism broadly indicates to a shifting of focus from supernaturalism to naturalism, from transcendental to the existing, from absolute reality to the living reality. Humanism is the term for those aspirations, activities and attainments through which natural man puts on “super nature”.
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.
Transcending Borders: Using Regional and Ethnographic Studies to Envision the Future of Humanistic Buddhism
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.
Buddhism and Hospice Care
Buddhism examines how to end the cycle of birth and death. When Siddhārtha Gautama renounced worldly life and sought enlightenment, his goal was to address the problem of life and death. In the Ming dynasty, Master Hanshan stated, “Since ancient times renunciation has been concerned with the issue of birth and death. The Buddha came into this world in order to teach all sentient beings about this. There is no other Dharma than that concerning birth and death; there is no birth or death other than what the Dharma teaches us.”
Perspective: The Teacher and Late Modern Buddhism in the West: Commitment and Dilemmas
The teacher plays a key role in Buddhism. In some traditions, the practitioner is advised to remain patient and persistent in the search for a lifelong teacher, as the right teacher is said to appear only once the practitioner is “ready.” The teacher may be the abbot in a monastery, the geshe in a gompa, or the roshi or ajahn in a temple. However, in this late-modern world, it is becoming increasingly common for Convert Buddhists to have no link or personal connection to any such organization or individual Dharma teacher.
Commentary: Loving-Kindness and Compassion
Venerable Master Hsing Yun writes that loving-kindness (maitri) and compassion (karuṇā) “are like a priceless passport—a person may own nothing, but no matter where they go happiness and safety will follow.” How might this statement be understood within the context of the Universal Vehicle (Mahāyāna) of Buddhism? As the Venerable Master writes, lovingkindness aims to bring others happiness, and compassion is the desire to alleviate the suffering of others. Here, I understand loving-kindness (maitrī) to love in its purest altruistic sense. Maitrī is not an erotic, passionate, selfish, or possessive love. All true love wants is the happiness of others.