Thích Nhất Hạnh is one of the most internationally recognized Buddhist leaders and has a large and devoted following. Despite this, there is a lack of critical scholarship on his life. The biographical sketches of Thích Nhất Hạnh are hagiographical in nature, portraying him as a peace activist, as an engaged Buddhist, and as a Zen master, and disassociating him from the continued development and transnationalization of Vietnamese Buddhism throughout the 20th century. Understanding the early influences in Thích Nhất Hạnh’s life, before he was exiled to the West in 1967, is critical to contextualizing his later framing as an engaged Buddhist leader and Zen master.
As a novice, Thích Nhất Hạnh attended a school in Hue that had been set up by Buddhist reformers. When he moved to Saigon as a young monk, he became involved in writing and publishing. During the 1950s his writing reflected the discourses that were central to the Buddhist reform movement in Vietnam, which had been heavily influenced by the reforms that had started earlier in China. The main foci in Thích Nhất Hạnh’s writings at this time included making Buddhism more relevant to contemporary society and unifying Buddhists in Vietnam. He also wrote essays on Buddhist philosophy and Buddhist literature in the history of Vietnamese Buddhism. Many of the central themes of his writings, and of the main journals that he edited, reflected the views of the Chinese Buddhist reformer Taixu on humanistic Buddhism, which had been translated and popularized in Vietnam in the 1930s.
Thích Nhất Hạnh was recognized by international peace activists after founding the School of Youth for Social Services, which provided relief to victims of the war and poverty in the 1960s. He became increasingly active as an opponent to the war, advocating for American withdrawal from Vietnam so that the North and South could find a way to bring peace without American involvement. This work cemented him in Buddhist literature as the main proponent of an “engaged Buddhist” movement. However, while he became internationally famous for his efforts, they should be seen in light of his embeddedness in discourses of Buddhist reform that were mobilizing many monks and lay Buddhists to make Buddhism more active in the contemporaneous issues of Vietnamese society.
Similarly, Thích Nhất Hạnh is also popularly described as a “Zen master,” and while there is good reason to give him this appellation, it should be understood within the context of modernist Buddhist discourses. Part of the construction of Thích Nhất Hạnh as a Zen master has been achieved by placing him in a Zen lineage. However, this idea of a Zen lineage in Vietnam is incongruous with the way Buddhism was practiced there. While Zen has had a presence in Vietnam for centuries, it was primarily as an elite aesthetic curiosity. There were no sizeable Zen communities or Zen monasteries in Vietnam as there were in Korea or Japan. Thích Nhất Hạnh’s interest in Zen is more reasonably attributable to an emerging fascination with Zen in southern Vietnam in the 1960s, when D. T. Suzuki’s works were translated to Vietnamese and young Buddhists became attracted by the legitimizing role that it could have for a reconstructed Vietnamese Buddhism. Thích Nhất Hạnh was taken up by this wave of popularization in Zen, but he did not start to be constructed as a Zen monk or master until after he was exiled from Vietnam and needed to establish himself in the West at a time when Zen had become interesting to young Westerners.
641-660 of 695 Results
Article
Thích Nhất Hạnh in the Context of the Modern Development of Vietnamese Buddhism
Alexander Soucy
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Thought Experiments and Religion
Yiftach Fehige
Thought experiments are basically imagined scenarios with a significant experimental character. Some of them justify claims about the world outside of the imagination. Originally they were a topic of scholarly interest exclusively in philosophy of science. Indeed, a closer look at the history of science strongly suggests that sometimes thought experiments have more than merely entertainment, heuristic, or pedagogic value. But thought experiments matter not only in science. The scope of scholarly interest has widened over the years, and today we know that thought experiments play an important role in many areas other than science, such as philosophy, history, and mathematics. Thought experiments are also linked to religion in a number of ways. Highlighted in this article are those links that pertain to the core of religions (first link), the relationship between science and religion in historical and systematic respects (second link), the way theology is conducted (third link), and the relationship between literature and religion (fourth link).
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Three Turnings of the Wheel of Doctrine (Dharma-Cakra)
John Powers
The three turnings of the “wheel of doctrine” (dharma-cakra) is a Buddhist concept that has its origins in the Discourse Explaining the Thought (Saṃdhinirmocana-sūtra), a 3rd–4th century Indian Mahāyāna work. According to the schema described in this text, in the first turning the Buddha laid out fundamental precepts such as the four noble truths and dependent arising. The Buddha subsequently taught a second wheel, comprising the Perfection of Wisdom (Prajñā-pāramitā) discourses and related works, in which the teachings of the first wheel were subjected to the critique of emptiness (śūnyatā): the Buddha corrected the false impression some followers had developed that his words have a privileged truth status and transcend the limitations of mundane words and concepts. But in so doing he moved some followers toward an extreme of nihilism. And so in the third wheel he differentiated what is and is not being negated. This framework, only sketchily outlined in the Sūtra, was later extended and reinterpreted by Buddhist exegetes, most often as a polemical and sectarian strategy by which they valorized their own doctrines and preferred scriptures and relegated those of rivals to lower status while still acknowledging them as valid teachings of the Buddha delivered for the benefit of particular types of trainees with specific proclivities. In some tantric sources, Vajrayāna is characterized as part of the third wheel. As with the Discourse Explaining the Thought’s formulation, the tantric version of the three wheels presents them as sequential, with each requiring the others. Subsequent wheels build on and correct misconceptions in earlier ones, and the schema construes each successive dispensation as more profound than the preceding one(s) and as better representing the Buddha’s final thought.
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Tibetan Book of the Dead (Bardo Thödol)
Casey Alexandra Kemp
Although in Tibet there is no single text directly referred to as the Tibetan Book of the Dead, this English work is the primary source for Western understandings of Tibetan Buddhist conceptions of death. These understandings have been highly influenced by Western spiritualist movements of the 20th and 21st centuries, resulting in efforts to adapt and synthesize various frameworks of “other” religious traditions, particularly those from Asian societies that are viewed as esoteric or mystical, including tantric or Tibetan Buddhism. This has resulted in creative forms of appropriation, reinterpretation, and misrepresentation of Tibetan views and rituals surrounding death, which often neglect the historical and religious realities of the tradition itself. The Tibetan Book of the Dead is a prime example of such a process. Despite the lack of a truly existing “book of the dead,” numerous translations, commentaries, and comparative studies on this “book” continue to be produced by both scholars and adherents of the tradition, making it a focal point for the dissemination and transference of Tibetan Buddhism in the West.
The set of Tibetan block prints that was the basis for the original publication of the Tibetan Book of the Dead in 1927 by Walter Y. Evans-Wentz (1878–1968) consisted of portions of the collection known in Tibetan as The Great Liberation through Hearing in the Intermediate State or Bardo Thödol (Bar do thos grol chen mo). This work is said to have been authored by Padmasambhava in the 8th century ce, who subsequently had the work buried; it was rediscovered in the 14th century by the treasure revealer (gter ston) Karma Lingpa (Kar ma gling pa; b. c. 1350). However, as a subject for literary and historical inquiry, it is nearly impossible to determine what Tibetan texts should be classified under the Western conceptual rubric of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. This is due partly to the Tibetan tendency to transmit textual traditions through various redactions, which inevitably change the content and order of collected works. Despite this challenge, the few systematic efforts made by scholars of Tibetan and Buddhist studies to investigate Bardo Thödol literature and its associated funerary tradition have been thorough, and the works produced by Bryan Cuevas and Donald Lopez Jr. are particularly noteworthy.
The Bardo Thödol is essentially a funerary manual designed to guide an individual toward recognizing the signs of impending death and traversing the intermediate state (bar do) between death and rebirth, and to guide one’s consciousness to a favorable next life. These instructions provide detailed descriptions of visions and other sensory experiences that one encounters when dying and during the post-mortem state. The texts are meant to be read aloud to the deceased by the living to encourage the consciousness to realize the illusory or dreamlike nature of these experiences and thus to attain liberation through this recognition. This presentation is indicative of a complex and intricate conceptual framework built around notions of death, impermanence, and their soteriological propensities within a tantric Buddhist program developed in Tibet over a millennium, particularly within the context of the Nyingma (rNying ma) esoteric tradition known as Dzogchen (rDzogs chen). Tibet and other tantric Buddhist societies throughout the Himalaya have developed a variety of technologies for practically applying Buddhist understandings of death, and so this particular “book” is by no means the only manual utilized during the dying and post-mortem states, nor is it even necessarily included in all Tibetan or Himalayan funerary traditions. Nevertheless, this work has captured the interests of Western societies for the past century and has unofficially become the principal introduction not only to Tibetan death rites but also to Tibetan Buddhism in general for the West.
Article
Tibetan Buddhism and the Gesar Epic
Solomon George FitzHerbert
In both eastern Tibet and in Mongolia, the Buddhist cult surrounding the figure of Ling Gesar (Gling ge sar) or Geser Khan in Mongolian versions is an outgrowth of Gesar’s standing as the eponymous hero of an elaborate oral epic tradition. Today, the epic and the Buddhist cult exist side by side in a relationship of symbiosis. Gesar’s sanctification as an enlightened being—as the combined manifestation of the Three Bodhisattva Lords and as an “emissary” or “manifestation” of Padmasambhava—whose tricksterism is enacted on behalf of the forces of goodness, justice, and the White Side in its perennial battle against the forces of evil, injustice, and the Dark Side—is both an outgrowth but also a source of nourishment for the epic tradition as it has continued to adapt and develop up to our own times.
The Gesar/Geser epic, in all the three main regions in which it survives (eastern Tibet and its neighboring regions, the Mongolic regions as far west as Kalmykia, and Ladakh and neighboring regions), is a living and mobile tradition of oral recitation and improvisation. The available textual corpus of this epic is very large, though none of it is very old (the oldest available epic texts in Tibetan are from the 17th century and in Mongolian are from 18th century). Thanks in part to sustained state patronage in the PRC, there are now over 200 published volumes of non-duplicating Gesar epic narrative and song, mostly from eastern Tibet. A lot of this material is of a directly oral provenance. Many modern volumes are the direct transcriptions (with some editing) of the oral repertoires of contemporary bards, some of which have been very lengthy. To take one example, the recorded repertoire of the bard Samdrup (Bsam grub) (1922–2011) was over 3,000 hours long, much of which has now been published. As for literary versions, the authors of Gesar epic texts often make explicit the debt that their tellings owe to oral renditions that they have heard. The mid-18th-century author of the famous Horling Yülgyé (Hor gling g.yul ’gyed), for example, mentions that he based his telling on the oral repertoires of “some twenty bards,” several of whom he cites by name. Due to the heterogeneity and sheer volume of this available textual corpus, it is hard to make categorical assertions about the relationship between Buddhism and the epic tradition, since that relationship varies from version to version. However, some general observations may be offered. In the ritual cult devoted to Gesar that evolved from the epic tradition, matters are somewhat clearer. In the ritual texts devoted to Gesar—which are mostly offering texts—the unruly polyphony of the epic (many bards, many characters, many perspectives) is replaced with a neater integrated vision, in which the hero is praised as a totalizing culture hero and enlightened lord—a hero in every register, both worldly and spiritual, both chivalric and shamanistic.
Article
Tibetan Buddhist Power Objects
James Duncan Gentry
As Tibetans began to import Buddhist scriptures and translate them into the Tibetan language in the 8th and 9th centuries, they also imported items like relics, reliquaries, statues, paintings, amulets, and other material objects believed to embody and transmit power through their physical connections with buddhas, bodhisattvas, and saints of the past. Guided by scriptural pronouncements, as these resonated with indigenous sensibilities Tibetans came to hold that sensory interactions with Buddhist power objects would enable unmediated access to the powerful sources of the Buddhist tradition for a range of pragmatic and transcendent goals. Such encounters were held to be so efficacious that they were sometimes promoted as viable complements or substitutes for the study and cultivation of Buddhist doctrine.
As Tibetans integrated Buddhism into Tibetan culture they began crafting their own Buddhist power objects. These became so ubiquitous and diverse in Tibetan Buddhist societies that there is no single Tibetan term that directly corresponds with the category of “power objects” to encapsulate their full range. Patterned after Indian prototypes, Tibetans developed their own terms and rubrics for these kinds of objects. They also adapted them to include a wider spectrum of items and advanced theories of their power and efficacy that extend beyond their Indian Buddhist counterparts. On this account, controversies sometimes erupted among Tibetan ecclesiastical scholars over the purported nature and potency of such things. The prominent role given to Buddhist power objects in Tibet entailed they would serve as touchstones for the formation of Tibetan Buddhist communities, institutions, and states. Yet, sustained discussion of these kinds of objects has only been sporadic among traditional Tibetan exegetes and modern academic scholars of Tibetan Buddhism.
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Tibetan Demonology
Christopher Bell
Tibetans engage with a panoply of divinities and spirits in their daily lives and ritual activities. The word “demon” does not capture the sheer breadth and diversity of these beings because there is a rich assortment of distinct spirit types that cause illnesses, guard against calamities, or possess human mediums to provide clairvoyant advice. While comprehensiveness is impossible, a representative demonology is valuable by offering a foundation for further exploration. Most Tibetan spirits are capricious or overtly pernicious and require oracles, diviners, tantrikas, and other religious specialists to ward off or harness their power. The gods and spirits of Tibet also fit loosely into ontological categories along a larger spectrum that includes enlightened beings, transcendent deities, worldly gods, and fierce demons. The boundaries between these categories are often porous, especially when it comes to aligning certain spirits with buddhas, bodhisattvas, or wrathful deities of the land. For Buddhism and Bön, the two major religious traditions of Tibet, there are specific protector deities with robust mythologies and liturgical corpora that are frequently propitiated and revered in order to maintain these religions both materially and spiritually. Interacting with such divinities often takes the form of oracular ceremonies or image consecrations and offerings. The practices may vary dramatically between spiritual lineages and regions, but the overall concept is rooted in interacting with these powerful forces to effect social, communal, and individual change. In Tibet, spirits are potentially dangerous, but they also offer diverse opportunities for personal advancement and religious enrichment.
Article
Tibetan Medicine and Its Buddhist Contexts
Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim
Tibetan medicine, also known as Sowa Rigpa (gso ba rig pa, the art, or knowledge of healing), has had a long and illustrious history, which has been intertwined with Buddhism in various aspects. It has been taught and practiced along with Tibetan Buddhism in areas that encompass the TAR (Tibetan Autonomous Region, since the mid-20th century part of China), areas of mainland China (Sichuan, Gansu, Qinghai, Yunnan), Ladakh, Nepal, Bhutan, Mongolia, and Buryatia (south Siberia, Russia). It is also practiced in India, particularly among the Tibetan exiled community, and in various parts of Europe and the United States.
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Tibetan Visionary Buddhism
Chris Hatchell
Tibetan religious traditions contain a variety of practices and discourses that involve the eyes: epistemologies that investigate the act of seeing, ritual uses of visual arts, literary references to light, and meditative practices of looking and visualization. Tibetan traditions also use practices of “vision,” where luminous scenes appear spontaneously to the eyes. Insofar as Tibetan Buddhists have extensively theorized these visionary experiences and identified them as important methods of attaining Buddhist goals, they can be thought of as constituting a kind of “visionary” Buddhism.
Visionary practices in Tibetan religion can be placed on two interconnected registers: those having practical or this-worldly benefits, and those that are viewed as leading to liberation. In the first category, vision is commonly found in practices related to prognostication, mediumship, and textual revelation. The second category is more characteristic of tantric yogic practices related to Kālacakra and the post-tantric movement known as the Great Perfection. In these cases, practitioners use sensory deprivation to induce complex visions. Such visions are described variously as being expressions of emptiness, expressions of one’s own mind, or the “lighting up” of an omnipresent awareness. Recognizing the nature of these visions is seen as part of the path to enlightenment.
Article
Tourism to Sacred Places in America: A Spatial Analysis
Jeremy R. Ricketts
At its founding, the United States did not have a long history nor an official state religion to draw from to construct a national identity, so Americans turned to the creation of sacred geographies built around nature and, as time passed, the founding myths of the republic. These natural and human-built sacred places now span the United States and correspond to a civil religion that appeals to tourists. The United States even has sacred documents like the Declaration of Independence that tourists view with reverence. Sacred tourist destinations are often overtly constructed and they imbue a nation with identity, elicit something akin to religious awe, and create a place wherein public rituals and modern pilgrimages are enacted. They also underscore the diverse nature of sacred tourism in America.
Religion and tourism both exist in space and use space to construct meaning. The motivations of those religious adherents who travel to sacred places are buttressed by an undercurrent of belief. Tourists, on the other hand, are not always believers, and they have diverse rationales for traveling to sacred places: some are on a quest for genuine spiritual engagement, others are seeking authenticity to offset the manufactured nature of modernity, and still others simply have an attraction to the cultural lore connected to a place. Tourists to religious sites thus arrive at a place that has been specifically designated sacred and therefore set apart, but while the place may be fixed geographically, its meanings commonly are not. Classifying a space brings it into existence as place, and this classification is regularly driven by the forces of commodification linked to tourism; it is also often contested between religious adherents and less spiritually inclined tourists and at times even within different tourist constituencies. Since human intervention is a precondition in any construction of place, sacred tourist destinations are based on mutually reinforcing relationships, and the tourists and pilgrims that seek sacred sites each play significant roles in creating, maintaining, or contesting a place’s identity.
“Religious-based tourism,” “tourism to sacred places,” and “religious or spiritual tourism” each carry different connotations. While religious and spiritual tourism indicate tours undertaken solely or mainly for faith-based reasons, “religious-based tourism” acknowledges that tourists are not homogenous; those tourists whose main aim is recreational can still be religious adherents, nonreligious tourists are still usually visiting a sacred place because of its purported numinous qualities, and those whose primary goal is religious can still evince behavior typically associated with tourism. “Tourism to sacred places” or “sacred tourism” allows the flexibility to include hallowed places that are either formally religious or not. Indeed, sites of secular pilgrimage continue to proliferate wherein “pilgrim” is used indistinguishably from “tourist” because of the mixture of secular and sacred at the site itself as well as the diverse motivations of the people who journey there. A spatial examination of tourism to sacred sites must thus consider the spatial dynamics of the motivations and actions of people within a commodified and contested place that draws tourists, pilgrims, and the many who are both.
Article
Transmission of Buddhist Media and Texts
Daniel Veidlinger
Different media have been used to spread the teachings of Buddhism, and they have exerted a significant influence upon the development of Buddhist ideas and institutions over time. An oral tradition was first used in ancient India to record and spread the Buddhist Dharma, and later the Pali canon was written down in the 1st century bce. Writing was also conspicuously used to transmit Mahāyāna texts starting in the first centuries of the first millennium. Printing was developed in medieval China probably in connection with the Buddhist desire to create merit through copying the texts. Efforts to print Buddhist texts in Western languages and scripts began in earnest in the late 19th century, and Western printing methods were later adopted by Asian Buddhists to publish the texts in modern times. It is important to appreciate the intricate relationship between the medium that is used to transmit a text and the form of the text itself, as well as the commensurate effects of the texts and their ideas on the medium and its uses in society. The oral medium has many constraints that forced the early texts to assume certain forms that were amenable to oral transmission, and institutions arose to assist in the preservation of these texts as well. Even once writing came to be used, the common people generally did not read but rather heard the text recited by learned monks. Private reading is for the most part a modern invention and it, too, had a distinct influence on the development of Buddhism, leading to modern reformist movements that demanded less superstition, more meditation, and a closer adherence to the teachings found in the canonical texts. The Internet is also shaping the popular reception of Buddhism, as Buddhist teachings and texts proliferate on thousands of websites in a dizzying array of languages.
Article
Transnational Jihadi Movements
Mona Sheikh and Saer El-Jaichi
Transnational jihadi movements are defined by their transnational appeal and demands, their reaction against external interventions and call for Muslim autonomy, and their network-like organization. These movements perceive jihad—in terms of an armed struggle—to be a (neglected) duty incumbent upon all Muslims, regardless of their national affiliation. The global jihadi movement has had two organizational manifestations: al-Qaeda, and the Islamic State movement. Al-Qaeda first appeared on the global stage in the 1990s as a local recruitment bureau for the mujahideen in Afghanistan during the Cold War. Islamic State appeared in the 2000s, initially as an Iraqi branch of al-Qaeda in the context of the country’s political turmoil in 2001–2003, later developing into a separate expansionist movement that took territorial control of large parts of Syria and Iraq. Though Islamic State lost its territorial control in 2018, it is still active across different regions, much like al-Qaeda. Regional branches of both organizations are at times reliant on a centralized authority, but more often they are local movements that have declared loyalty to the agenda of the al-Qaeda or Islamic State.
The worldview of transnational jihadi movements is framed and defined by geopolitical events that took place in the Middle East from the 1960s onward. The movements appear with a defensive anticolonial ethos against foreign intervention and interference, but also with offensive ambitions of establishing a transnational caliphate. Though Islamic State has a sectarian agenda largely defined against Shia Muslims, both contemporary movements are driven by the belief that God’s sovereignty is threatened, that the United States and the West are an enemy of Muslims along with apostate Muslim regimes, and that Islam needs to be purified from disbelief. Tactical and interpretive differences regarding the definition of disbelief, the right timing of establishing the caliphate, and fighting the near enemy (apostate regimes) or the far enemy (the United States and the West) have caused divisions among the transnational jihadi movements.
Article
Tri Songdétsen
Brandon Dotson
Emperor Tri Songdétsen (Khri Srong lde brtsan; 742–c.800 ce) is one of the most fascinating figures in Tibet’s religious and political history. He played a central role in shaping the character of early Tibetan Buddhism by patronizing and protecting it as an official religion of the Tibetan Empire (c. 608–866). After proclaiming his official patronage of Buddhism in c. 779, Tri Songdétsen oversaw the consecration of Samyé (Bsam yas) Monastery and made provisions for the official sponsorship of a nascent Sangha. From this point onward, Buddhism became an irrevocable component of Tibetan culture and spread its roots at both elite and popular levels.
The basic contours of Tri Songdétsen’s life and work may be gleaned from contemporary administrative records and from the king’s own inscribed pillar edicts and their accompanying paper documents. These describe how he was enthroned as a fourteen-year-old boy after his father was assassinated in the course of a revolt. They also give Tri Songdétsen’s reasons for officCially supporting Buddhism, and mention some of the opposition that he faced. As accounts of the concerted introduction of Buddhism to Tibet, Tri Songdétsen’s edicts constitute a clear forerunner to later Tibetan “histories of the Dharma” (chos ’byung) that would become a standard medium for Tibet’s Heilsgeschichte from the 11th century to the 21st. In this way, Tri Songdétsen also played a key role in the genesis of Tibet’s unique form of Buddhist historiography.
Ironically, the very historiographical traditions that Tri Songdétsen inaugurated in Tibet would in subsequent centuries come to express an ambivalent attitude toward the emperor’s central role in the establishment of Buddhism. Although he was lionized shortly after his death and in the century that followed, in Buddhist histories and hagiographies from the 12th century onward, Tri Songdétsen is eclipsed by the figure of the yogin Padmasambhava, who is credited as the real agent in the conversion of Tibet. Within this new narrative, the king is somewhat ineffectual in his commitment to Buddhism, such that his failure to follow Padmasambhava’s instructions eventually accounts for Padmasambhava’s departure from Tibet and for all sorts of future calamities that befall Tibet, its monarchy, and its people.
The subordination of Tri Songdétsen to Padmasambhava is part of a larger movement by which kings receded from Tibetans’ devotional emphasis and from their daily lives, and by which the figure of the lama ascended to cultural paramountcy. In particular, it reflects a shift in devotional emphasis across the 11th to 13th centuries from the cult of Emperor Songtsen Gampo (Srong rtsan sgam po; c. 605–649), who was viewed as an emanation of Tibet’s protector bodhisattva, Avalokiteśvara, to that of the yogin Padmasambhava, revered as an emanation of the Buddha Amitābha. Tri Songdétsen became a supporting player in Padmasambhava’s hagiography and cult, as one of his twenty-five disciples, and was also refigured as an emanation of the bodhisattva Mañjusrī. It is in this guise that Tri Songdétsen is remembered within Tibetan cultural memory and within Tibetan Buddhism more generally from the 12th century to the 21st.
Article
Tsangpa Gyare (1161–1211), Founder of the Drukpa Kagyü School
Seiji Kumagai
Buddhism was introduced to Tibet in the 7th century and became the state religion of the Tibetan Empire in the 8th century, only to face a temporary all-out decline in the ensuing century. After Atiśa’s visit to Tibet in the 11th century, Buddhism revived there. Just after the Kadam school (Bka’ gdams pa) was founded by the followers of Atiśa, the Kagyü school (Bka’ brgyud pa) and the Sakya school (Sa skya pa) were also established, and so Tibetan Buddhism became rich in diversity. The Sakya school was ruled by the Khön family and remained mostly unitary. On the other hand, the Kagyü school developed the master–disciple relationship, producing many subschools established by the foremost students of famous teachers. Thus, four disciples of Gampopa (Sgam po pa Bsod nams rin chen or Dwags po lha rje, 1079–1153) founded the four primary subschools, and Phagmo Drupa (Phag mo gru pa Rdo rje rgyal po, 1110–1170) established the eight secondary subschools.
It is a well-known fact that the Karma Kagyü school (Karma bka’ brgyud) became the most prominent subschool among them. The second largest subschool regarding the number of followers was the Drukpa Kagyü school (’Brug pa bka’ brgyud). This school has been a state Buddhist school in Bhutan (or Druk Yul) since the establishment of the country by the 17th head abbot Shabdrung Ngawang Namgyal (Zhabs drung Ngag dbang rnam rgyal, 1594–1651).
Fortunately, modern Western researchers have provided us with a general outline of the history of the Drukpa Kagyü. However, some details remain unclear. Due to difficulties of accessing many of his works, the life and thoughts of Tsangpa Gyare (Gtsang pa rgya ras Ye shes rdo rje, 1161–1211), the founder of the Drukpa Kagyü school, have been insufficiently studied. Information about its founder is necessary to improve our understanding of the school. Thus, this article aims to re-examine Tsangpa Gyare’s life, integrating both philological and field information in an effort to provide a historical mapping of Tsangpa Gyare according to both his spiritual lineage of pre-reincarnations and dharma lineages (master and disciple relationship), and an examination of his life. In order to understand the life and personality of this figure, this article will examine Tsangpa Gyare’s own works as well as varied sources referring to him.
Article
The Twofold Rule of God
John R. Stumme
During the 20th century there was a remarkable change in the interpretation of Martin Luther’s approach to society. During the 19th and first part of the 20th centuries, many understood that Luther advocated a sharp separation between gospel and world, faith and politics, church and state. Faith or religion was understood to be a private affair that had nothing to do with the autonomous functioning of government and other secular institutions. Christians were to obey the existing powers, even if unjust or authoritarian, and serve their neighbor through acts and church institutions of mercy. Lutherans were called quietists, defeatists, and dualists, and Karl Barth alleged that Luther’s understanding of law and gospel allowed other gods to claim allegiance alongside Jesus the Lord. And then especially there were the Lutheran failures in the Nazi experience.
All of this spurred theologians to critically evaluate their tradition and to take a fresh look at Luther in order to assist the church to be a more responsible presence in a changing world. In the middle decades of the last century, there was an impressive outpouring of historical and theological studies on what was being called Luther’s “two-kingdoms doctrine.” These studies did not exonerate Luther from all the ills of the tradition that bears his name, but they did reveal that other ideas and interests led to Luther’s approach often being wrongly interpreted and ideologically misused. These studies offered new interpretations, often differing in their positions and emphases, which demonstrated the complexity, the “labyrinth” (Johannes Heckel), of Luther’s thought and also revealed something about the social location of the interpreter. Yet there was wide agreement that Luther in his life and his theology did not disdain or withdraw from social and political life. On the contrary; a revisionist strain saw Luther’s theological distinctions to be essential for the church both to preserve the uniqueness of the gospel and to encourage Christians to participate critically in society. Questions remained, yet many in various contexts found in Luther a way for the church to affirm both justification and justice.
This all too brief sketch of the controversial and checkered history of interpretation of Luther’s thought on society since the early 20th century sets the stage for turning to Luther himself. In addressing social and political issues, Luther moves out from the center of his theology. That center is justification, the belief that people, sinners before God, are forgiven and justified by faith alone because of Jesus Christ. Christians living in faith before God also live at the same time in the networks and institutions of society where they are freed and called to love their neighbor. For Luther Christians always live in these two realms or relationships in which God is active; the loving God who justifies also creates the world in which Christians and others live. Better labels for Luther’s approach than “two kingdoms” are “the twofold rule of God” or “the two realms.”
Luther works out his understanding of political authority and its relation to spiritual authority as part of the twofold rule of God. He does so while protesting the abuses in the church and leading a reforming movement. He is concerned to show the proper function of Word and sword and their relationship. His 1523 treatise Temporal Authority: To What Extent It Should Be Obeyed sets out his perspective, which later he developed and modified.
Article
Tzu Chi
Elise Anne DeVido
The Buddhist Compassion Relief Tzu Chi Foundation, founded in 1966 by the Taiwanese bhikkhunī Shih Cheng Yen, is a global humanitarian nongovernmental organization (NGO). Tzu Chi Foundation USA is in consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council (UN-ECOSOC). Tzu Chi’s “Four Missions and Eight Footprints” comprise formidable phalanxes of volunteers and professionals in the fields of charity, relief, medicine, education, and cultural production as well as international relief, bone marrow donation, community volunteerism, and environmental protection. As of 2021, Tzu Chi has provided humanitarian aid to people in 122 countries and regions. There are Tzu Chi volunteers in sixty-six countries and regions across the continents of Asia, Europe, Africa, North America, and South America as well as Oceania. All organizations, particularly those with charismatic founders, face questions of long-term sustainability. The Tzu Chi enterprise must determine how each part will play a role, how to better coordinate Taiwan’s operations with operations overseas, how to recruit young talent as volunteers and professionals, and how to develop the Tzu Chi School of Buddhism and Jing Si Dharma Lineage as the threads that bind Tzu Chi together. Yet no matter what organizational and philosophical configuration may develop, Tzu Chi is a model for humanitarians and Buddhists alike on how to relieve suffering, nurture hope, and build community through the bodhisattva path.
Article
The Uganda Martyrs Guild
Heike Behrend
The Uganda Martyrs Guild (UMG) was founded in 1897, after the killing of a number of young Catholics, Protestants, and Muslims, who had worked as pages at the court of the king of Buganda. The Catholic Church made the Catholic victims the center of a cult of martyrs. They were beatified in 1920 and canonized in 1964. Since its founding, the UMG has served as a point of mediation between Uganda and the transnational network of the Catholic Church. In the early 1990s, the UMG emerged as a witch-finding movement in western Uganda, which continued until the organization changed its procedures and began to refrain from naming witches in 2005. Since that time, members have increasingly shifted their focus instead to the healing and security of UMG members and those willing to join the UMG.
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Ugaritic and Biblical Literature
Mark S. Smith
The Ugaritic texts provide a rich resource for understanding the Late Bronze Age kingdom of Ugarit, located on the coast of Syria. The site has yielded about two thousand tablets in Ugaritic, the West Semitic language of this city-state, and about twenty-five hundred tablets in Akkadian, the lingua franca of the period, as well as many texts written in seven other languages. These reveal a cosmopolitan, commercial center operating in the shadow of two great powers of the eastern Mediterranean basin, the Egyptians and the Hittites.
The Ugaritic texts offer innumerable literary and religious parallels to biblical literature. The parallels are so rich and in some cases so specific that it is evident that the Ugaritic texts do not merely provide parallels, but belong to a shared or overlapping cultural matrix with the Hebrew Bible. Ugaritic literature may not predate the earliest biblical sources by much more than a few decades, but the bulk of biblical literature dates to centuries later. Moreover, unlike the coastal, cosmopolitan center of Ugarit, ancient Israel’s heartland lay in the rural inland hill-country considerably to the south in what is today Israel and occupied Palestinian territory. Despite these important differences, Ugaritic and biblical literature are not to be understood as representing entirely different cultures, but overlapping ones.
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The Uniting Church in Australia
Robert W. Gribben
The Uniting Church in Australia (1977) faces the challenge of both being faithful to its inherited traditions (Methodist and Reformed), and taking the opportunity to draw on contemporary ecumenical liturgical scholarship in the preparation of new liturgies. The eucharistic liturgies follow the basic shape of Dix; the Great Prayer may be used in either the Western Catholic tradition, or prefaced by a Reformed “warrant.” There is a wide variety of baptism and related services, including some resources for an adult catechumenate. There is provision for both adult and infant baptism, as appropriate; some material for an adult catechumenate is included, but the church has not yet shown evidence of increased baptism of adults. The first phases of the renewal process involved the production of two worship books, in 1988 and 2005, covering the full range of word, sacrament, and occasional offices, and were increasingly supported by authorized CD-ROM and web-based resources. Inclusive language is used throughout. The liturgical forms are regarded as models, to be varied or supplemented with material with the same theological intent. There is now an increasing move toward local worship leaders (lay and ordained) devising liturgies using resources, including musical, with other theological bases. This raises the question of the theological integrity of the result, in words spoken and sung. The complex task of providing its liturgies for non-European cultures, including indigenous, has hardly begun, though there are services now translated into other languages. The dearth of scholarly liturgical study in theological colleges makes it difficult to see how this can be addressed. Without such historical, theological, and practical study of worship, many other developments will be prey to fashion and individual styles.
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Urban Space and Religion in the United States
Katie Day
Religion has always been a contextually based phenomenon, particularly in urban space. Cities of every size, in every period, and in every region of the country have been defined by the towers and spires of faith traditions. They have mapped cities, providing anchors to religionists who worship there, and contributing to the construction of civil society and a sense of place. Communities of faith have drawn migrants and immigrants to settle in a particular place and provided resources for adaptation and integration. Houses of worship have often defined neighborhood identities and become progenitors of social capital beyond their walls. Increasingly the physical and social forms of religion are becoming more diverse—different accents, practices, music, dress, and even scents pour into and out of houses of worship that may not be grand old structures but more modest structures built for other purposes, blending into the cityscape. Still, religion is influential in shaping its context both spatially and socially.
But the relationship is reciprocal, as context acts on the questions, meanings, and practices of faith groups as well. The city has occupied the religious imaginations of many traditions as an ambivalent symbol, seen as both the locus of depravity and of redemption. Out of these imaginaries religious questions, meanings, practices, and forms of engagement have been shaped. Further, the economic, political, social, and institutional dynamics of the urban space impact the practice and understanding of religion, and how it is expressed and lived out in everyday life.
The interaction of religions and urban space—what can be described as a dynamic synapse in a human ecology—is emerging as a focus of exploration in understanding how cities work. Although religion is often overlooked by many urban theorists, researchers, planners, developers, and governments, it is gaining fresh attention by scholars. Drawing on major schools of urban theory—particularly the modernist Chicago School and the postmodern L.A. School of Urbanism—the spatial dimension of urban religion is being analyzed in research projects from a growing number of contexts. Theoretical and empiric work is enabling a deeper understanding of the relationship of religion and cities; they cannot be considered in isolation. Religious agency cannot be exaggerated or romanticized but should be considered as what two researchers have called “one of the ensemble of forces creating the new American metropolis” (Numrich, Paul D., and Elfriede Wedam. Religion and Community in the New Urban America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.). In the same way, faith groups of all traditions and dimensions do not exist in isolation of their context as bubbles in city space. The intersection of space and urban religion is complex, especially as both religion and cities are in the midst of great change in the 21st century.