Arabic-speaking migrants from the Ottoman Empire embarked on mass migrations across the Atlantic in the late 19th century. Large numbers traded and settled in the Caribbean region, forming the nucleus of communities that still thrive in the early 21st century. Although underplayed in the existing historical literature on the Caribbean and modern Middle East, these Caribbean migrations were a vital part of the creation of an Arab diaspora across the Americas. In the early years of emigration out of the Ottoman Empire, mostly Christian Arabs utilized their preexisting trading bases in the ports of Western Europe to launch new exploratory ventures across the Atlantic. In many cases, the Caribbean islands were their first ports of call where they found ideal conditions for peddling small consumer goods they imported from Europe and North America. From these initial bases, they fanned out across the region, often using the Caribbean islands as stepping stones toward ventures on the mainland. A pattern developed whereby migrants sought out boomtowns around the Caribbean region where fast-expanding export economies (particularly in bananas and sugar) offered lucrative opportunities for peddlers and small-scale retailers. In cities like San Pedro Sula (Honduras), San Pedro de Macorís (Dominican Republic), and Barranquilla (Colombia), Arab traders played central roles in the rapid growth of the local economy. Taken collectively, these case studies speak of an “Arab Caribbean”—a regional sphere of migration and trade that transcended national boundaries, encompassing both the islands and the Caribbean coasts of Mexico, Central America, and South America. Despite their frequent persecution in their new places of residence, Arab migrants in the Caribbean proved remarkably resilient, utilizing their region-wide networks to regroup and adapt to the changing economic and political landscape.
641-660 of 710 Results
Article
The Making of the Arab Caribbean, c. 1870–1930
Jacob Norris
Article
Nomadic Shelters, Mystical Staircases, and Cosmic Chambers in Iberoamerican Art
Barbara von Barghahn
When Jesus used the phrase “in my Father’s house” in speaking to Jews of future hospitality in paradise, he deliberately invoked a complicated expression, which suggested both a range of types of dwellings as well as an expansive notion of the familial. The domestic metaphor that Jesus invoked was so pregnant with meaning, in fact, that it continued to inspire artists and patrons—among others—many centuries later, and those subsequent Christian generations often imagined the biblical expression at least in part in terms of the contemporary houses and homes that they saw around them.
This article directs attention to some of the tension in that phrase from John 14:2, which reminded Jesus’ audience of Abraham’s history. In Genesis 12, God directed the patriarch to abandon his land, birthplace, and “father’s house” and go “to the land I will show you.” Note that Abraham refers, too, to God removing him from “my father’s house” when he spoke with the Gerarite king Abimelech in Genesis 20, and to his own servant Eliezer four chapters later. The Hebrew letter yud (“my”) suggests possession, while “father’s” (aba) implies the house belongs to another, and thus there is a dual tension hinting at the way that Abraham, in many ways, could have been a stranger in his own idol-worshiping father’s house.
Abraham renounced his paternal inheritance to chart his own monotheistic course, and, of course, the father to which he refers in each of those biblical passages is an earthly one. If anything, the Jewish patriarch could be said to be upgrading a pagan earthly father’s home for one associated with his heavenly “father,” who, incidentally, promises Abraham that he himself will in turn “father many nations” (Gen. 17:4).
Jesus, meanwhile, invokes his Father’s house as only a son could who is heir to, and implicated in, that same home, rather than fleeing it as Abraham did. To put it differently, Jesus reverses the direction of Abraham’s use of the term; where Abraham returns repeatedly to his exit from his father’s earthly house, Jesus invites his followers into his Father’s heavenly abode. As will be shown in the article, the range of homes that Jesus has in mind include several irregular, or at least impermanent, ones, which adds to the richness of the metaphor and its lesson.
Article
The Marketplace and Religion in America
Daniel Silliman
There is a long and complicated relationship between religious activities and marketplace activities in the United States. Despite popular expectations that these spheres of life, the sacred and profane, ought to be completely separate, the two are often intimately related. Further, the relationship is messy, multifold, and complex.
In contemporary American life, the connections are readily visible. Churches employ branding experts, while tech companies forgo profit to promote disruptions that promise to save the world. Christians organize financial seminars and corporations sponsor spiritual retreats. According to the Supreme Court, some companies have religious beliefs. Meanwhile, the spiritual-but-not-religious express their spirituality with practices of ethical consumption. Advertisers promise “your best life now,” as do prosperity preachers. The sacrament of marriage is worth billions, built on the belief that the special day deserves and requires special expense. Holidays are big business, and so are Bibles.
This is not a new phenomenon, either. It was a religious group that invented corn flakes. The Massachusetts Bay Colony was a joint stock company before it was a model for Christian charity. The Quakers made an economic argument for religious freedom. Revivalist preachers were often as skilled in advertizing as they were in sermonizing. The leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints faced religious persecution in Ohio in the 1850s, but were also opposed because of their wildcat bank. It was economic interests that brought the Catholic and Jewish immigrants, who challenged Protestant dominance of American life. End-to-end, American culture is chockfull of case studies of the manifold, mutual, and often highly contradictory forms of interaction between religion and marketplace.
Religion-and-the-marketplace studies examine these interactions. The field is quite diverse, and includes a number of different disciplines that ask different questions. There are, broadly speaking, three approaches to religion-and-the-marketplace studies. One looks at the market conditions that shaped or influenced religious movements. One makes use of economic terms to explain religious diversity in America. One looks at the underlying assumptions that unite religious activity and market activity.
Article
Theological Language in Martin Luther
Joachim Ringleben
In Christianity, theological language must be understood against the background of the multifaceted semantic field of Logos. “Logos” (as “word” and as “linguistic reason”) is used in multiple contexts: (1) Trinitarian theological (John 1:1); (2) creation (Gen. 1:3) and revelation-theological (Jesus Christ “the Word of God” [ὁ λόγος τοῦ θεοῦ]: Rev. 19:13); and (3) soteriological-eschatological (“Word of Life,” 1 John 1:1). These references are mediated through the philosophy of language’s concept of “translation” (Johann Georg Hamann) and the idea of divine condescension into human language.
In Luther, religious language as the language of the Bible is to be understood on the one hand by its character as a living address to humankind and on the other as an immediate confession of the believer in spontaneous reaction to it. In biblical language, the Word of God, conveyed in human terms, comes closer to us than we do to our own selves and transforms our earthly existence to the goal of everlasting life.
Theological language is intellectual interpretation and conceptual reflection on religious language with a theoretical aim—in other words, its intent is to reach an agreement about itself under the conditions of the overall context; it concerns the truth of religious language and texts.
Because Luther—linguistically aware to the highest degree—recognized the specific distinctiveness of biblical language, and of New Testament language in particular, his writings contain an abundance of differentiated reflections on the state of appropriate theological language. The Word of God in our human language requires theology to have a “different” or “new” logic (and philosophy) in its articles of faith. All traditional philosophical terms and logical forms of judgment and conclusion must be “translated” into Christianity—even, for example, the concept of the human being and of the Word itself.
In particular, the unity of God and man in Christ compels a new sort of language or way of thinking. The imaginative form of spatial prepositions (such as “in”) must be rethought in determinate negation. In God, opposites coincide.
Because God’s Word is directed against the self-conception of the sinner before God, it comes to humankind essentially in the twin linguistic structure of “Law” and “Gospel”; these categories also define theological language in a specifically Reformation sense.
New Testament language, in its fundamentals, is eschatologically oriented. Hence, categories such as “substance” or “essence” (essentia) must be rephrased on the condition that nothing has already been defined, and everything is still developing. Luther undertook this with an eschatology of the Word of God.
As Luther shows in the case of Jesus’ words at the Last Supper, “This is my body …,” the new logic is a genuinely linguistic logic, or rather thinking from language. Traditional (formal) logic replaces the logic of real language with an artificial model.
Finally, Luther also reflects on the linguistic status of the word “God” as a grammatical subject. Here, too, he wants the word “God” to be comprehended as a fluid substance, understanding it essentially as a verb—as a linguistic expression of movement—thus embodying the Reformation idea of “for me” (pro me).
Ultimately, it is always about the important role of two linguistic aspects in theological language: grammar on the one hand, which should receive fundamental attention, and linguistic usage (usus loquendi) on the other, the comprehension of which is also crucial. Thus, Luther’s understanding of theological language could be summarized in this statement: theology, understood linguistically, is a grammar of the language of the sacred scriptures.
Article
Theology in Translation: Latin American and Iranian Efforts
Ángel Horacio Molina and Luis Alberto Vittor
“Turkish” migrants , in fact Ottoman Arab who entered the American continent with identity documents issued by the Ottoman authorities and traveled with their languages or dialects, arrived at the end of the 19th century and in the first decades of the 20th century. However, the migratory wave extended almost until the middle of the 20th century after going through a complex political, social, and cultural process that substantially modified various aspects of the migrants’ lives. Their religious lives were progressively hampered in terms of ritual practice because their faith of origin was in the minority with no adequate spaces for collective prayer. They encountered the increasingly pressing need to translate their Islamic sources, on the one hand because of the gradual loss of the Arabic language in some communities and on the other because of the need to maintain it—not only through translation but also by teaching the language in mosques and community centers. The arrival of Iranian migrants to different destinations in Latin America starting in the 1980s enriched this process of translation and dissemination of Islamic texts (Arabic and Persian) in Latin America.
The Muslim diaspora was the first group who, for various reasons, left their homeland while maintaining a close relationship with their language and culture of origin, and later, Muslim converts devoted themselves to the task of translating (inversely, directly, and indirectly) the Islamic theological texts from Arabic to Spanish or Portuguese. The very possibility of translation is a type of migration—a transfer that modifies a source language into a target language. One’s own language is poured into a foreign language. Translating is the disposition of language from the “I” that leads the reader to meet the “you” of otherness. This migratory process is also the inner journey made by the Latin American convert to the Islamic faith: their effort to first learn a language that is not their own in order to translate it into their own in the act of translating. Translation is a form of migration that has become an essential tool for mediation, conversion, knowledge, and dissemination. Both Muslim Arabs and converts devoted themselves to this task: for Muslim Arabs because of the progressive loss in the use of the language of their ancestors, and for converts, out of a pious duty to learn Arabic, the language in which the Qur’an was revealed in the Scripture that guides their new faith and to benefit those who do not know the language.
Article
Theology Issues in North America
Candace Mixon
Muslims have been present in North America long before the transatlantic slave trade; Western and North African Muslims were an (involuntary) part of “New World” expeditions as early as the 1500s. Muslims who arrived enslaved during the transatlantic slave trade were often prohibited from practicing, writing about, or discussing Islam. Later, immigration waves, new religious movements, and eventually dedicated centers for teaching about Muslims and Islam and centers of Muslim education and debate yielded sophisticated responses to the specific challenges and benefits of North American Muslim life. Authenticity and connection to Arabo-centric Islam have often characterized theological movements, while the variety of North American Muslim communities developed an ever-changing pallet of Islams and identity markers that still do not coalesce neatly into traditional theological schools.
The concept and translation of Islamic theology, or kalam, does not map onto its comparative Christian counterpart. Kalam has historically been employed to define modes of correct Muslim practice within Muslim communities while defending against questions, attacks, or degradations by other religious groups. Islamic theology can be considered from two directions: foundations of practicing Islam that form Muslims’ obligations derived from many Qur’anic interpretations and through the discipline of theology, focused on the rational and technical inquiry of doctrines and arguments to determine correct practice. Both approaches delve into intra-Muslim dialogues, which are vital to the outcome of believers’ performance in this world to prepare for the next. North American experiences inform Muslim approaches to theology, whether attributed to transcontinental migration or developed within the boundaries of North America. Such approaches may sometimes be disparate or even oppositional, accumulated through the lack of a singular religious authority. Numerous leadership groups, histories, informal leaders, and recognized pathfinders who could be considered leading the charge to promote particular theologically driven movements in North America can be pointed to. At the same time, many Muslims in North America do not belong to any particular Muslim organization; they may connect with ethnic or regional communities instead.
Tracing the history of Islam in North America is a framework for following North American approaches to theological debates that serve to create, police, or multiply the variety of Muslim experiences in North America. The decentralized development and diversification of Islam in North America contribute to a diversity of theological practices that are better embraced in their multiplicities rather than treated as a cohesive body.
Article
Theos Bernard, the “White Lama”
Paul G. Hackett
Theos Bernard was an early pioneer of yoga in the United States and only the third American to reach the capital of Tibet, Lhasa, but the first to do so as a religious pilgrim. Although born in Los Angeles, California, Bernard was raised and educated in Tombstone, Arizona. In the late 1930s, Bernard embarked upon a journey to India and Tibet and, while there, explored the yogic traditions of India and participated in some of the highest religious rituals in Tibet, all while documenting his experiences on paper, in photographs, and on film.
Upon returning to New York in 1937, Bernard wrote and published several books purporting to chronicle his experiences in India and Tibet and setting forth the fundamental principles of Indian and Tibetan philosophies as he understood them. During the years that followed, Bernard attempted to establish a Tibetan research center in Santa Barbara, California, together with the Tibetan monk and scholar Gendün Chöpel. His efforts having been thwarted by the events of World War II, in 1942, Bernard instead entered Columbia University to pursue a PhD in philosophy. Completed less than a year later, his dissertation, “Hatha Yoga: The Report of a Personal Experience,” was an ethnographic report of his studies in India that was subsequently published, and which served to introduce the practices of yoga to a new American generation. Bernard went on to found the short-lived Tibetan Text Society in Santa Barbara, California, prior to returning to the Indian subcontinent in 1946 in search of additional resources. Finding his entry to Tibet blocked by the British government in India, he bided his time until Indian independence. In August 1947, he launched a different expedition into the western Himalayas—to Spiti, Lahoul, and Ladakh—five days after the Partition of India. He was never seen again.
Article
The Passion of Christ in the New World
Alena Robin
The study of Passion imagery in the New World is located at the crossroads of artistic expressions, historical moments, and interests. It must consider issues of iconography, local devotion, agency, identity, and the materiality of artworks, but also connections to belief, piety, and the colonial context. The Passion of Christ encompasses the last moments in the life of Jesus: from his death sentence and the torments he suffered, to his execution through Crucifixion at Mount Golgotha. Although Passion imagery depicts moments narrated in the four canonical Gospels, artists also found inspiration in apocryphal texts, Spanish mystic literature, and European images that traveled in the form of engravings, which were sources abundantly used in Ibero-America. Spanish, Flemish, and Italian sources circulated in America, providing Passion images with particular characteristics. At the same time, local history was incorporated into the representation of these last moments of the life of Jesus, such as in cases of the Christ of Ixmiquilpan in colonial Mexico or the Christ of the Earthquakes, in Cusco, Peru. Generic Passion images became specific cult images due to their miracles, which were particularly important in the Americas as part of the evangelization process and the preservation of the colonial political order. The indigenous populations of America were in many occasions intertwined in these stories around images of Christ. Soon after the conquest, indigenous people also became manufacturers of these images. Passion imagery is found in the form of painting, sculpture, engraving, and architecture, becoming, in certain cases, Gesamtkunstwerk, or total works of art, since buildings and their interiors make use of many art forms under a unifying concept related to the Passion of Christ, such as sanctuaries dedicated to Jesus or architectural renditions of the Way of the Cross.
Article
Theravāda Buddhism
Sven Bretfeld
Theravāda Buddhism is a neologism denoting a variety of historically connected religious traditions. Today these traditions are predominantly spread in Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and parts of Vietnam. More recent communities in other parts of the world (e. g., Europe, the United States, India, Nepal, Australia) are directly or indirectly connected to the traditions of these countries by migration or adaptation processes. These local varieties do not constitute a homogeneous entity. Nevertheless, the use of a common denominator is justified by their interconnected religious histories and a common stock of liturgical, ritual, exegetical, and narrative traditions.
Prior to the 20th century theravāda (or theriya, theravaṃsa) was understood as a nikāya, an institutionalized monastic lineage primarily defined by a specific system of ritual and legal regulations for monks and nuns (the vinaya). This specific lineage became increasingly associated with Sri Lanka during the first millennium ce, while its Indian origins became obscure. Like many other nikāyas, the Theravādins were not uniform in their doctrinal, ethical, and liturgical orientations. The dynamics of local acculturation and active participation in the translocal networks of the ancient “Buddhist World” produced multiple religious expressions and attitudes within the Theravāda monastic lineage through the centuries. Doctrinally, these could range from an exclusive Pāli-based Śrāvakayāna (“Hīnayāna”) approach to the promotion of so-called Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna texts and practices. A series of royally enforced monastic reforms in the 11th and 12th centuries in Sri Lanka strengthened a certain “conservative” camp of the saṅgha and enforced an exclusivist vision of a Theravāda “orthodoxy,” purified from what this group deemed to be inauthentic adulterations of the Buddha’s teaching. This impulse yielded a powerful—though not unchallenged—impact on the further development of Buddhist monasticism in Sri Lanka and, somewhat later, in Southeast Asia. Ultimately they shaped much of the modern ideas about the characteristics of Theravāda Buddhism.
During the first half of the 20th century the nikāya name Theravāda was detached from its technical monastic meaning and became reinterpreted as a type of Buddhism, idealizing the doctrinal content of the canonical scriptures of this lineage—the so-called Pāli Canon—as a binding belief system for all “Theravāda Buddhists,” monastic or lay. In anachronistic extension of this typology, the compound “Theravāda Buddhism” was further understood as the most ancient, or even “original,” form of the Buddhist “creed.”
The adjective form of Theravāda is Theravādin, which can also be used as a noun to denote a follower of Theravāda.
Article
The Reincarnation System in Central Asian Buddhism
Ruth Gamble
Reincarnation lineages, their traditions, and their institutions have been central to Tibetan religion, culture, society, and politics since the 13th century. They developed incrementally, dependent on doctrines from India and local precedents. From their Indian-Buddhist forebears, they took the tradition of past-life storytelling, the belief that celestial bodhisattvas constantly manifested to aid beings, and the practice of guru-yoga, which encouraged them to see their teachers as nirmāṇakāya (“creation bodies”; trülku [sprul sku] in Tibetan).
From the 10th century in Tibet, they recognized an increasing number of beings as either bodhisattva emanations or prominent beings’ rebirths. Claiming rebirth status was particularly evident in the Nyingma school’s treasure tradition, whose visionaries claimed to be the rebirths of the 8th-century mahāsiddha Padmasambhava’s students. Treasure texts also contended that the celestial bodhisattva, Avalokiteśvara, constantly manifested in Tibet.
During the 11th century, Kadam and Kagyü yogis made themselves jātaka protagonists, and the number of beings from all schools claiming to be emanations of celestial bodhisattvas increased. The Nyingma visionary Nyangrel Nyima Özer (Nyang ral nyi ma ‘od zer, 1124–1194) became the first to describe a series of his previous lives. The second and third Karmapas (13th century) developed on these precedents, adding future-life prediction and child recognition and linking rebirths to monasteries and inheritances. They combined the two ideas of rebirth and incarnation, claiming that the reborn Karmapas were a series of Avalokiteśvara’s emanations. After the Mongol emperors became the Karmapas’ students, their model was copied across Tibet.
In the 16th century, the Dalai Lamas, aided first by Mongol rulers and then the Manchu-Qing Emperor, gained political supremacy in Tibet. This also enabled their school, the Geluk, to proselytize widely in the Mongol world and establish further guru-patron relationships. After an argument between two aristocratic reincarnates led to the Sino-Gurkha War in the late 18th century, the Qianlong Emperor mandated that Geluk reincarnates be chosen by drawing lots from a Golden Urn. The Geluks used the Golden Urn to establish many new reincarnation lineages but resisted its use to decide the Dalai Lamas or other highly ranked reincarnates. The Manchu-Qing had little influence on the non-Geluk lineages, who developed strongholds in the Himalaya and Kham in Eastern Tibet.
After the Qing Empire fell, the thirteenth Dalai Lama declared Tibet independent. He did not live to see its dissolution into the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the 1950s. During the Mao period in Tibet and the Soviet period in Mongolia, reincarnates were first co-opted and then outlawed. They became refugees, and several became famous internationally. When the Soviet Union fell, and China opened, some reincarnates re-established their monasteries, but the PRC retained the authority to recognize reincarnates, including the next Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lama, whose reputation underpins the entire reincarnation system, has refuted this claim. But as he single-handedly defends his institution against the PRC state and attempts to deal with a series of abuse and corruption scandals involving reincarnates—as perpetrators and victims—it appears certain the Dalai Lama’s next interregnum will challenge the entire reincarnation system.
Article
The Revival of Animism in the 21st Century
Kocku von Stuckrad
The academic concept of “animism” has a long and complicated history. Born from a colonial setting around 1900, it was used to identify premodern or “primitive” understandings of certain nonhuman entities or objects as being alive, ensouled, and agentic. Because of its European depiction as a “failed ontology,” and the heavy colonial baggage this depiction entails, the concept was criticized and went almost out of use in mainstream anthropology and the academic study of religion. Around the turn of the 21st century, however, a different interpretation of animism was (re)introduced, which focused on animism as a relational approach to the world rather than as ontological claims about nonhuman entities. Many scholars in the emerging field of “new animism” base their considerations on spiritual practices in Europe and North America that use the concept of animism in a positive way. This is true for many forms of paganism, nature-based spiritualities, and environmental activism. In a parallel, and in fact intertwined, movement, academic theories have been developed across disciplines and intellectual traditions that conceptualize relationality, nonhuman agency, and entanglements of life forms in a way that strives to overcome influential binaries such as subject–object, nature–culture, mind–matter, or human–nonhuman. These theories, in turn, materialize in literature and art, and they influence political and spiritual practice in many ways. In what can be called animism’s double-bind, new animism is a mode of critique of exactly those binary constructions that originate in European hegemonic thinking. While the idea of animism, due to its colonial legacy, should no longer be applied as a generic concept to a particular “type” of religion, its revival in Euro-American discourse at the turn of the 21st century can, ironically, be interpreted as a subversive attempt to decolonize the hegemonic tradition that constructed European (white, male) humans as detached from the rest of planetary life and as the pinnacle of evolution and creation.
Article
The Study of Indigenous Religions
Gregory D. Alles
The most important question to start with in considering the study of Indigenous religions is: What do the terms study, indigenous, religion, and Indigenous religions mean? There is no universally agreed upon definition for any of these terms or their combination, but one common understanding sees the study of Indigenous religions as the examination, in an academic context, of the religions of Indigenous people, prototypically, but not exclusively, people displaced by European settler colonialism. In Western European and North American universities this study has been dominated by scholars whose nations engaged in colonialism, and it has produced any number of theories attempting to understand and explain the religious practices and ideas of people who have generally been deemed “other.” As in other disciplines and fields, the Western European and North American tradition of study has exerted a powerful influence on scholars elsewhere, such as South Asia. Beginning in the late 1990s, however, Indigenous people began to develop their own methods of study, known as Indigenous research methodologies. Among other things, these methodologies emphasize the active involvement of Indigenous people as research participants rather than just objects of study, engage in research that addresses the concerns of Indigenous people, and insist that the benefits of research should be shared with the people being studied. They also often employ various methods and theories rooted in their own traditions. In practice, the mutual relations of Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars and the people whom they study vary widely, as do the topics that scholars choose to study.
Article
The Study of Visual Culture in South and Southeast Asian Buddhism
Nicolas Revire
The overwhelming focus on textual or dharma studies in Buddhism, to the relative neglect of artistic production, has led to a bias in understanding the close and intricate relationships between Buddhist art (usually comprising sculptures, mural paintings, architectural facades and ornamental elements, illuminated paintings, cloth banners, and drawings in manuscripts), rituals, and the written word. The constant dialogue between material, visual, and ritual cultures should be approached in tandem. Visual culture is a significant part of Buddhism and must be treated as part of the same social, historical, and geographical contexts as texts and practices. Buddhist visual culture, including art media, graphic aids, and physical objects or monuments associated with Buddhist practices, does not merely serve to illustrate sacred texts, legends, and doctrines. In addition, the textual tradition does not always have to explain or justify the presence—or absence—of a material object such as a Buddha icon or a Buddhist painting. While visual culture studies have become increasingly important in various academic fields over the years, a critical and complete overview of the precise relationship between art, ritual, and text in the study of south and southeast Asian Buddhism has yet to be written.
Article
The Violence at Jonestown
Rebecca Moore
The eruption of violence carried out by members of Peoples Temple, in which more than nine hundred men, women, and children died by ingesting cyanide-laced fruit punch in 1978, seemed incomprehensible. Scholars, journalists, pundits, and government officials presented a variety of explanations to account for the mass murder–suicides of US citizens that occurred in Jonestown, Guyana. The range of analyses in the weeks, months, and years that followed sought to understand why group members assassinated a US congressman and fatally shot four other people, why parents murdered their children, and why they then took their own lives.
Shocked by news reports and goaded by professional cult-watchers, popular opinion focused on so-called brainwashed followers who did as they were told under the authority of a charismatic—some said deranged—leader. Psychiatrists and psychologists tended to blame maladjusted individuals seeking refuge from autonomy and independence. Scholars who specialize in new religions studies noted historical precedents, religious beliefs (especially apocalyptic theology), and the influence of cultural opponents—relatives, the news media, and government actors—placing pressure on the group. Political analysts found religion in general, cult leaders, and vulnerable followers responsible. Contesting official and consensus understanding, conspiracy theorists viewed the deaths as mass murder rather than mass suicide. Some former members of Peoples Temple adopted this perspective, although many came to believe that residents had been conditioned by coercive practices to follow the leader.
In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, documents and audiotapes generated in Jonestown have illuminated the community’s internal practices and rhetoric and have served to complicate traditional views. This evidence has made it clear that Jonestown leaders conspired to develop a mass suicide plan to be enacted when the community faced imminent destruction. Although the logistics were carefully crafted, the various justifications for this irrevocable step remain obscure and ambiguous.
Article
Thích Nhất Hạnh in the Context of the Modern Development of Vietnamese Buddhism
Alexander Soucy
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.
Article
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).
Article
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.
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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.
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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.
