The Buddha's Biography: Its Development in the Pagan Murals vs. the Later Vernacular Literature, in the Theravādin Buddhist Context of Southeast Asia

2017 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 255-294
Author(s):  
SAMERCHAI POOLSUWAN
Keyword(s):  
Sri Lanka ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Vernacular Literature ◽  
Buddhist Tradition ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Biographical Account ◽  
The Buddha ◽  
Complete Account

AbstractAn investigation is provided on the narration of the Buddha's biography in Burmese murals of the Pagan Period (eleventh to thirteenth century ce). It detects a development of the complete account on the subject in the oldest murals of the period at the Patho-hta-mya Temple, which probably predate the earliest known literary counterpart in Pāli, the Jinālaṅkāra, which was most likely composed in Sri-Lanka during the mid-twelfth century ce. The comparison is provided between the biographical account of the Buddha illustrated in Pagan murals and those found in the two main groups of much later vernacular texts compiled in Southeast Asia, namely: Malālamkāravatthu-Tathāgataudanadīpanī particularly prevailing in Burma and representing the later Burmese tradition on narrating the Buddha's biography; and, Pathamasambodhi gaining its popularity over several other parts of Southeast Asia (i.e., Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Southwestern China and eastern part of the Shan State). The Pagan narrative on the Buddha's life is shown to be far more associated with the Malālamkāravatthu-Tathāgataudanadīpanī than with the Pathamasambodhi, suggesting the first group of texts to be a later product of the longstanding Buddhist tradition existing in Burma at least since the Pagan Period, and the latter of a separate development.

A Short Survey of Yemeni Sufism from Its Inception up to the Thirteenth Century

2009 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Muhammad Aziz
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
Mountainous Area ◽  
Economic Activities ◽  
Short Survey ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Intellectual Activities

This paper analyzes the historical conditions of Yemen’s Sufi movement from the beginning of Islam up to the rise of the Rasulid dynasty in the thirteenth century. This is a very difficult task, given the lack of adequate sources and sufficient academic attention in both the East and theWest. Certainly, a few sentences about the subject can be found scattered in Sufi literature at large, but a respectable study of the period’s mysticism can hardly be found.1 Thus, I will focus on the major authorities who first contributed to the ascetic movement’s development, discuss why a major decline of intellectual activities occurred in many metropolises, and if the existing ascetic conditions were transformed into mystical tendencies during the ninth century due to the alleged impact ofDhu’n-Nun al-Misri (d. 860). This is followed by a brief discussion ofwhat contributed to the revival of the country’s intellectual and economic activities. After that, I will attempt to portray the status of the major ascetics and prominent mystics credited with spreading and diffusing the so-called Islamic saintly miracles (karamat). The trademark of both ascetics and mystics across the centuries, this feature became more prevalent fromthe beginning of the twelfth century onward. I will conclude with a brief note on the most three celebrated figures of Yemen’s religious and cultural history: Abu al-Ghayth ibn Jamil (d. 1253) and his rival Ahmad ibn `Alwan (d. 1266) from the mountainous area, andMuhammad ibn `Ali al-`Alawi, known as al-Faqih al-Muqaddam (d. 1256), from Hadramawt.

A Short Survey of Yemeni Sufism from Its Inception up to the Thirteenth Century

2009 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Muhammad Aziz
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
Mountainous Area ◽  
Economic Activities ◽  
Short Survey ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Intellectual Activities

This paper analyzes the historical conditions of Yemen’s Sufi movement from the beginning of Islam up to the rise of the Rasulid dynasty in the thirteenth century. This is a very difficult task, given the lack of adequate sources and sufficient academic attention in both the East and theWest. Certainly, a few sentences about the subject can be found scattered in Sufi literature at large, but a respectable study of the period’s mysticism can hardly be found.1 Thus, I will focus on the major authorities who first contributed to the ascetic movement’s development, discuss why a major decline of intellectual activities occurred in many metropolises, and if the existing ascetic conditions were transformed into mystical tendencies during the ninth century due to the alleged impact ofDhu’n-Nun al-Misri (d. 860). This is followed by a brief discussion ofwhat contributed to the revival of the country’s intellectual and economic activities. After that, I will attempt to portray the status of the major ascetics and prominent mystics credited with spreading and diffusing the so-called Islamic saintly miracles (karamat). The trademark of both ascetics and mystics across the centuries, this feature became more prevalent fromthe beginning of the twelfth century onward. I will conclude with a brief note on the most three celebrated figures of Yemen’s religious and cultural history: Abu al-Ghayth ibn Jamil (d. 1253) and his rival Ahmad ibn `Alwan (d. 1266) from the mountainous area, andMuhammad ibn `Ali al-`Alawi, known as al-Faqih al-Muqaddam (d. 1256), from Hadramawt.

The Merovingian monastery of St Evroul in the light of conflicting traditions

1972 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 31-40
Author(s):  
Marjorie Chibnall
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Archaeological Evidence ◽  
Documentary Sources ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Historical Truth ◽  
Almost All ◽  
Old Men

Historians of early monasticism in Frankish Gaul either have little to say about the monastery founded by St Evroul or, like Dom Laporte, devote their attention to a discussion of the probable date of his life. The disappearance of almost all early documentary sources is one reason for this: there was certainly a break in the occupation of the site for perhaps half the century between the destruction of the monastery in the tenth century and its refoundation in 1050, and only one charter, dated 900, was rescued and copied in the eleventh century. The fact that there has been no systematic excavation of the site, so that archaeological evidence of buildings before the thirteenth-century church is lacking, is another. Early annals and reliable lives of other saints have nothing at all to say on the subject. The first historian to tackle it, Orderic Vitalis, writing in the early twelfth century, had to admit that he could discover nothing about the abbots for the four hundred years after St Evroul; and he had to draw on the memories and tales of the old men he knew, both in the monastery and in the villages round about. Needless to say he harvested a luxuriant crop of legends and traditions of all kinds. The problem of the modern historian is to winnow a few grains of historical truth out of the stories that he garnered, and the hagiographical traditions, some of which he did not know.

Medieval Ecclesiology and the Conciliar Movement

2018 ◽  
pp. 198-216
Author(s):  
Norman Tanner
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
People Of God ◽  
The People ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Institutional Church ◽  
Gregorian Reform ◽  
The Church

This chapter covers ecclesiology in the Western (or Catholic) church from the beginning of the schism between the churches of East and West—between Rome and Constantinople—in 1054 until the eve of the Reformation in 1517. Ecclesiology is taken to mean the nature or constitution of the church. The topic is considered from various standpoints: how it was viewed or taught by church officials, including the popes of the period, by councils, by theologians and other writers, and by the laity. Thereby the subject is treated from the standpoints of both the institutional church and the people of God, both ‘from above’ and ‘from below’. The chapter is divided chronologically into three periods: the Gregorian reform and its aftermath, from the mid-eleventh to the late twelfth century; the ‘long’ thirteenth century; the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries including the Avignon papacy, the conciliar movement, and the early Renaissance.

The Making of the Angevin Empire

1973 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Warren Hollister ◽  
Thomas K. Keefe
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Careful Analysis ◽  
Anglo Norman ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
Angevin Empire ◽  
Political Design ◽  
King John

During the last half of the twelfth century the kings of England ruled a vast constellation of lands stretching from Ireland to the Mediterranean, known traditionally, if not quite accurately, as the “Angevin Empire.” While the empire lasted, its rulers were the richest and strongest in Christendom. When King John lost Normandy, Anjou, Maine and Touraine, he also lost much of his income and influence, and the kings of France became the great royal figures of the thirteenth century. It is the purpose of this paper to explore the origins of the Angevin empire, and in particular the union of its two chief components — the Anglo-Norman state and the county of Anjou. Did the empire come about by accident or by political design? And if by design, who was its architect? Was it Henry I, who arranged the crucial marriage between his daughter Maud and Geoffrey, heir to Anjou? Was it Geoffrey, or Maud? Or was it their son, Henry Plantagenet — the ultimate beneficiary of the marriage?At first glance, the empire would seem to have been conceived in the calculating mind of Henry I, who could hardly have failed to grasp the implications of a marriage joining the Anglo-Norman heiress to the Angevin heir. Indeed, many treatments of the subject, both old and recent, have suggested that the Angevin empire arose from King Henry I's “immensely grandiose designs” to absorb Anjou. But did Henry I have any such desire, or any such intention? The question can only be answered after a careful analysis of Henry I's diplomacy, both in its general contours and in its relation to Anjou.

Sri Lanka’s Sinhala Buddhist Guardian Deities: Satara Varan Devi

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sree Padma ◽  
John Holt
Keyword(s):  
Sri Lanka ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Place And Space ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
Buddhist Tradition ◽  
15Th Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Religious Cultures ◽  
The Buddha ◽  
The Guardian

Satara varan devi, in the Sinhala language of Sri Lanka, refers to the four guardian deities of the Buddhist kingdoms of Sri Lanka. It is a phrase that first appears in inscriptions at Buddhist temples in the 15th-century Sri Lankan upcountry region of Gampola to denote the protective gods of the divine hierarchy who have been warranted with powers by the Buddha to not only protect the kingdom as a whole, but to provide for this-worldly well-being of individual Buddhist devotees as well. In ensuing centuries, the identities of deities constituting the satara varan devi varied from era to era and from place to place. Moreover, the identities of these deities were often composite conflations of a number of collateral deity traditions. The singular popularity of each of these deities for many devotees continues to form a significant presence in contemporary iterations of Sri Lanka’s Sinhala Buddhist religious culture. Each are regarded as Buddhist deities, even though the origins of most can be traced to Brahmanical beginnings in India. Even so, most Sinhala Buddhists would be surprised to learn that worship of Vishnu, for instance, originated in India, since he is so well known in Sri Lanka as the guardian of the Buddhasasana (Buddhist tradition). Antecedent constructions of four guardian deities appear in earlier Vedic, Buddhist, and Puranic schemes that were articulated in the earlier history of Indian religions. These various constructions not only served the function of protecting temples, cities, regions, and, in the case of early Buddhism, the Buddha himself in cosmically configured contexts, but they also reflect the way in which deities from non-Vedic, non-Puranic, and non-Buddhist origins were also assimilated and subordinated, perhaps mirroring social and political processes that were historically in play. Comparatively, analogous but not identical processes of incorporation or assimilation can also be seen within the contexts of other Theravada Buddhist-dominated religious cultures: how the Burmese have enfolded nats (mostly euhemeristic, but some Hindu deities), how the Thai and Lao have enveloped phi (various spirits or powers of place and space), and how the Khmer have embraced the worship of neak ta (again, spirits or powers of place and space). In each of these other Theravada Buddhist cultural contexts, important Brahmanic deities have also been absorbed and their significance reframed. In Mahayana contexts, other Buddhists have similarly accommodated the worship of non-Buddhist indigenous deities in Japan (kami), in Tibet (bon), and in China (Taoist and Confucian supernaturals, in addition to deities of the Chinese folk traditions).

Lying and Perjury in Confessors’ Manuals

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Corran
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Canon Law ◽  
Moral Dilemmas ◽  
The Subject

Confessors’ manuals were the most important genre in which practical thought about lying and perjury was developed during the thirteenth century. This chapter argues that confessors’ manuals shared an interest in moral dilemmas with Peter the Chanter’s Summa. A comparison of the treatment of a famous dilemma concerning a lie to save a life in Robert of Courson, Raymond of Penafort, and Hostiensis reveals the similarities in their approach. The key difference between confessors’ manuals and the practical theologians of the late twelfth century was the degree to which they quoted material from canon law. This chapter investigates this influx of legal material into pastoral writings and explains the reasons for the change. It suggests that engagement with canon law did not mean that the ethics of lying and perjury became indistinguishable from canonical thought on the subject.

When a Word Is Worth a Thousand Pictures: Mahāyāna Influence on Theravāda Attitudes Towards Writing

Numen ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 405-447 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Veidlinger
Keyword(s):  
Sri Lanka ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
First Millennium ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Ambivalent Relationship ◽  
Written Word ◽  
Chinese Travelers ◽  
Central Thailand

AbstractThis article argues that Buddhist attitudes towards the written word in major Theravāda regions of Southeast Asia were strongly influenced by Mahāyāna Buddhism. Writing is not mentioned in the Pāli canon of the Theravāda Buddhists, and no emphasis was put on the idea of worshipping books in authoritative Theravāda literature, save a few words in an eleventh-century sub-commentarial text. The early generations of Theravāda Buddhists, not surprisingly, had an ambivalent relationship to writing and there is little evidence to suggest that they revered it. On the other hand, from the earliest times, seminal Mahāyāna texts have reserved their highest praise for the Dharma-bearing written word, and archeological and iconographic evidence as well as accounts of Chinese travelers suggest that stūpas were indeed made to enshrine texts and that books were the subject of votive cults. From the end of the first millennium CE, however, some Theravāda communities in Southeast Asia did begin to revere the written word in a Buddhist context by constructing beautiful libraries to house the texts, making texts out of gold, enshrining them in stūpas, and even worshipping them outright. In places such as Burma, Sri Lanka and central Thailand, this change of attitude coincided with the height of Mahāyāna influence. Moreover, in the northern Thai kingdom of Lan Na, there does not appear ever to have been any significant Mahāyāna presence and consequently, the more reverential Mahāyāna attitudes towards writing do not seem to have been imbibed by the culture, even though writing was well-known and fairly widely utilized.

Latin Syria and the West, 1149–1187

1969 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 1-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. C. Smail
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The West ◽  
First Crusade ◽  
Holy Places ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject

Historians of the crusades have given most of their attention to the major crusading expeditions, especially to the first, and to the surface history of the Latin states in Syria, especially to that of the kingdom of Jerusalem. They have shown less interest in those conditions in western Europe from which all crusading activity grew. It is true that the roots of the movement prior to the First Crusade were traced by Erdmann in a magisterial study which remains the most important contribution made to the subject during the present century. But the First Crusade was not the end of the matter. European sentiment about the crusades and the Latin states continued to develop during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and beyond. Even in the twelfth century there was a body of opinion which was highly critical of crusading activity and this grew in the course of time; but the main weight of conventional opinion in the later twelfth and earlier thirteenth century came to accept the crusade, and the maintenance or recovery of Latin possession of the Holy Places, as a Christian responsibility.

A Modified Chair Geometry for Whole Body Counting

1976 ◽  
Vol 15 (05) ◽  
pp. 246-247
Author(s):  
S. C. Jain ◽  
G. C. Bhola ◽  
A. Nagaratnam ◽  
M. M. Gupta
Keyword(s):  
Marked Improvement ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Whole Body ◽  
Spatial Response ◽  
Body Counting ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Whole Body Counting ◽  
The Buddha

SummaryIn the Marinelli chair, a geometry widely used in whole body counting, the lower part of the leg is seen quite inefficiently by the detector. The present paper describes an attempt to modify the standard chair geometry to minimise this limitation. The subject sits crossed-legged in the “Buddha Posture” in the standard chair. Studies with humanoid phantoms and a volunteer sitting in the Buddha posture show that this modification brings marked improvement over the Marinelli chair both from the point of view of sensitivity and uniformity of spatial response.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document