Jātaka

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Naomi Appleton
Keyword(s):  
Visual Art ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
Past Life ◽  
Symbolic Value ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Buddha ◽  
Sacred Biography ◽  
Common Era ◽  
Human Birth ◽  
The Ideal

A jātaka story narrates an episode in a past life of the Buddha. Such tales are found in a variety of Buddhist texts, the largest and best known of which is the Jātakatthavaṇṇanā, a collection of almost 550 stories in the Pāli language preserved by the Theravāda school. Jātaka stories emphasize the Buddha’s great abilities as visionary and storyteller, and illustrate moral lessons, the workings of karma, or the perfections required for the attainment of buddhahood. A focus of a large number of stories is the ideal of generosity, which, for an aspiring buddha, includes being prepared to give away one’s own children, or the flesh and blood from one’s own body. In addition to their widespread presence in texts, jātaka stories have been depicted at Buddhist stūpa and temple sites since before the beginning of the Common Era, and continue to be a popular form of Buddhist visual art to this day. They also play an important role in the cultural life of some Buddhist countries, inspiring literature, theater, opera, and other art forms. Their place in the Buddha’s sacred biography gives them a special symbolic value, which is behind some uses of the stories in art and ritual. The Vessantara-jātaka, understood in Theravāda tradition as narrating the Buddha’s penultimate human birth and his acquisition of the perfection of generosity, takes on a particularly important role in artistic, ritual, and festive contexts. In addition, there is evidence to suggest that the jātaka genre as a whole had an important role in the formation and communication of ideas about buddhahood, karma and merit, and the place of the Buddha in relation to other buddhas and bodhisattvas.

Dionysus and drama in the Buddhist art of Gandhara

2009 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 219-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pia Brancaccio ◽  
Xinru Liu
Keyword(s):  
Literary Work ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Northern Pakistan ◽  
Buddhist Art ◽  
Cultural Elements ◽  
Roman World ◽  
Hellenistic World ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Buddha ◽  
Common Era

AbstractThis essay examines the relationships existing between Dionysian traditions of wine drinking and drama that reached the easternmost part of the Hellenistic world, and the Buddhist culture and art that flourished in Gandhara (Eastern Afghanistan and Northern Pakistan) under the Kushan kings between the first and third centuries CE. By piecing together archaeological, artistic and literary evidence, it appears that along with viniculture and viticulture, Dionysian rituals, Greek theatre and vernacular drama also became rooted in these eastern lands. Continuous interactions with the Graeco-Roman world strengthened these important cultural elements. At the beginning of the Common Era Dionysian traditions and drama came to be employed by the Buddhists of Gandhara to propagate their own ideas. The creation of a body of artworks representing the life of the Buddha in narrative form along with the literary work of Ashvaghosha, may be an expression of the same dramatic format that developed locally along with a strong Dionysian ritual presence.

Right Thoughts at the Last Moment

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacqueline I. Stone
Keyword(s):  
Historical Records ◽  
Pure Land ◽  
Ritual Performance ◽  
Medieval Japan ◽  
Religious Professionals ◽  
Devotional Practices ◽  
Evil Person ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The Buddha ◽  
The Ideal

Buddhists across Asia have often sought to die, as the Buddha himself is said to have done, with a clear and focused mind. This study explores the reception and development in early medieval Japan (roughly, tenth through fourteenth centuries) of the ideal of “dying with right mindfulness” (rinjū shōnen) and the discourses and practices in which it was embedded. By concentrating one’s thoughts on the Buddha at the moment of death, it was said, even the most evil person could escape the round of deluded rebirth and achieve birth in the Pure Land; conversely, even the slightest mental distraction at that juncture could send the most devout practitioner tumbling down into the evil realms. The ideal of mindful death thus generated both hope and anxiety and created a demand for ritual specialists who could help the dying to negotiate this crucial juncture. Examination of hagiographies, ritual manuals, doctrinal writings, didactic tales, diaries, and historical records uncovers the multiple, sometimes contradictory logics by which medieval Japanese approached death. Deathbed practices also illuminate broader issues in medieval Japanese religion that crossed social levels and sectarian lines, including intellectual developments, devotional practices, pollution concerns, ritual performance, and divisions of labor among religious professionals.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erika Fischer-Lichte
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Group ◽  
Family Values ◽  
Court Culture ◽  
Common Root ◽  
New Family ◽  
The Common ◽  
German Court ◽  
The Ideal

The introduction ‘Philhellenism and Theatromania’ retraces the emergence of these two phenomena in the German middle class. The year 1755 marks a watershed in this regard: it saw the publication of J. J. Winckelmann’s treatise Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks and the premiere of G. E. Lessing’s first domestic tragedy Miß Sara Sampson. Both share the common root and motivation once and for all to banish Frenchified German court culture. While Winckelmann’s treatise praised the ‘noble simplicity’ and ‘quiet greatness’ of the Greek masterpieces, Lessing’s play advocated new family values and the ideal of ‘naturalness’ as the true virtues of the middle class. The merging of Philhellenism as the cult of beauty with theatromania as the quest for identifying in a social group and as an individual provided the basic condition for staging Greek tragedies.

scholarly journals From Norms to Facts: The Realization of Rights in Common and Civil Private Law

2011 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helge Dedek
Keyword(s):  
Legal System ◽  
Deep Structure ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Social Reality ◽  
Judicial Decision Making ◽  
Legal Traditions ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
The Common ◽  
Legal Concepts ◽  
The Ideal

Every legal system that ties judicial decision making to a body of preconceived norms has to face the tension between the normative formulation of the ideal and its approximation in social reality. In the parlance of the common law, it is, more concretely, the remedy that bridges the gap between the ideal and the real, or, rather, between norms and facts. In the common law world—particularly in the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth—a lively discourse has developed around the question of how rights relate to remedies. To the civilian legal scholar—used to thinking within a framework that strictly categorizes terms like substance and procedure, subjective right, action, and execution—the concept of remedy remains a mystery. The lack of “remedy” in the vocabulary of the civil law is more than just a matter of attaching different labels to functional equivalents, it is the expression of a different way of thinking about law. Only if a legal system is capable of satisfactorily transposing the abstract discourse of the law into social reality does the legal machinery fulfill its purpose: due to the pivotal importance of this translational process, the way it is cast in legal concepts thus allows for an insight into the deep structure of a legal culture, and, convergence notwithstanding, the remaining epistemological differences between the legal traditions of the West. A mixed jurisdiction must reflect upon these differences in order to understand its own condition and to define its future course.

The Word of God in One’s Hand: Touching and Holding Pendant Koran Manuscripts

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 338-357
Author(s):  
Cornelius Berthold
Keyword(s):  
Haptic Feedback ◽  
The Body ◽  
Word Of God ◽  
Rare Occurrence ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Solid Objects ◽  
Cylindrical Form ◽  
The Common ◽  
Common Era

AbstractKoran manuscripts that fit comfortably within the palm of one’s hand are known as early as the 10th century CE.For the sake of convenience, all dates will be given in the common era (CE) without further mention, and not in the Islamic or Hijra calendar. Their minute and sometimes barely legible script is clearly not intended for comfortable reading. Instead, recent scholarship suggests that the manuscripts were designed to be worn on the body like pendants or fastened to military flag poles. This is corroborated by some preserved cases for these books which feature lugs to attach a cord or chain, but also their rare occurrence in contemporary textual sources. While pendant Korans in rectangular codex form exist, the majority were produced as codices in the shape of an octagonal prism, and others as scrolls that could be rolled up into a cylindrical form. Both resemble the shapes of similarly dated and pre-Islamic amulets or amulet cases. Building on recent scholarship, I will argue in this article that miniature or pendant Koran manuscripts were produced in similar forms and sizes because of comparable modes of usage, but not necessarily by a deliberate imitation of their amuletic ‘predecessors’. The manuscripts’ main functions did not require them to be read or even opened; some of their cases were in fact riveted shut. Accordingly, the haptic feedback they gave to their owners when they carried or touched them was not one of regular books but one of solid objects (like amulets) or even jewellery, which then reinforced this practice.

Marking Religious and Ethnic Boundaries: Cases from the Ancient Golan Heights

2000 ◽  
Vol 69 (3) ◽  
pp. 519-557 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert C. Gregg
Keyword(s):  
Rhode Island ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
Small Communities ◽  
Rural Settings ◽  
The Common ◽  
Late Roman Period ◽  
Common Era

In the aftermath of the 1967 “Six Days' War,” 254 ancient inscribed stones were found in forty-four towns and villages of the Golan Heights—241 in Greek, 12 in Hebrew or Aramaic, and 1 in Latin. These stones, along with numerous architectural fragments, served as the basis of the 1996 book by myself and Dan Urman, Jews, Pagans, and Christians in the Golan Heights—a study of settlement patterns of people of the three religions in this region in the early centuries of the common era.1 The area of the Golan heights, roughly the size of Rhode Island, was in antiquity a place of agriculture and, for the most part, small communities. Though historians of religions in the late Roman period have long been aware of the “quartering” of cities, and of the locations of particular religious groups in this or that section of urban areas, we have had little information concerning the ways in which Hellenes, Jews, and Christians took up residence in relation to each other in those rural settings featuring numerous towns and hamlets— most presumably too small to have “zones” for ethnic and religious groups. The surviving artifacts of a number of the Golan sites gave the opportunity for a case study. Part 1 of this article centers on evidence for the locations and possible interactions of members of these religious groups in the Golan from the third to the seventh centuries and entails a summary of findings in the earlier work, while part 2 takes up several lingering questions about religious identity and ways of “marking” it within Golan countryside communities. Both sections can be placed under a rubric of “boundary drawing and religion.”

Cultural and communicative formulae as a reflection of the concepts of culture as an expression of the spiritual content of civilizations

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nataliya Alekseevna Zavyalova
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Educational Institution ◽  
Cultural Codes ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
The World ◽  
Cultural Standards ◽  
Human World ◽  
The Common ◽  
Similarity And Difference ◽  
And Behavior

The analysis of civilizational pictures of the world through the prism of linguistic universals allows one to reveal the general and the particular in the «human — world» system, which contributes to a more complete understanding of their cultural semantics. Cultural standards vary across civilizations. Their description on the material of multi-structural, genetically heterogeneous languages, civilizations and cultures makes it possible to reveal the common foundations of people's social life despite the fact that their cultural codes are different, often creating the impression of a complete incompatibility of the thinking and behavior of their representatives. Therefore, studies based on the description of fundamentally dissimilar civilizations and cultures, demonstrating the groundlessness of such impressions, are relevant. The article examines cultural and communicative formulae as a reflection of the civilizational pictures of the world. Cultural and communicative formulae (CCF) are defined by the author as the simplest, stable, high-frequency units of culture used at all levels of social and cultural life, which, being a combination of signs, compactly represent the culture in its similarity and difference with other cultures and make it possible to establish a dialogue of cultures in minimum of data involved. CCF provide communication through verbal forms of language, gestures, styles, etc., i.e. through all cultural forms that can be translated into signs of a given culture and are sufficient to have a minimal idea of it. The article examines the CCF using the example of concise verbal forms belonging to folk speech, which include proverbs and sayings, «winged words», precedent phrases that are a component of the civilizational picture of the world. The materials of the article may be of interest for preparation at the higher educational institution in the framework of the fields of «Linguistics», «International relations» and «Culturology».

scholarly journals GLOBALIZATION AND GLOBAL GOVERNANCE

2013 ◽  
pp. 16-23
Author(s):  
A. A. Gromyko
Keyword(s):  
Global Governance ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Global Market ◽  
State University ◽  
The Sustainable Development ◽  
Private Interests ◽  
The Common ◽  
Academy Of Sciences ◽  
Moscow State University ◽  
The Ideal

Anatoly Andreevich Gromyko, a professor of the Moscow State University, a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences reflects in his article on the destinies of mankind and the most complex problems facing the world community at the early 21 century under globalization and increased demand in global governance. In his analysis the author concedes that after numerous pieces of research on various aspects of these two phenomena, there are still more questions than answers. He believes that globalization might become a force serving not only private interests of big corporations but also the common good of humanity. Since interdependence is the main feature of our world we should not fall prey to the ideal images of global governance because there is no one size fit all global governance. The article elaborates the three most pressing world problems:– the need in a new way of thinking about globalization. According to the author the problems of globalization must be approached with knowledge of history and acknowledgement of social justice;– the need in morally acceptable balance among unifying potential of globalization, unchained global market and the state as the last resort of its nation;– the need to make United Nations a platform, where political and social democracy should lay ground for global governance so craved for by the mankind. The author pays special attention to the dichotomy between the force of law and the law of force as well as to the prospects for the new democratic global order accommodating the sustainable development of human civilization.

scholarly journals Community building as an educational task

2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Waldemar Segiet
Keyword(s):  
Social Integration ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Community Building ◽  
The Common Good ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
Socialization Processes ◽  
Educational Task ◽  
Reflexive Modernity ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Creation

Along with the description of contemporary societies, including the indication of clear tendencies towards „individualisation” of lifespan, focusing on subjects that observe themselves with reflection, an issue appears regarding the creation of a community, including the educational one. A peculiar outline of the reflexive modernity is recognised on the basis the ways how individuals achieve social integration. Despite the differentiating forms of social and cultural life, the foundation of the accomplishment of self and the society,is still „community”, which constitutes an encouragement to enter the issue of social (dis)integration, an inspiration allowing to bestow a defined sense on democracy, and socialization processes. Therefore, the need to consider the issues of communities arises, including their confirmation in education. To present a path for social integration, with the full awareness that in modern societies the „common good” ideal is being lost, one should be accompanied by indications regarding education itself. One may reduce them to how the community constituted due to and within education, ensured the integration of all entities concerned, and helped accomplish democracy.

scholarly journals Co to znaczy być artystą/artystką?

2017 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-99
Author(s):  
Marek Krajewski ◽  
Filip Schmidt
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
Nationwide Survey ◽  
Social World ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Common ◽  
Artistic Career ◽  
Depth Interviews

Who is an artist? Questions over how to define this role divided the makers of the project The Invisible Visual: Visual Art in Poland—Its State, Role, and Significance. The authors’ sources of data were the results of a nationwide survey, a survey of graduates of the Polish Academy of Fine Arts in the years 1975–2011, and in-depth interviews with seventy individuals in the field of visual arts. The authors were able to establish, first, that persons working in the art field give different definitions from those beyond its bounds; second, that artists, decision-makers, curators, and critics try to defend the sense and autonomy of their activities against ways of thinking and acting that are typical of other areas of the social world (while they are themselves engaged in disputes over who has a right to call him- or herself an artist and what is and isn’t good art); and third, being an artist is marked by a difficult-to-cross boundary, as is shown by the common necessity of supplementing artistic work by other sources of income and the high risk of failure in an artistic career.

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