Buddhism and Motherhood

Buddhism ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vanessa R. Sasson

Motherhood is a relational concept by its very nature. Biologically, it is tied to the children a woman produces. It is tied to concepts like fertility, pregnancy, abortion, and loss. But motherhood is more than a biological fact. The way motherhood is imagined and interpreted affects women’s direct experiences socially, politically, and medically. When motherhood is limited to a biological fact, it can limit women’s lives. But as this entry will hopefully make clear, motherhood is more than that. It is also a paradigm, a metaphor, even a religious practice. Among the themes highlighted here, we will consider specific mothers first—the Buddha’s two mothers (Māyā and Mahāpajāpatī [Skt. Mahāprajāpatī]), along with other famous mothers in Buddhist narrative (such as the mother of the Buddha’s son). We will consider one of the most important doctrines related to motherhood—namely, that one must love all beings the way a mother loves her only son—and the paradox such a teaching embodies. Pollution is an important challenge presented by motherhood (with the famous Blood Pond Hell that all mothers are destined for), along with filial piety (so that sons might save their mothers instead). Buddhist literature often shatters the concept of motherhood with tales like that of Kisā Gotamī, who only achieves awakening after losing her son, and yet motherhood is also sometimes carried over into discussions of renunciation, as monastics might embody motherhood (or parenthood) despite shaved heads. Some of the themes discussed here appear in other entries of this bibliographic collection, because when we study one piece of a tradition, we inevitably find ourselves studying all of it.

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 171-183
Author(s):  
Brandon James O'Neil
Keyword(s):  

Author(s):  
Justine Buck Quijada

The epilogue re-caps the arguments presented in the previous chapters, and revisits Bakhtin’s idea of the chronotope as an analytic terminology for an anthropology of history. The epilogue argues that a comparative approach to indigenous revitalization projects in post-Soviet secular Buryatia reveals the contingent and creative nature of human conceptions of time and space, and the productive capacity of ritual. The chronotopes indexed in rituals exist as negotiated, contingent, performative evocations of pasts that continuously produce Buryats as subjects in the present. The epilogue also reminds readers that all the previous chapters are linked by the way in which contemporary Buryats emphasize materiality as proof for belief, and argues that this is a secular conception that undergirds contemporary Siberian religious practices. The materiality of ritual appears to participants to exceed its explanations, grounding revived post-Soviet religious practice in a secular discourse of evidentiary proof.


Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 224 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaesang Jung

Confucian rituals have constituted the foundation of religious practice in the traditional societies of East Asia. Paying attention to the Confucian ritual, this article explores the way Confucianism constructs its symbolic system based on people’s natural feelings, particularly in the case of three-year mourning. It intends to show how the two feelings of “affection for the family” (chinchin/qinqin, 親親) and “respect for the honorable” (chonjon/zunzun, 尊尊) are ritualized in Confucian rites, and to illuminate the religious and social dimensions of Confucianism in premodern Korea by analyzing a seventeenth-century controversy over royal mourning from the perspective of these two principles.


Traditio ◽  
1983 ◽  
Vol 39 ◽  
pp. 135-162 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edwin D. Craun

Forbidden language, like forbidden knowledge, has always had its attractions. Of its many varieties, the inordinata locutio of blasphemy, speech which violates fundamental norms in the way it represents God, has held no small appeal for people in times of widespread religious practice. The late Middle Ages offers no exception to these two commonplaces of modern thought, judging from the number of civil statutes designed to extirpate blasphemy and from the stringent measures drawn up by influential clerics like Jean Gerson. This animus against blasphemy among the lettered, both lay and clerical, means that few blasphemous utterances, few of the words judged as blasphemous by someone other than the speaker, have come down to us. Preachers and compilers of catechetical handbooks, like theologians and glossators, are as silent about the actual words of blasphemers as they are eloquent about their temerity. Even the collectors of exempla, whose tales provide so much information about religious life, rarely record so much as a blasphemous phrase in their repertoire of tales about blasphemers. Perhaps these late medieval writers shared the reticence of the author of the Book of Job, who, according to the Priest (ps.- Jerome), wrote benedixerit for maledixerit, inverting the literal sense ‘quod non fuit ausus scriptor historiae ore suo in Deum dicere verbum blasphemiae.’


2020 ◽  
Vol 2019 (4) ◽  
pp. 119-149
Author(s):  
Sun Xiangcheng

AbstractOn the level of existential structure, “Shengsheng Buxi” unfolds an existential structure different from Heidegger’s “being-in-the-world”. This paper calls it “being-between-the-generations”. Through this existential structure, it reveals many aspects which Heidegger ignored in his existential analysis. The existence of “I” between generations is, first of all, a conjunction of generations, “this body” has its own origin. Its original facing the Other is to love his/her parents, and showing the structure of “being-together-with-the-generations” in filial piety; family implements the existence of “inheritance”, thus gaining its ontological status in this structure. The state of mood in generations shows the “Enjoyment-at-home” of this-body; at the same time, being-between-the-generations also makes “learning” and “teaching” indispensable and essential moments in the existential structure, and makes the “Project” of “trans-generations” possible. The “historicity” formed by “generations” has an impact on this. Ultimately, in the memorial ceremony of “death of parents and ancestors”, it builds the structure of “being-together-with-the-generations” within a family, and maintains the dimension of transcendence, in the way of filial piety, whose nature is revealed in The Analects as “Tribute to the death of parents and keeping memory of ancestors” (慎終追遠).


2002 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-169 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daphne Spain

From the Chicago human ecologists to the Los Angeles postmodernists, urban theorists have tried to understand how space is structured by technological, political, economic, and cultural forces; gender is seldom examined. Yet both women’s status and urban form underwent significant changes following World War II. As the home became less predictably the center of women’s lives, the monocentric city was evolving into the polycentric metropolis. This article suggests that gender relations also have spatial implications for the metropolis, and that urban theory would be more comprehensive if it incorporated historically parallel developments in the literature on gender and space.


Author(s):  
Bella Stanislavovna Khotko

This article examines the phenomenon of preservation of the traditional cult practices of Abkhazians in the current context. The key tasks of this research include studying ritualism in terms of the traditional beliefs (religion) of Abkhazians, creation of the “scenario” of ritual practice, and assessment of the relevance and role of this phenomenon in life of the modern Abkhazian ethnos. The conclusion that the cult practice manifests as a form of Abkhazians’ identity, a so-called cultural core, and allows the ethnos to preserve itself in the conditions of globalization and multiple destructive modern trends that  destructive for the ethnos.  The main results of the conducted research consists in the statement that the modern Abkhazian society marks dominance of the traditional values and beliefs (religion), against the background of which are implemented Christian or Islamic practices. Traditional religion is perpetuated, holistic, regulated by the institution of priests and the true faith of the entire Abkhazian ethnos. Reliability of the research is substantiated with the author's expedition materials, acquired as a result of expedition work in 2013-2017.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Hugh Eldred-Grigg

<p>The origin of the phrase ‘let them eat cake’ is obscure. Conversely, it is widely understood that the woman whose name is most associated with the phrase, Marie Antoinette, the last pre-revolutionary Queen of France, never said it. But despite its lack of veracity the phrase demonstrates neatly the degree of disdain and anger directed at the Queen to the point where hatred becomes a useful term. This hatred was not unique to Marie Antoinette. While there is no phrase to highlight her role in the public eye, Alexandra Fedorovna, the last Czarina of Russia, was the focus of parallel disdain. Despite the timescale their situations are strikingly similar. The French and Russian revolutions form the backdrop for the close of these two women’s lives. Political historians de-emphasise the role of individual actors in shaping events, but the events of individual lives – or more precisely, the way in which those events are interpreted in the public sphere – can provide an insight into the impersonal events that constitute noteworthy targets of analysis. This study identifies a common dynamic that explains the reason why Marie Antoinette and Alexandra Fedorovna were both the target of such intense hatred during the revolutions that overthrew the systems they were part of and contributed collectively and individually to the shaping of the modern world.</p>


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Hugh Eldred-Grigg

<p>The origin of the phrase ‘let them eat cake’ is obscure. Conversely, it is widely understood that the woman whose name is most associated with the phrase, Marie Antoinette, the last pre-revolutionary Queen of France, never said it. But despite its lack of veracity the phrase demonstrates neatly the degree of disdain and anger directed at the Queen to the point where hatred becomes a useful term. This hatred was not unique to Marie Antoinette. While there is no phrase to highlight her role in the public eye, Alexandra Fedorovna, the last Czarina of Russia, was the focus of parallel disdain. Despite the timescale their situations are strikingly similar. The French and Russian revolutions form the backdrop for the close of these two women’s lives. Political historians de-emphasise the role of individual actors in shaping events, but the events of individual lives – or more precisely, the way in which those events are interpreted in the public sphere – can provide an insight into the impersonal events that constitute noteworthy targets of analysis. This study identifies a common dynamic that explains the reason why Marie Antoinette and Alexandra Fedorovna were both the target of such intense hatred during the revolutions that overthrew the systems they were part of and contributed collectively and individually to the shaping of the modern world.</p>


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (9) ◽  
pp. 230
Author(s):  
Austin Waffo Kouhoué ◽  
Yoann Bonavero ◽  
Thomas Bouétou Bouétou ◽  
Marianne Huchard

Digital technologies are an opportunity to overcome disabilities, provided that accessibility is ensured. In this paper, we focus on visual accessibility and the way it is supported in Operating Systems (OS). The significant variability in this support has practical consequences, e.g., the difficulty to recommend or select an OS, or migrate from one OS to another. This suggests building a variability model for OS that would classify them and would serve as a reference. We propose a methodology to build such a variability model with the help of the Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) framework. In addition, as visual accessibility can be divided into several concerns (e.g., zoom, or contrast), we leverage an extension of FCA, namely Relational Concept Analysis. We also build an ontology to dispose of a standardized description of visual accessibility options. We apply our proposal to the analysis of the variability of a few representative operating systems.


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