Tiantai Buddhist Elaborations on the Hidden and Visible

2020 ◽  
Vol 74 (4) ◽  
pp. 883-910
Author(s):  
Hans-Rudolf Kantor
Keyword(s):  
Crucial Feature ◽  
Buddhist Doctrine ◽  
Linguistic Strategy ◽  
The Mind

Abstract A crucial feature of Tiantai (天台) Buddhist thought certainly is its elaboration on the hidden and visible, called “root and traces” (ben ji 本跡), as the concept of non-duality (bu er 不二) of these opposites is part of what constitutes the highest level of Buddhist doctrine in Tiantai doxography, called “round/ perfect teaching” (yuanjiao 圓教). Such elaboration is inextricably bound up with paradoxical discourse, which functions as a linguistic strategy in Tiantai practice of liberating the mind from its self-induced deceptions. Observation of paradoxes in the elaboration on the hidden and visible could be called practice qua doctrinal exegesis, because Tiantai masters try to integrate self-referential observation in mind-contemplation (guanxin 觀心) with interpretation of sūtra and śāstra. For Tiantai Buddhists, the ultimate meaning of the Buddhadharma (fofa 佛法) itself is independent from speech and script and only accessible to the liberated mind, yet it cannot fully be comprehended and displayed apart from the transmission of the canonical word. To observe the paradox in non-duality of the hidden and visible is what triggers practice qua doctrinal exegesis and entails liberation (jietuo 解脫) according to the “round/ perfect teaching.” The article traces the formation of paradoxical discourse in Chinese Madhyamaka, particularly referencing the Tiantai elaboration on the hidden and visible and its diverse sources of inspiration, which includes both Chinese indigenous traditions of thought (Daoism and Xuanxue) and translated sūtra and śāstra literature from India.

Natural Education in Wollstonecraft’s Wrongs of Woman and Rousseau’s Emile

2019 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 43-57
Author(s):  
Catherine Engh
Keyword(s):  
Religious Belief ◽  
The Self ◽  
Social Structures ◽  
Crucial Feature ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Aesthetic Sensibility ◽  
Vital Forces

Abstract This essay places Wollstonecraft’s late novel Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman (1798) in conversation with Rousseau’s thought on natural education in Emile (1762). In both texts, aesthetic sensibility is a foundation of religious belief and a crucial feature of a program of natural education that aims at freedom. Education falters, however, as Rousseau’s student and Wollstonecraft’s heroine are consigned to exile by a prejudiced society. Though Rousseau and Wollstonecraft make strong claims for the moral and liberating possibilities of aesthetic sensibility, they differ in their interpretation of exile. Wollstonecraft rewrites Rousseau’s portrait of the self-sufficient exile to highlight her outcast heroine’s estrangement from the vital forces that animate life and the mind. Natural education fails in Wrongs of Woman because the cultivation of sensibility remains separate from the work of reforming the social structures that discredit women’s reason.

Awakening of faith in Mahāyāna

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter N. Gregory
Keyword(s):  
Significant Contribution ◽  
East Asian ◽  
The Awakening ◽  
Buddhist Doctrine ◽  
Philosophical Texts ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Ultimate Ground

The Awakening of Faith in Mahāyāna (Dasheng qixinlun) is one of the most influential philosophical texts in East Asian Buddhism. It is most important for developing the Indian Buddhist doctrine of an inherent potentiality for Buddhahood (tathāgatagarbha) into a monistic ontology based on the mind as the ultimate ground of all experience. Its most significant contribution to East Asian Buddhist thought is its formulation of the idea of original enlightenment (benjue, or in Japanese, hongaku).

scholarly journals “One’s Own Body of Pure Channels and Elements”: The Teaching and Practice of Tibetan Yoga at Namdroling

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (6) ◽  
pp. 404
Author(s):  
Naomi Worth
Keyword(s):  
South India ◽  
The Body ◽  
Yoga Practice ◽  
Tibetan Buddhist ◽  
Religious Doctrine ◽  
Buddhist Doctrine ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Buddha ◽  
The Relationship

The Tibetan yoga practice known as “winds, channels, and inner heat” (rtsa rlung gtum mo) is physically challenging, and yet is intentionally designed to transform the mind. This chapter explores the relationship between Buddhist doctrine and this physical practice aimed at enlightenment through the teachings of a contemporary yoga master at Namdroling Tibetan Buddhist Monastery and Nunnery in Bylakuppe, Karnataka, South India. This ethnographic profile exemplifies the role of a modern Tibetan lama who teaches a postural yoga practice and interprets the text and techniques for practitioners. While many modern postural yoga systems are divorced from religious doctrine, Tibetan Buddhist yoga is not. This essay highlights three key areas of Buddhist doctrine support the practice of Sky Dharma (gNam chos) yoga at Namdroling: (1) The history and legacy that accompany the practice, which identify the deity of Tibetan yoga as a wrathful form of Avalokiteśvara, the Buddha of compassion; (2) The role of deity yoga in the practice of Tibetan yoga, where the practitioner arises as the deity during yoga practice, an all-consuming inner contemplation; and (3) The framing of Tibetan yoga within the wider philosophy of karma theory and its relationship to Buddhist cosmology. Practitioners of Tibetan yoga endeavor to burn up karmic seeds that fuel the cycle of rebirth in the six realms of saṃsāra. In Tibetan yoga, the body acts in service of the text, the philosophy, and the mind to increasingly link the logic of texts to experience in meaningful ways.

scholarly journals Psychotechnical Theory as a Format of Psychological Knowledge

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-78
Author(s):  
E.Yu. Patyaeva
Keyword(s):  
Psychological Research ◽  
Psychological Practice ◽  
Research And Practice ◽  
Conceptual Space ◽  
Crucial Feature ◽  
General Logic ◽  
Methodological Tool ◽  
Per Se ◽  
Psychological Knowledge ◽  
The Mind

The paper deals with the methodological characteristics of psychotechnical theory, a specific format of psychological knowledge developed by F.Ye.Vasilyuk. The author describes the general logic of overcoming the ‘schism’ in psychology through the discovery of the methodological importance of psychological practice. It is also shown that the philosophy of practice is implemented through the psychotechnical approach, its crucial feature being the investigation not of the mind per se, but of the experience of working with the mind. The format of psychological knowledge appropriate for the psychotechnical approach is the psychotechnical theory. Eight methodological characteristics of the psychotechnical theory suggested by F.Vasilyuk create a certain conceptual space fitted not only for psychotechnical theories, but also for classical ‘academic’ theories as well as various mixed ones. The article concludes that the psychotechnical theory presents a more general and universal format of psychological knowledge in comparison with the classical theories, and this means an opportunity to create a unified methodological tool for describing and analyzing psychological research and practice — and thus for overcoming the schism in psychology.

scholarly journals Doxographical Appropriation of Nāgārjuna’s Catuṣkoṭi in Chinese Sanlun and Tiantai Thought

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (11) ◽  
pp. 912
Author(s):  
Hans Rudolf Kantor
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Analysis ◽  
Buddhist Doctrine ◽  
Heuristic Device ◽  
The Mind

This article reconstructs the Chinese “practice qua exegesis” which evolved out of the doxographical appropriation of the Indian Buddhist catuṣkoṭi (four edges), a heuristic device for conceptual analysis and a method of assorting linguistic forms to which adherents of Madhyamaka ascribed ambiguous potential. It could conceptually clarify Buddhist doctrine, but also produce deceptive speech. According to the Chinese interpreters, conceptual and linguistic forms continue to be deceptive until the mind realizes that all it holds on or distinguishes itself from is its own fabrication. Liberation from such self-induced deceptions requires awareness of the paradox that the desire to leave them behind is itself a way of clinging to them. Chinese Sanlun and Tiantai masters tried to uncover this paradox and to disclose to practitioners how the application of the catuṣkoṭi, on the basis of such awareness, enables proper conceptual analysis in exegesis. From this approach followed the Chinese habit of construing doxographies in which hermeneutical and soteriological intent coincide. Understanding the inner unity of doctrinal manifoldness in the translated sūtra and śāstra literature from India via exegesis also made it possible to apprehend the ineffable sense of liberation.

scholarly journals Emotion Recognition from Realistic Dynamic Emotional Expressions Cohere with Established Emotion Recognition Tests: A Proof-of-Concept Validation of the Emotional Accuracy Test

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 25
Author(s):  
Jacob Israelashvili ◽  
Lisanne S. Pauw ◽  
Disa A. Sauter ◽  
Agneta H. Fischer
Keyword(s):  
Individual Differences ◽  
Emotion Recognition ◽  
Emotional Expressions ◽  
Proof Of Concept ◽  
Accuracy Test ◽  
Crucial Feature ◽  
Recognition Ability ◽  
Emotion Recognition Ability ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Concept Validation

Individual differences in understanding other people’s emotions have typically been studied with recognition tests using prototypical emotional expressions. These tests have been criticized for the use of posed, prototypical displays, raising the question of whether such tests tell us anything about the ability to understand spontaneous, non-prototypical emotional expressions. Here, we employ the Emotional Accuracy Test (EAT), which uses natural emotional expressions and defines the recognition as the match between the emotion ratings of a target and a perceiver. In two preregistered studies (Ntotal = 231), we compared the performance on the EAT with two well-established tests of emotion recognition ability: the Geneva Emotion Recognition Test (GERT) and the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET). We found significant overlap (r > 0.20) between individuals’ performance in recognizing spontaneous emotions in naturalistic settings (EAT) and posed (or enacted) non-verbal measures of emotion recognition (GERT, RMET), even when controlling for individual differences in verbal IQ. On average, however, participants reported enjoying the EAT more than the other tasks. Thus, the current research provides a proof-of-concept validation of the EAT as a useful measure for testing the understanding of others’ emotions, a crucial feature of emotional intelligence. Further, our findings indicate that emotion recognition tests using prototypical expressions are valid proxies for measuring the understanding of others’ emotions in more realistic everyday contexts.

How Homo economicus lost her mind and how we can revive her

2018 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter DeScioli
Keyword(s):  
Economic Thought ◽  
History Of Economic Thought ◽  
Homo Economicus ◽  
Economic Theories ◽  
Target Article ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Mind ◽  
And Behavior

AbstractThe target article by Boyer & Petersen (B&P) contributes a vital message: that people have folk economic theories that shape their thoughts and behavior in the marketplace. This message is all the more important because, in the history of economic thought, Homo economicus was increasingly stripped of mental capacities. Intuitive theories can help restore the mind of Homo economicus.

Metaphors in the Mind

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeannette Littlemore
Keyword(s):  
The Mind
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