Boran Kammatthan (Ancient Theravada) Meditation Transmissions in Siam from late Ayutthaya to Rattanakosin periods

2021 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-252
Author(s):  
Phibul Choompolpaisal

This article investigates three distinct lineages of the transmission of the ancient Theravada meditation, boran kammatthan (Thai, Khmer; Pali, purana kammatthana), in Siam from the late Ayutthaya to the Thonburi and Rattanakosin periods, as well as the survival of two of them as living practices. It traces the Ayutthaya lineage of the Supreme Patriarch Suk Kaitheun (1733–1822) back from Wat Ratchasittharam (Thonburi) in the present to Wat Pa Kaew (Ayutthaya) in the sixteenth century. It also looks at the transmission of boran kammatthan from Wat Choengtha and other temples in Ayutthaya via Wat Hongrattanaram (Thonburi) to Wat Intharam (Thonburi) by King Taksin (r.1767–1782) and the Supreme Patriarchs of Thonburi under his support in the eighteenth century. It finally looks at the continuing transmission at Wat Pradusongtham (Ayutthaya) from the 1750s to the present. Key meditation teachers, covered in this article, include the Supreme Patriarchs of Thonburi and early Bangkok periods, as well as King Taksin. Overall, by documenting more than one transmission from a historical point of view, I argue in this article that there could be various meditation lineages that transmitted diverse practices within the broad framework of boran kammatthan.

1956 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 195-209
Author(s):  
George L. Mosse

The purpose of this paper is to examine several aspects of the relationship between Christianity and the rise of the new rationalistic spirit of the eighteenth century. It is in this connection that we intend to examine the thought of the French Huguenot preacher Jacques Saurin (1677–1730). Historians have held that the two leading ideas of that century, Nature and Reason, derive their meaning from the natural sciences. Such a point of view tends to ignore the greater realism towards nature and politics which developed within the Christian theological framework itself. From the sixteenth century on, we find orthodox theologians emphasizing the need for dealing with the world on its own terms. It was not so much the new sciences but rather the conflicts of the Reformation which brought out this increasingly rational attitude on the part of both Protestant and Catholic theologians. This development went on side by side with that secularized idea of reason which is of specific scientific inspiration. The means which theologians used to make room for a greater realism in their Christian framework of thought was casuistic divinity.


Author(s):  
Daniel R. Melamed

If there is a fundamental musical subject of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Mass in B Minor, a compositional problem the work explores, it is the tension between two styles cultivated in church music of Bach’s time. One style was modern and drew on up-to-date music such as the instrumental concerto and the opera aria. The other was old-fashioned and fundamentally vocal, borrowing and adapting the style of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, his sixteenth-century contemporaries, and his seventeenth-century imitators. The movements that make up Bach’s Mass can be read as exploring the entire spectrum of possibilities offered by these two styles (the modern and the antique), ranging from movements purely in one or the other to a dazzling variety of ways of combining the two. The work illustrates a fundamental opposition in early-eighteenth-century sacred music that Bach confronts and explores in the Mass.


Author(s):  
Samuel K. Cohn, Jr.

This chapter investigates changes in mentalities after the Black Death, comparing practices never before analysed in this context—funerary and labour laws and processions to calm God’s anger. While processions were rare or conflictual as in Catania and Messina in 1348, these rituals during later plagues bound communities together in the face of disaster. The chapter then turns to another trend yet to be noticed by historians. Among the multitude of saints and blessed ones canonized from 1348 to the eighteenth century, the Church was deeply reluctant to honour, even name, any of the thousands who sacrificed their lives to succour plague victims, physically or spiritually, especially in 1348: the Church recognized no Black Death martyrs. By the sixteenth century, however, city-wide processions and other communal rituals bound communities together with charity for the poor, works of art, and charitable displays of thanksgiving to long-dead holy men and women.


2021 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 261-289
Author(s):  
Andreas Friedolin Lingg

Abstract Recent research emphasizes that empiricist approaches already emerged long before the seventeenth and eighteenth century. While many of these contributions focus on specific professions, it is the aim of this article to supplement this discourse by describing certain social spaces that fostered empiricist attitudes. A particularly interesting example in this respect is the mining region of the Erzgebirge (Saxony) in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. The following article will use this mining district as a kind of historical laboratory, as a space not only for scientific observation but also as a structure within which specific forms of knowledge were socially tested, to show how the economic transformation of this region supported the rise of characteristic elements of empiricist thinking. It is common practice to link the appraisal of useful knowledge, (personal) experience and the distrust towards (scholastic) authorities in those days with only small minorities. By addressing not only the struggles of the commercial elites but also the challenges faced by the average resident of a mining town, this paper tries to add to this view by demonstrating how entire masses of people inhabiting the late medieval Erzgebirge were affected by and schooled to think in empiricist ways.


2009 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-235
Author(s):  
STEFAN HALIKOWSKI-SMITH

AbstractOne of the most influential European printed sources on South-East Asia at the turn of the eighteenth century was the Scottish sea-captain Alexander Hamilton's memoirs. The picture he paints of the Portuguese communities that had existed since the period of Portuguese ascendancy in the sixteenth century is overwhelmingly negative. But a close textual and empirical analysis of his text shows that not only was he frequently misinformed in terms of the historical developments relating to that community, but that he merely conforms to a set of standard rhetorical tropes we can associate with the Black Legend, which had grown up in Protestant countries of northern Europe since the 16th century to denigrate Portugal and her achievements. This article urges that this key text consequently be used with far greater circumspection than has hitherto been the case.


2001 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 239-267 ◽  
Author(s):  
PHILIP WITHINGTON

This review reconsiders the place and importance of urban political culture in England between c. 1550 and c. 1750. Relating recent work on urban political culture to trends in political, social, and cultural historiography, it argues that England's towns and boroughs underwent two ‘renaissances’ over the course of the period: a ‘civic renaissance’ and the better-known ‘urban renaissance’. The former was fashioned in the sixteenth century; however, its legacy continued to inform political thought and practice over 150 years later. Similarly, although the latter is generally associated with ‘the long eighteenth century’, its attributes can be traced to at least the Elizabethan era. While central to broader transitions in post-Reformation political culture, these ‘renaissances’ were crucial in restructuring the social relations and social identity of townsmen and women. They also constituted an important but generally neglected dynamic of England's seventeenth-century ‘troubles’.


2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 196-206
Author(s):  
Sushil Chaudhry

Commercial relations between India and Iran have existed since antiquity, but they particularly flourished from the latter part of the sixteenth century to the earlier part of the eighteenth century. Partly, this could be due to greater degree of security on the land routes established under the two contiguous empires, the Mughal and the Safavid. Partly also, it owed much to the changing pattern of Eurasian commerce: Iran obtained increasing amount of silver from Europe in return for its silk, and with this augmented supply of silver, Iran could buy more Indian goods, especially textiles. Much too was owed to the enterprise of merchants, the Armenians of New Julfa and the large members of Indian merchants (Multanis and Gujaratis) who, practically settled in Iran, engaged in both commerce and usury.1


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Lori Beth Leigh

<p>The adaptations of Shakespeare‘s plays that were written and staged during the English Restoration and eighteenth century form an important part of the performance history of Shakespeare; yet they have never been employed in research on the female characters in the original plays. This thesis analyzes four late Shakespeare plays and their adaptations: The Two Noble Kinsmen (with Fletcher) and Davenant's The Rivals; The Tempest and Davenant and Dryden's The Enchanted Island; The Winter's Tale and Garrick's Florizel and Perdita; and the lost Cardenio (also with Fletcher) and Theobald's Double Falsehood. Investigating the dramaturgy of the female characters from a theatrical point-of-view that includes both a close-reading and imagining of the text with a "directorial eye" and practical staging work, this study examines not only language but the construction and representation of character through emotional and physical states of being, gestures and movement, sound (music and the sound of speech), props, costumes, spectacle, stage directions, use of space and architecture, and the audience. The adaptations have been used as a lens to encounter afresh the female characters in the original plays. Through this approach, I have discovered evidence to challenge some traditional interpretations of Shakespeare's female characters and have also offered new readings of the characters. In addition, I have demonstrated the danger of accepting the widely held critical view that the introduction of actresses on the Restoration stage prompted adaptors to sexualize the female roles in a demeaning, trivial, and meretricious manner. In fact, female roles in the Restoration had some power to subvert gender boundaries just as they did in the Renaissance when played by boy actors. This work explores the treatment of themes and motifs that recur around the staging of women in the early modern period such as madness, cross-gender disguise and cross-gender casting, rape and sexual violence, and the use of silence by female characters. Each chapter draws individual conclusions about the female characters in the plays, often drawing parallels between two central women in particular play. Overall, the thesis demonstrates the complexity and multiplicity of the ways the women in Shakespeare's plays express their agency and desire.</p>


2013 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 89-101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ferdy Hubers ◽  
Helen de Hoop

Dutch prescriptive grammar rules dictate that the complementizer dan ‘than’ should be used in comparative constructions of inequality. This has been an issue for grammarians from the sixteenth century onwards when als ‘as’ started to be used as an alternative form in this type of context. In order to find out why and when people choose one comparative marker over the other, we examined the use of these markers in the Spoken Dutch Corpus (CGN). We found that the use of dan is overall more common than als in comparative constructions of inequality, even though from a linguistic point of view als might be favoured. The choice between als and dan turns out to be strongly correlated with the level of education. Although this factor has been assumed to be of influence for a long time, as far as we know it has never been quantitatively tested before. We conclude that the effect of the level of education we found reflects the strong influence of the prescriptive rule taught in schools, repressing the use of als in comparatives of inequality.


1942 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-122 ◽  
Author(s):  
James G. Mann

The two gauntlets which were exhibited to the Society by kind permission of the Archdeacon of Richmond, on 26th November 1941, form part of the funeral achievement of Sir Edward Blackett (died 1718), hanging above his monument in the north transept of Ripon Cathedral. The achievement consists of a close-helmet of the sixteenth century with a wooden funeral crest of a falcon (for Blackett); a tabard; a cruciform sword in its scabbard, of the heraldic pattern of the early eighteenth century; and two iron gauntlets. The wooden escutcheon and pair of spurs which must once have completed the group are now missing.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document