Interpreting the Signs

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacqueline I. Stone
Keyword(s):  
Religious Communities ◽  
Pure Land ◽  
Social Fact ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The Buddha

Auspicious signs attesting to particular individuals’ ōjō gave assurance to the bereaved that their dead had indeed achieved the Pure Land. They legitimated the practices of specific religious communities and were also linked to the forming of favorable karmic connections (kechien)—to teachings, persons, places, or objects—deemed able to assist one’s own efforts to achieve ōjō. Signs showed which practitioners, living or dead, were worthy of reverence as objects of kechien. Corporeal signs, such as remarkable preservation of the corpse, helped people to negotiate otherwise incommensurable understandings of death as both defiling and as the moment of encounter with the Buddha. Identifying auspicious signs, often through revelatory dreams, also allowed those concerned to cope with deaths that would otherwise have seemed senseless or tragic by recasting them as instances of ōjō. Since signs could be recognized only by the living, ōjō as a social fact was determined by survivors.

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.

The Imprisoned Queen

2021 ◽  
Vol 71 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-36
Author(s):  
Anne N. Feng
Keyword(s):  
Tang Dynasty ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Land Art ◽  
Central Component ◽  
Chinese Art ◽  
Pure Land ◽  
Spatial Imagery ◽  
Mountain Ranges ◽  
The Tang Dynasty ◽  
The Buddha

Abstract This paper reconsiders how and why the representation of landscape became an increasingly central component of Pure Land art in the Tang dynasty. Focusing on the seventh-century Cave 209, I examine the first set of mountain panels at Dunhuang, arguing that those polychrome landscapes represent Vulture Peak, the sacred abode of Śākyamuni Buddha. Cave 209 shows how Lady Vaidehī—the protagonist of the Meditation Sutra—emerges as the first female viewer of landscape in Chinese art. Departing from the Meditation Sutra, painters at Dunhuang resituate Lady Vaidehī, the formerly imprisoned royal consort and model Pure Land adept, within mountain ranges where she converses with the Buddha. I argue that Lady Vaidehī's encounter with the Buddha is mapped onto the space of a Dunhuang cave to enable the viewer to assume her position when facing the icon of Śākyamuni surrounded by Vulture Peak. By grappling with Vaidehī's imprisonment, painters use landscape to develop a new spatial imagery of salvation. I maintain that the striking innovations in landscape representation at Dunhuang—achievements that have been seen to anticipate later Tang “blue and green” landscapes—are in actuality based on an effort to visualize Buddhist soteriology in the early seventh century.

scholarly journals Zionism, Colonialism, and Post-colonial Migrations: Moroccan Jews’ Memories of Displacement

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 338-351
Author(s):  
Yolande Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Religious Communities ◽  
Cultural Education ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
The People ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Complex Relationships ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Push And Pull ◽  
Intense Debate

The emigration of Jews from Morocco to Israel, in particular, is the subject of intense debate among historians, signaling the difficulty of telling a unified story of this moment. I want to contribute to this debate by showing that the combining and often opposing forces of Colonialism and Zionism were the main factors that triggered these migrations, in a period of rising Moroccan nationalism. But those forces were also seen as opportunities by some migrants to seize the moment to better their fate and realize their dreams. If we cannot assess every migrant story, I want here to suggest through my family’s experience and memory and other collected oral histories, how we could intertwine those memories to a larger narrative to shed more light on this history. The push and pull forces that led to Moroccan Jewry’s migrations and post-colonial circulations between the 1940s and 1960s were the result of a reordering of the complex relationships between the different ethnic and religious communities well before the migration took place. The departures of the people interviewed for this study are inscribed in both the collective and family dynamics, but were organized in secret, away from the gaze of the others, particularly that of non-Jewish neighbors. Their belonging to a sector of the colonial world, while still prevalent in their narratives, is blurred by another aspect of post-colonial life in Morocco, that is the cultural/education nexus. Depending on where one has been educated and socialized, the combined effects of Colonialism and Zionism strongly impacted the time of their departures and the places they went to.

CORPUS OF KORAPUT MUNDA LANGUAGES: GOALS AND SPECIAL ASPECTS

2020 ◽  
pp. 295-301
Author(s):  
Anastasiya S. Krylova ◽  
◽  
Evgeniya A. Renkovskaya ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Language Education ◽  
The State ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Specific Information ◽  
Text Format ◽  
Video Recordings ◽  
Written Texts ◽  
Official Languages ◽  
Printed Materials ◽  
The Moment

The paper deals with the first digital corpus of texts in the Koraput Munda languages (Sora, Gutob, Bonda), which became available online in Spring 2020. Koraput Munda are spoken in India on the border between states of Odisha and Andhra Pradesh and they all are more or less endangered. Texts in these languages were collected during four expeditions to the state of Odisha in 2016–2018. Koraput Munda speakers live in communities, which differ in religions, traditional occupations, dialects and are influenced by various official languages depending on the state. For example, Sora speakers belong to more than six religious communities and use four types of writing. Therefore, one of the main tasks of the corpus is to present texts of various genres and different social conditions of language usage. At the moment, the corpus includes oral and written texts, poetry and prose, religious, folklore and traditional everyday content. Oral texts are presented both in phonological transcription and in audio and video recordings. The sub-corpus of written texts presented in various scripts contains both texts related to a particular handwritten genre, as well as samples of printed materials. The texts are provided with morphological markup and translation into Russian and English. Each text is accompanied by detailed sociolinguistic and genre-specific information. One of the most special features of the corpus is the system of tags including text format, speaker’s gender, script, genre, topic, religion etc. This project is intended not only to make linguistic materials of the Koraput Munda languages accessible for the global linguistic and anthropological studies, but also to be useful for teaching and preserving cultural heritage, in particular within the framework of the Multi-Language Education government program.

Catholicism as a Protestantism

1976 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 365-370
Author(s):  
John A. Miles
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Intentional Community ◽  
The Moment ◽  
American Catholic ◽  
American Catholic Church ◽  
The Catholic Church

“Among the ways in which the American Catholic church has protestantized itself in recent years, the most important has been its transformation into an intentional community. For Catholics now, as earlier for Protestants, religion is a matter of opinion, not of birth; and one may change religion as easily and frequently as one changes one's mind. However—and this is the key point—intentional, Protestant religious communities have long had ways of recognizing and removing those who do not share the grounding intention of the community, whatever it may be. The Catholic Church, for the moment anyway, does not.”

The Order of the Holy Cross (Crutched Friars) In England

1913 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 191-208
Author(s):  
Egerton Beck
Keyword(s):  
Religious Communities ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
Tower Of London ◽  
The Moment

One of the religious communities dissolved in the reign of Henry VIII was described in its deed of surrender as ‘prior et conventus domus fratrum ordinis sanctae Crucis juxta Turrim Lond. vulgariter nuncupatae The Crossed Fryers’ —the house of the brethren of the Holy Cross, popularly called the ‘crossed friars’; a house whose memory is kept alive by the street near the Tower of London known as ‘Crutched Friars.’ The object of this paper is to give some account of the order to which it belonged, and to attempt to determine the number of its establishments in this country. It will be shown that its members were canons regular, and, assuming this for the moment, something must be said in regard to their designation as the crossed, crouched, or crutched friars.

scholarly journals The “Proto-Mandala” of Daschly-3: How to Embody the Idea of the World Lord in Architectural Form

2021 ◽  
pp. 190
Author(s):  
Burchard Brentjes
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
Size Structure ◽  
Protective Function ◽  
Architectural Form ◽  
Common Basis ◽  
Eurasian Steppe ◽  
The World ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The Buddha ◽  
Made In

Buchard Brentjes describes a unique find of the Soviet-Afghan team of archaeologists during their expedition to Northern Afghanistan — an impressive in size structure which resembled a mandala in shape. It is surprising that the discovered structure was almost three thousand years older than the Tibetan mandalas known at the time. Brentjes notes that structures with similar unusual architecture were also found in southern Uzbekistan — the settlement of ancient farmers of the 2nd–1st millennium BC, namely Sappalitepa. Brentjes focuses his paper to the question what the purpose of such exceptional structures of the Bronze Age in Central Asia was. For this purpose, the author examines the original meaning of mandalas in Tibetan religious life and confirms that the mandalas built in Tibet of sand were created exclusively for cults and not for a protective function. Mandalas were used once and destroyed after performing rituals dedicated to the Lama and the Buddha. Therefore, mandalas cannot be found in archaeological excavations. Drawing on the writings of Tucci [1972], Olschak, and Wangyal [1972], Brentjes concludes that the Lamaist mandala is a mythical representation of the world with its ruler, i.e., Lama at the moment of “coronation”. The transition of the ruler in the centre who must protect the moving world from decaying forces. And the square is an image of the world to be protected. Brentjes describes in the article similar forms of structures and objects in different countries: ancient China, Iran, on the Hindustan peninsula, depicting, according to the author, a mystical picture of the world. The author concludes that it does not make a breakthrough difference to speculate about the common basis of mandalas, square or round cities as symbols of the world, palaces, and mausoleums with a square layout and domed halls. But the discovery of the “mandalas” of Sappalitepa and Daschly-3, as well as the round-square city, allows us to make assumptions the structures were made in the later Bactrian period of the 2nd millennium BC and continued to exist in the Eurasian steppe and India, as well as in China.

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