scholarly journals The Spread of Buddhism and Peace in Southeast Asia

Author(s):  
Rajneesh Kumar Gupta ◽  
Alok Kumar Verma

Buddhism is among the oldest religious traditions of the world. It is based on the life and teachings of Siddharta Gautama. The message of world peace is the greatest contribution of Buddhism to the human civilization. This paper aims to study the spread of Buddhism in the Southeast Asian region and its relations with the ideals of peace in contemporary period. Theoretically paper relies on the post-colonial history writing tradition. It adopts descriptive and analytical method to study the subject matter. Conclusions of the paper are drawn after scrutiny of primary and secondary literatures. A thorough study reveals that Buddhism has a glorious past in the Southeast Asia. The practice of Buddhism in the region was popular even prior to the beginning of recorded history. Different monuments provide tangible evidence, and deep-rooted essence of Buddhism in the socio-cultural practices of the region are intangible testimony to this. Paper argues that inter-religious issues in the region and especially current situation of conflict between people of different faith can be resolved by following philosophy of Buddhism in true sense.

Author(s):  
Robert Louis Stevenson

The literary world was shocked when in 1889, at the height of his career, Robert Louis Stevenson announced his intention to settle permanently on the Pacific island of Samoa. His readers were equally shocked when he began to use the subject material offered by his new environment, not to promote a romance of empire, but to produce some of the most ironic and critical treatments of imperialism in nineteenth-century fiction. In these stories, as in his work generally, Stevenson shows himself to be a virtuoso of narrative styles: his Pacific fiction includes the domestic realism of ‘The Beach at Falesé, the folktale plots of ‘The Bottle Imp’ and ‘The Isle of Voices’, and the modernist blending of naturalism and symbolism in The Ebb-Tide. But beyond their generic diversity the stories are linked by their concern with representing the multiracial society of which their author had become a member. In this collection - the first to bring together all his shorter Pacific fiction in one volume - Stevenson emerges as a witness both to the cross- cultural encounters of nineteenth-century imperialism and to the creation of the global culture which characterizes the post-colonial world.


Author(s):  
Townshend M. Hall

As the rare descent of Meteorites or Aërolites affords us the only real tangible evidence we possess respecting the mineral constituents which exist beyond the limits of our own globe, a great degree of interest must always be attached to these stray visitors ; and although much has been written on the subject at different times, it has hitherto taken the form either of a bare catalogue of the date and place of occurrence ; or of scattered notices dealing only with individual cases. My desire is to collect these various records as far as they relate to each meteoric stone which has been known, or has been said to have fallen in Great Britain, and to endeavour to give as complete an account as possible of every instance; including not only the historical facts, but also notices Of mineralogical observations and references to authorities.


Itinerario ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 27 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 263-284 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Laura Stoler

This essay takes as its subject how intimate domains - sex, sentiment, domestic arrangement and child rearing - figure in the making of racial categories and in the management of imperial rule. For some two decades my work on Indonesia's Dutch colonial history has addressed patterns of governance that were particular to that time and place but resonant with practices in a wider global field. My perspective thus is that of an outsider to, but an acquisitive consumer of comparative historical studies, one long struck with the disparate and congruent imperial projects in Asia, Africa and the Americas. This essay invites reflection on those domains of overlap and difference. My interest is more specifically in what Albert Hurtado refers to as ‘the intimate frontiers’ of empire, a social and cultural space where racial classifications were defined and defied, where relations between coloniser and colonised could powerfully confound or confirm the strictures of governance and the categories of rule. Some two decades ago, Sylvia van Kirk urged a focus on such ‘tender ties’ as a way to explore the ‘human dimension’ of the colonial encounter.’ As she showed so well, what Michel Foucault has called these ‘dense transfer point[s]’ of power that generate such ties were sites of production of colonial inequities and, therefore, of tense ties as well. Among students of colonialisms in the last decade, the intimacies of empire have been a rich and well-articulated research domain. A more sustained focus on the relationship between what Foucault refers to as ‘the regimes of truth’ of imperial systems (the ways of knowing and establishing truth claims about race and difference on which macro polities rely) and those micro sites of governance may reveal how these colonial empires compare and converge.


1998 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 337-355 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. J. Stockwell

It is a commonplace that European rule contributed both to the consolidation of the nation-states of Southeast Asia and to the aggravation of disputes within them. Since their independence, Burma, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Vietnam have all faced the upheavals of secessionism or irredentism or communalism. Governments have responded to threats of fragmentation by appeals to national ideologies like Sukarno's pancasila (five principles) or Ne Win's ‘Burmese way to socialism’. In attempting to realise unity in diversity, they have paraded a common experience of the struggle for independence from colonial rule as well as a shared commitment to post-colonial modernisation. They have also ruthlessly repressed internal opposition or blamed their problems upon the foreign forces of neocolonialism, world communism, western materialism, and other threats to Asian values. Yet, because its effects were uneven and inconsistent while the reactions to it were varied and frequently equivocal, the part played by colonialism in shaping the affiliations and identities of Southeast Asian peoples was by no means clear-cut.


Author(s):  
Eve-Marie Becker

This chapter studies the interrelation of history-writing and literary culture. It considers the function of history-writing within the context of Hellenistic literary culture, as historiography at the time can be seen as a literary phenomenon. History-writing represents a substantial contribution to ancient literature; it circulates within the sphere of the ancient literary canon. Chronologically speaking, Mark and Luke follow in the literary tradition set by the earliest in Western history-writing, yet literary tradition among the earliest Christian authors also differs from the Greco-Roman world. Where historiographical topics and concepts vary significantly from one author to the next, in Mark and Luke, the subject of the narrative, namely, the gospel, remains surprisingly constant.


2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (8) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohamad Reza Mohamed Afla

This article focuses on the subject of burial practices which are performed by the Muslim population and the management at public cemeteries within the metropolitan areas of Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta. This research examines specifically, the conventional way of burial practice by the majority of the Muslim population. Unlike other major religions in Southeast Asia which are more open and flexible in the disposal of corpses, full body burial is mandatory in Islam. In response to the escalating issue of lack of space and land shortage for Muslim cemetery, local authorities of the two metropolitan areas have identified alternatives and solutions in handling these alarming situations. This research has recognised factors that lead to these problems, as well as discussing available methods to overcome these issues. The finding exhibits Muslim cemetery’s layout to be problematic due to abundance of burial practices accumulated by patrons which led to disorganisation of space and claustrophobia. This article concludes by providing proposals and design guidelines at the terrain level, together with recommendations that emphasise the long-term usage of the grave plots.


1970 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-71
Author(s):  
Hanoch Ben-Pazi

The subject of tradition engaged both Emmanuel Lévinas and Jacques Derrida in many of their writings, which explore both the philosophical and cultural significance of tradition and the particular significance of the latter in a specifically Jewish context. Lévinas devoted a few of his Talmudic essays to the subject, and Derrida addressed the issue from the perspective of different philosophical and religious traditions. This article uses the writings of these two thinkers to propose a new way of thinking about the idea of tradition. At the core of its inquiry lie the paradigm of the letter and the use of this metaphor as a means of describing the concept of tradition. Using the phenomenon of the letter as a vantage point for considering tradition raises important points of discussion, due to both the letter’s nature as a text that is sent and the manifest and hidden elements it contains. The focus of this essay is the phenomenon of textual tradition, which encompasses different traditions of reading and interpreting texts and a grasp of the horizon of understanding opened up in relation to the text through its many different interpretations. The attention paid here to the actions of individuals serves to highlight the importance of the interpersonal realm and of ethical thought.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adib Rifqi Setiawan

Islamic Education in Southeast Asia reflects the diversity of Islam in that part of the world and of course plays a central role in shaping and transmitting the region’s religious traditions. this work concludes that Southeast Asia has an extraordinarily large and well-developed structure of Islamic education that can be a resource of critical importance in the ongoing war of ideas within Islam.


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