Ambedkar and the Buddha's Sangha: A Ground for Buddhist Ethics

The saṅgha is one of the three jewels of the Buddhist tradition. While undervalued in many other Anglophone iterations of Buddhist modernism, Ambedkar’s approach to Buddhism placed a reconceptualized saṅgha at the center. Where traditional accounts often limit the boundaries of saṅgha to ordained monks and nuns, Ambedkar sought to include all lay Buddhists within its frame. He suggests that the role of the saṅgha is not, as many traditional accounts might suggest, the personal liberation of the monks and nuns who join it, but instead social service directed toward the community at large. Ambedkar’s commitment to the development of a religion that champions egalitarianism naturally lead to his inclusion of women as full participants in his image of the saṅgha, despite the historically patriarchal limits placed on them in many traditional Buddhist settings. This wide-tent approach to the saṅgha, along with its emphasis on service and egalitarian principles, are defining features of Ambedkar’s unique approach the Buddhist tradition.

BUDDHIST FIVE PRECEPTS: NECESSITY AND BENEFITS

Five Precepts are the minimal ethical code binding on the Buddhist laity, they are administered regularly by the monks to the lay disciples at almost every service and ceremony, following immediately upon the giving of the three refuges. They are also undertaken afresh each day by earnest lay. Buddhists as part of their daily recitation. The precepts function as the core of the training in moral discipline. They are intended to produce, through methodical practice, that inner purity of will and motivation, which comes to expression as virtuous bodily and verbal conduct. Hence the equivalent term for precept, sikkhāpada, which means literally “factor of training "that is, a factor of the training in moral discipline.

Ventilation and the SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus Analysis of outbreaks in a restaurant and on a bus in China,and at a Call Center in South Korea

In a previous paper [10] a model of the distribution of respiratory droplets and aerosols by Lagrangian turbulent air-flow was developed. It is used to show how the SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus can be spread by the breathing of single infected person. The model shows that the concentration of viruses in the cloud, exhaled by one person, can increase to infectious levels within a certain amount of time, in a confined space where the air re-circulates. In [10] the model was used to analyze the air-flow and SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus build-up in a restaurant in Guangzhou, China [19,18]. In this paper, we add the analysis of two more cases, an outbreak among lay-Buddhists, on a bus [26], traveling to a ceremony in Zhejiang province, China, and an outbreak in a Call Center in Seoul, Korea [20]. The analysis and comparison of these three cases, leads to the conclusion that the SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus attacks in two steps: The first step is a linear spread between individuals with a couple of days delay. The second step is an exponential spread effected by the air-conditioning system affecting a much larger number of people. Thus in the second step, the ventilation becomes the super-spreader.

1. Buddhist morality

This chapter summarizes the main moral teachings, precepts, and virtues common to the major schools of Buddhism. While these schools often exhibit divergent practices and customs, it seems legitimate to speak of them sharing a common moral core grounded in the teachings of the Buddha originating in the 5th century bce and then handed down largely unaltered through the centuries. A central part of this common core are the Five Precepts observed by lay Buddhists everywhere. The monastic community has its own set of rules and regulations in the Vinaya. Buddhist moral beliefs are underpinned by the cosmic principle of Dharma, of which the law of karma is an aspect. Like science, karma is objective, but unlike science it is not value-free. Karma is concerned with voluntary actions and the good and bad consequences flowing from moral choices.

From Temples to Teahouses

This article presents an overview of the nature of lay Buddhist revival in post-Mao China. After defining the category of lay practitioner, it outlines key events in the revival of lay Buddhism following the end of the Cultural Revolution. Following this, it describes three main aspects of the revival: the grassroots-organized formation of communities of lay Buddhists that gather at temples either to share and discuss the moral teachings of Buddhist-themed media or to engage in devotional activities; devotional and pedagogical activities organized for lay practitioners by monastic and lay leaders at temples and lay practitioners’ groves; and, more recently, the emergence of private spaces for specific practices such as meditation, the appreciation of Buddhist art and culture, and the discussion of teachings from specific Buddhist masters. The article concludes that while government-authorized temples continue to be active spaces for lay practitioners interested in Dharma instruction from monastics, regular devotional activities, and opportunities to earn merit and gain self-fulfillment through volunteerism, greater state restrictions on spontaneous lay-organized practices in temple space are increasingly leading lay practitioners to organize activities in private or semi-private spaces. The introduction of social media has facilitated the growth of Buddhist-related practices for laypersons in nontemple spaces.

Religion, Medicine and the Notion of Charity in Early Jesuit Missionary Pursuits in Buddhist Japan

Searching for conceptual distinctions between religion and medicine is a promising avenue from which to reconstruct trajectories towards the appropriation of hegemonic Western concepts of secularism in Japan, such as the Meiji-period separation of religious and medical practice. Buddhism and medicine had already established a complex relationship for centuries when the Jesuits arrived in Japan. Mahāyāna Buddhist tenets, such as the practice of medicine as a “field of merit” (fukuden 福田), served lay Buddhists as well as monastics as a means to increase social capital through charitable projects. The article seeks to explore whether the Jesuits’ distinction between religion and medicine, and by extension the notion of charity, had any significant impact on Japanese religious and medical culture. In making a distinction between religion and medicine, the Jesuits drew a particular boundary in a way that could be interpreted as a precursor of secularity. The analysis of late medieval and early modern sources in European languages and in Japanese supports the conclusion that the form of secularity emerging in the Edo period resulted from an increase in the popularization of Neo-Confucian concepts and not the influx of the Catholic notion of caritas in the Iberian phase.

Religious Traditions in Politics: Buddhism

Buddhists constitute a majority of the population in peninsular Southeast Asia, but the largest concentration of Buddhists lives in East Asia. The delay between the times the Buddha gave his teachings and they were transcribed in written form and the adoption of the latter through centuries in countries with vastly different cultures hampered the development of a unified Buddhist political thought. Two major trends within Buddhism aspire to influence contemporary politics: “Buddhism for the human realm,” a reform movement originating in Republican China, and “engaged Buddhism,” which is a contemporary international network of activists rather than a systematic body of thought. The three major schools of Buddhism do not differ fundamentally on matters of doctrine, so the variety of Buddhist political orientations has more to do with the historical and national circumstances of the religion’s diffusion. Buddhism has expanded out of its country of origin, India, where it has almost disappeared but remains an important source of soft power. The Mahayana school has spread to China, where it has developed an eschatology that has inspired rebellions through history. The Theravada school has spread to Southeast Asia and has provided a source of legitimation for many rulers. The colonial era brought a key change, as lay Buddhists and monastics inspired many nationalist movements. Only six governments give a “special place” to Buddhism in their constitutions, but other countries with large Buddhist populations feel its influence on politics through the sangha. In countries of the Theravada tradition, monastics play an important role in politics, whereas in countries where the Mahayana school prevails lay associations mobilize Buddhists. Very few Buddhist political parties have emerged and only in Japan has one endured in a coalition government. In Southeast Asia, the politics of Buddhism is often associated with nationalist intransigence, in contrast to the peaceful and tolerant image of the religion’s politics promoted by many of its exiled leaders in the “engaged Buddhist” network.

The language of Chinese Buddhism

This is a more detailed introduction of the language of Chinese Buddhism based on our latest research of Buddhist Chinese, which is a modern Chinese historical linguistic category applied to a form of written Chinese originated for and used in Buddhist texts, including the translations into Chinese of Indian Buddhist scriptures and all Chinese works of Buddhism composed by Chinese monks and lay Buddhists in the past. We attempt to answer in this paper the following questions: What is Buddhist Chinese? What is the main difference between Buddhist Chinese and non-Buddhist Chinese? What role did this language play in the history of Chinese language development? And what is the value of this language for the Chinese Historical Linguistics?