Development of Human Relations for the Happiness in New Normal Era

Human Relations for happiness in New Normal era will lead to a smooth relationship and have a good understanding of each other. It creates satisfaction, pleasure, strengthening, solidarity in work. Human relations build trust and love. Reconcile each other contributes to the success of businesses with a common purpose in order to be effective in the administration of educational institutes as much as possible that must consist of Buddhist principles, namely the four principle of service (Sangahavatthu IV) which can benefit the person to live in society with happiness as an anchor for kindness and friendship between each other. It is a tool to promote interpersonal relationships to have respect for each other as appropriate as a tool to coordinate various organizations of society in every sector to remain and operate well. It is also promoted morality and to prevent the detrimental conduct of the people in society in accordance with the 4 principles of human relations that consisted of Sending, Speaking, Servicing and Supporting. Therefore, human relations for happiness integrating between Buddhist principle and the 4 principles of human relations are very importance for encouraging people in the society in New Normal era.

Buddhist Integration of Forest and Farm in Northern Thailand

Usually seen as incompatible, forests and farms are integrated by Buddhist environmental activists in Thailand. Monks engaged in environmental conservation see the conditions of farmers’ lives as related to how they treat the forests surrounding their farms. If farmers seek their livelihood through cash-cropping and contract farming, they see the forest as a material resource in terms of land for future farms. This attitude contributes to the rapid deforestation occurring across northern Thailand’s mountainous region and a cycle of environmental degradation and economic struggle. Buddhist monks work with non-governmental organizations and sometimes state agents to encourage farmers to shift to integrated agriculture, growing a mix of food crops and raising animals mimicking ecological relations. The monks teach that the forest is part of this eco-system, as it supplies water and other natural resources and must be protected. This paper examines the work of Phrakhru Somkit Jaranathammo, a monk in Nan Province, Thailand, who promotes dhammic agriculture and engages a new interpretation of Right Livelihood, a basic Buddhist principle, to support and protect the well-being of both the forest and farmers.

Consciousness and Causal Emergence

In challenging the physicalist conception of consciousness advanced by Cārvāka materialists such as Bṛhaspati, the Buddhist philosopher Śāntarakṣita addresses a series of key issues about the nature of causality and the basis of cognition. This chapter considers whether causal accounts of generation for material bodies are adequate in explaining how conscious awareness comes to have the structural features and phenomenal properties that it does. Arguments against reductive physicalism, it is claimed, can benefit from an understanding of the structure of phenomenal consciousness that does not eschew causal-explanatory reasoning. Against causal models that rely on the concept of potentiality, the Buddhist principle of “dependent arising” underscores a dynamic conception of efficient causality, which allows for elements defined primarily in terms of their capacity for sentience and agency to be causally efficacious.

‘I’ without ‘I am’: On the Presence of Subjectivity in Early Buddhism, in the Light of Transcendental Phenomenology

Investigating the P?li suttas, compiled prior to the development of Abhidhamma, from a phenomenological perspective reveals an internally coherent and consistent doctrine/theory whose crucial theme is the intentionality and subjectivity of consciousness. Reductive interpretations tend to interpret the basic Buddhist principle of ‘non-self ’, and its correlative repudiation of the concept/conceit ‘I am’, as entailing a rejection of any genuine (phenomenological) meaningfulness for the term ‘I’ as a legitimate expression of subjectivity, intentionality, and consciousness. Indeed, it is occasionally even claimed that Buddhas and Arahants cannot possess subjective intentional consciousness at all. In the following reflections, then, a few key aspects of an alternative (phenomenological) perspective upon early P?li Buddhism are introduced and sketched out, whereby it is argued that the presence of subjective intentional consciousness, even in the case of Buddhas and Arahants, is not only presupposed by the suttas, and is not only quite unproblematic for early Buddhist doctrine/theory, but is also actually of fundamental importance for the very possibility of Buddhist truth and practice. Thus, early Buddhist doctrine/theory is not only non-reductive; it also eminently invites a deep dialogue with, and a serious and detailed interpretation from the perspective of, Transcendental Phenomenology.

Ekstratekstuele relasies van 'spieël' in die poësie van Breyten Breytenbach

Extra-textual relations in the poetry of Breyten Breytenbach are regarded as having the same importance as intra-textual relations. Focusing on extra-textual relations, references to “mirror” show non-literary extra-textual relations to the “mirror mind” of Buddhism. This relation is constituted by literary extra-textual relations between four analysed poems. All other references to “mirror” in the oeuvre are listed for comparison in this framework. The Buddhist principle of unity underlying this poetry becomes a textual strategy. The reader is guided towards a reading process in which no single poem is to be considered as a bearer of the full meaning. Interrelated with all other poems in the oeuvre, each single poem is only an aspect, a flowing image, in the “mirror mind” of this poetry.