Gods of Leather and Lilies: ancestral spirits and community leadership culture in the Buddhist debates at Kōyasan
Since the early fifteenth century, the monastic participants in the Risseigi debates at the Kōyasan esoteric Buddhist community have been promoted to membership in the “Myōjin-kō”...
Ocean of Milk, Ocean of Blood. A Mongolian Monk in the Ruins of the Qing Empire
Columbia University Press 2019.
After the fall of the Qing empire, amid nationalist and socialist upheaval, Buddhist monks in the Mongolian frontiers of the Soviet Union and Republican China faced a chaotic and increasingly uncertain world. In this book, Matthew W. King tells the story of one Mongolian monk’s efforts to defend Buddhist monasticism in revolutionary times, revealing an unexplored landscape of countermodern...
Is our consciousness singular or plural? If the mind is not unitary, but rather consists of multiple entities, what happens to those entities at death? One Southeast Asian Buddhist tradition asserts that our minds consist of thirty-two parts. If these thirty-two citta fail to exit the corpse from a single orifice, they can easily be scattered across samsara, mixed together with the minds of other living beings. Reunification is possible through a special cry emitted by the wandering citta, but this is rare. The diverse faculties and preferences of living...
In the later Chinese Buddhist tradition one text above all others has been extolled for the profundity of its ideas, the beauty of its language, and its insight into the practice of meditation—this is the scripture popularly known as the Lengyan jing or Śūraṃ...
Since the 1980s, American Buddhist convert communities have been the site of reoccurring cases of sexual abuse and misconduct. This two-part presentation will reflect on how some contemporary practitioners have responded, in particular identifying "generative responses" that combine Buddhist and non-Buddhist frameworks to generate new forms of Buddhist thought, community...
"The Questions of Milinda: How To Use a Philosophical Classic and (perhaps) find a Literary Gem."
My goal is practical—How shall an intelligent reader make use of the remarkable though forbidding work, The Questions of Milinda (Milindapañha)? The Pāli...
"Protecting Insects in Medieval Chinese Buddhism: Daoxuan's Vinaya Commentaries"
Buddhist texts generally prohibit the killing of all sentient beings. This is certainly the case in vinaya (disciplinary) texts, which contain strict guidelines on the preservation of all human and animal life. When these vinaya texts were translated into Chinese, they formed the core of Buddhist behavioural codes, influencing both monastic and lay followers. Chinese vinaya masters, such as Daoxuan 道宣 (596–667) and Yijing...
