Cultural Remnants of the Indigenous Peoples in the Buddhist Scriptures

Indo-iranian Journal, 2001

International Review of Social Research , 2019

This special issue of the International Review of Social Research addressed scholars from a wide range of disciplines connected to Buddhist academic research and Buddhism. The articles we selected cover an extended spectrum of research topics, including Buddhist history and histories, Buddhism in India and Asia, Buddhism and archaeology, Buddhist rituals and practices, Buddhism cultural origins and cultural transformations, Buddhism, identity and social change, Buddhist heritage, Buddhist sites and tourism. We welcomed articles on classical textual analysis, Buddhist doctrine, archaeology, as well as analyzing contemporary Buddhist communities. The volume’s guest editors are interested in enhancing the advances and research results in the field of Buddhist studies and Buddhism, worldwide. Acknowledging the interdisciplinary and international nature, inherent to the contemporary Buddhist studies, we intended to facilitate the exchanges of ideas between different disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, social and cultural anthropology, ethnology, history, archeology, art history, religious studies, literary, textual and philological studies etc. We considered also the observations of José Ignacio Cabezón, for an emphasis on cultural contextualization (see Nash et. al., 1966), as well as on cross-cultural analysis or feminist studies (see also Gross, 1993, Klein, 1995), or to a critique of colonialism, neocolonialism (Cabezón, 1995: 264).

This article reconsiders sites, practices, and ideas about the physical remains of the special dead in South Asian religions. Questioning the common notion of “relics” as a point of distinction between “Buddhism” and “Hinduism,” it explores the constellation of ideas and practices surrounding the remains of gods, demons, people, and animals in South Asian religions. Archaeological and literary evidence for liṅgas, stūpas, and related sites and structures are used to explore shared discourses and practices among Buddhists and Śaivas in particular. Through such test-cases, it shows how bones and other physical remains of the special dead could become areas of engagement, especially when linked to sacred landscape. Attention to these contact zones reveals sharing, borrowing, and competition among ancient and medieval groups that modern scholarship has studied primarily in terms of assumed differences between “Hinduism” and “Buddhism.”

Research India Press, New Delhi, 2022

Religions, 2025

This article is written as part of the ongoing multidisciplinary inquiry into how ecologically focused Buddhism is and whether or not the faith-based "Buddhist ecology" and the natural scientifically conceived discipline of ecology-which studies the relation of organisms to their physical environments-communicate well and are mutually complementary with each other. It addresses these questions by linking regionally specific Buddhist traditions with modern Buddhism and Buddhist studies in the West, which are, respectively, known for initiating Buddhist environmentalism in the public sphere and shaping Buddhist ecology as an academic field. Situated in the eastern Himalayan-Tibetan highlands, this article offers a twofold argument. First, many ecological practices in Buddhist societies of Asia originate in pre-Buddhist indigenous ecological knowledges, not in the Buddhist canon. Second, understood either from the Buddhist environmentalist perspective or as an academic field, Buddhist ecology originates in the modern West, not in Asia, as a combined outcome of Western Buddhists' participation in the greater environmental movement and their creative interpretation of Buddhist canonical texts for the purpose of establishing a relational understanding of ecobiologically conceived lifeworlds. This argument is based on the case studies of long se, or spirit hills, in Dai villages in Xishuangbanna, Yunnan, and of lha-ri, or deity mountains, in the Tibetan Plateau. Both long se and lha-ri are often discerned as a spiritual-environmental basis of Buddhist ecology. While Dai and Tibetan societies are predominantly Buddhist, the cultural customs of long se and lha-ri are pre-Buddhist. Through the comparable cases of human-spirit-land relations among the Dai and the Tibetans, this article concludes that, conceived in the West, Buddhist ecology entails a body of syncretized approaches to the relational entanglements of all life communities. These approaches find their origins mostly in the ecologically repositioned Buddhist soteriology and ethics as well as in the modern scientific environmentalist worldview.

International Journal For Multidisciplinary Research

culture, it not only means language, literature, dance, music etc, the social practices, beliefs, value system, fundamental rights and traditions also come under culture. India has its own ancient culture with a fusion between Hinduism, Buddhism, Muslims and tribal people and somehow it helps to shape India's national identity. India is very rich for its culture, that is beyond doubt. But if we try to understand the roots of this richness and the reason behind its upliftment then we can easily understand how Buddhism, the earliest religion of India, influenced Indian culture from various aspects. Even all the layers of Indian culture is nothing but the struggle of Shramanic and Brahmanic trends. Today's India can't be imagined without Buddhism and it can't be separated from Buddhism. This paper is going to highlight the impacts of Buddhism In Indian culture from several aspects and to find the reason behind the importance of studying Buddhism and Buddhist philosophy ...

Religion and Society, 2017

Buddhist Studies Review, Vol. 41, no. 1–2, pp. 269–274, 2024

This recently launched anthology, skillfully curated by Andrea Acri (École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris) with the support of Peter Sharrock (SOAS-University of London), is presented in two distinct volumes, each available for individual purchase. The collection comprises a general introduction and nine essays in each volume, contributed by different authors. The majority of these chapters originated as conference or workshop papers in 2016 and 2017, examining multidisciplinary aspects of religious art in medieval maritime Asia, exploring diverse trends and influences from South, East, and Southeast Asia. The editors' thematic approach and the selection of contributions are noteworthy, contributing to a comprehensive and informative reading experience. The organizational structure of the two volumes is well-executed, encompassing both regional and chronological perspectives. While some chapters may present certain challenges (discussed below), the majority are relatively readable and accessible to both experts in the field and a broader non-specialist audience. A significant portion of the contributions, specifically four in the first volume (Chapters 2 to 5) and six in the second volume (Chapters 2 to 7), directly engages with the field of Buddhist Studies. It is essential to note, however, that the remaining collected work (Vol 1, Chapters 6-10; Vol. 2, Chapters 8-10) focuses on Hindu (mostly Śaiva) material originating from the Khmer, Cham, and Javanese worlds, which falls outside the scope of this book review. The majority of the Buddhist essays revolve around the realm of what is termed "esoteric" or "tantric Buddhism." However, the key question is whether these terms share an exact equivalence, and do they hold uniform applicability across the diverse landscape of Buddhist Asia? Unfortunately, the general introduction neglects to furnish explicit definitions for these pivotal terms and expressions. Consequently, one is compelled to infer that the editors, and potentially the various authors, consider them more or less synonymous, a presumption that can prove problematic on occasion. A noteworthy perspective, articulated by the late Yury Khokhlov (Vol. 1, p. 66, n. 4), and possibly influenced by Geoffrey Goble's thesis on Tang China, 1 posits

Asian Studies Review, 2016

Eagle Leap Publishers, 2024

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Studies in Phikosophy, 2019

103 This paper proposes an indigenous religion paradigm as an alternative to world religion paradigm in examining varieties of religious practices of Indonesian indigenous peoples. Those varieties of religious practices have been dominantly described based on world religion paradigm. As a result, instead of being accounted as "religious", those practices have been labelled as "animistic", the ethnocentric theory of Tylor. Building on scholarship of indigenous religions, this paper will show that the world religion paradigm has misrepresented phenomena of indigenous religious practices, and argue that indigenous religion paradigm is more helpful and just to be employed. Indigenous religion paradigm is based on a cosmological concept that the cosmos is occuppied by different "persons" of human and non-human beings. Personhood is not identical to human beings, but perceived as extending beyond them. It is a capacity that may belong to the so-called "nature" (an essential category in a hierarchical cosmology along with "culture" and "supernatural"). This indigenous religion paradigm is used to specifically examine religious practices through which three groups of Indonesian indigenous peoples are engaged in environmental preservations and protections. The first is the Ammatoans of Sulawesi who have succeeded in preserving and protecting their customary forest from deforestation, the second is the Kend-hengs of Central Java who have been resisting a national cement company for their customary mountain and karst ecosystem, and the third is the Mollos of East Nusa Tenggara, eastern part of Indonesia, who succeeded protecting their costumary land by expelling marble mining companies. For those indigenous peoples, those costumary forest, mountain and land are "persons", whom they interrelate religiously for mutual benefits. They all engage in "inter-personal" relationship with those "natural" beings.

Edited Volume

In this seminar we shall read and discuss a selection of recent important works on Buddhism (in English). Topics covered will include Buddhism and science, material culture, death, relics, art and architecture of Buddhist sites. In addition we shall survey trends in recent Buddhist Studies scholarship produced in other languages (Chinese, Japanese, French, German, etc.). Students will be required to write regular, short (1–2 page), critical responses to the readings in addition to a longer essay that reflects on the state of the field of Buddhist Studies.