Professor David Gellner, a Trustee of the Centre has recently published a piece on the “Politics of Buddhism in Nepal”.
In order to read it please click here.
Professor David Gellner, a Trustee of the Centre has recently published a piece on the “Politics of Buddhism in Nepal”.
In order to read it please click here.
The authors are grateful to Professor Tam Wai Lun and the Chinese University of Hong Kong for a grant which helped to pay for the expenses of this research.
Dr Justin Meiland has kindly agreed for us to hold his Dphil. thesis on our website. It was written in 2003 and given through Linacre College, Oxford. Copyright Justin Meiland, 2003.
By Professor Richard Gombrich
First given as the 8th Annual BASR Lecture in 1997 and issued as a BASR Occasional Paper, re-published as Chapter 8, pp. 123-148, in S. Sutcliffe (editor) 2004 Religion: Empirical Studies: A Collection to Mark the 50th Anniversary of the British Association for the Study of Religions. Aldershot: Ashgate
A talk originally given by Richard Gombrich for the Institute of Oriental Philosophy, revised for a lecture for the OCBS.
By Yu-Shuang Yao and Richard Gombrich, October 2014.
by Richard Gombrich
Regarding the recent article in Antiquity concerning the dates of the Buddha’s life.
This is a copy of a talk given by video at the 8th Global Conference on Buddhism in Singapore by Richard Gombrich.
Richard Gombrich’s keynote address for the International Conference on Dissemination of Theravada Buddhism in the 21st Century held in Salaya, Bangkok, Sep/Oct 2010.
Mark G. Williams
The author reviews the articles in the Special Section on Mindfulness, starting from the assumption that emotions evolved as signaling systems that need to be sensitive to environmental contingencies. Failure to switch off emotion is due to the activation of mental representations of present, past, and future that are created independently of external contingencies. Mindfulness training can be seen as one way to teach people to discriminate such “simulations” from objects and contingencies as they actually are. The articles in this Special Section show how even brief laboratory training can have effects on processing affective stimuli; that long-term meditation practitioners show distinct reactions to pain; that longer meditation training is associated with differences in brain structure; that 8 weeks’ mindfulness practice brings about changes in the way emotion is processed showing that participants can learn to uncouple the sensory, directly experienced self from the “narrative” self; that mindfulness training can affect working memory capacity, and enhance the ability of participants to talk about past crises in a way that enables them to remain specific and yet not be overwhelmed. The implications of these findings for understanding emotion and for further research is discussed.
J. Mark G. Williams
The author introduces the special section on mindfulness: four articles that between them explore the correlates of mindfulness in both crosssectional and treatment studies. Results from these studies, taken together, suggest a close association between higher levels of mindfulness, either as a trait or as cultivated during treatment, and lower levels of rumination, avoidance, perfectionism and maladaptive self-guides. These four characteristics can be seen as different aspects of the same ‘mode of mind’, which prioritizes the resolution of discrepancies between ideas of current and desired states using a test-operate-test-exit sequence. Mindfulness training allows people to recognize when this mode of mind is operating, to disengage from it if they choose, and to enter an alternative mode of mind characterized by prioritizing intentional and direct perception of moment-by-moment experience, in which thoughts are seen as mental events, and judgemental striving for goals is seen, accepted and ‘let go’.
Mark Williams
Eisel Mazard
When Cambodia gained its independence from France, a concerted effort was made to replace French loan-words with ancient-sounding neologisms: new Cambodian words were coined through the combination of Pali parts.1 This reflects a tradition that can be traced back through several centuries of adapting the unfamiliar syllables of Pali and Sanskrit into more indigenous-sounding forms; it also reflects a unique era of optimism when European colonialism seemed to have come to its end—an optimism that proved to be painfully brief. In the past century, the ancient, dead language of Pali has had a rather lively role in mainland Southeast Asia: it has not only been used to expunge French words from Cambodian, but also to expunge Thai words from Lao, and Lao words from Thai. While Pali is an equally foreign language to all of the countries and cultures concerned, it has retained its status as a touchstone of cultural authenticity for all. This paper reflects on the basis of that sociolinguistic perception in more tangible relations of authority.
Joanna Jurewicz
In this paper I would like to join the discussion about transmigration in Vedic times. It is generally assumed that the ideas of transmigration were introduced by the kṣatriyas, as attested in the Upaniṣads (Bṛhadāraṇyaka,Chāndogya, Kauṣītaki) . The BU and CU present the ‘knowledge of five fires’ (pañcāgnividyā) together with the division into the pitṛyāna and devayāna, paths taken by the dead according to their past deeds. The model of five fires is used to explain how the world works also in the Jaiminīya Brāhmaṇa (JB 1.45-46, 49-50). This Brāhmaṇatoo presents two possible ways the dead can take, depending on their knowledge.
Click here to download full document.
Noa Ronkin (Gal)
The Buddha’s teaching, as it is recorded in the first basket of the Pali Canon, the Sutta-piṭaka, is presented as the path leading to the solution of the fundamental problem of human existence, namely, dukkha, customarily translated as ‘suffering’. The Buddha’s message contains doctrinal concepts and theoretical statements on the nature of suffering, its cause and the way to its cessation, but these are merely guidelines for making sense of Buddhist thought and do not amount to a systematic theory.
Noa Ronkin (Gal) (more…)
by Dr. Sarah Shaw
In this paper I would like to look at a travel story of a different kind. It describes a physical journey, but begins a collection of stories about travel in a larger sense: the journey of one individual, and his followers, across many lifetimes and rebirths as different kinds of animal, human and god.
This is the title of Professor Richard Gombrich’s Gonda Lecture given in 1997 in the Netherlands. Reference:
Gombrich, R., Kindness and Compassion as Means to Nirvana. (1997 Gonda Lecture), Amsterdam: Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1998.
A talk given by Prof Richard Gombrich for the OCBS on 28 April 2014.
Prof Gombrich has supplied this talk as a pdf.
You can read it by clicking here.