In the early twentieth century, Uchiyama Gudō, Seno’o Girō, Lin Qiuwu, and others advocated a Buddhism that was radical in two respects. Firstly, they adopted a more or less naturalist stance with respect to Buddhist doctrine and related matters, rejecting karma or other supernatural beliefs. And secondly, they held political and economic vie…[Read more]

The economic system is the cornerstone of social development. Its economic system has remained at the root of the progressive development of human civilization. A country, society or caste; Social, political and cultural upliftment is mainly based on the progress of its economic resources and facilities. In a country without these facilities,…[Read more]

आपल्या देशाने 27 जानेवारी 1950 रोजी लोकशाहीचा स्वीकार केला. बहुमताने लोकप्रतिनिधींना निवडून त्यांनी गठीत केलेली शासनप्रणाली हीच राजकीय लोकशाही होय. राजकीय लोकशाहीचा पाया जर सामाजिक लोकशाहीचा नसेल तर ती टिकूच शकणार नाही. गौतम बुद्धाचे तत्त्वज्ञान स्वातंत्र्य, समता, बंधुत्व व न्याय ही मूल्ये प्रदान करतात. या शिवाय संपूर्ण मानवाच्या विक…[Read more]

This paper renders the ancient folktale ‘Ama’ (Woman Diver) into English, investigates its origins, and interprets its timeless significance. From a prehistoric oral tradition, it evolved into a temple chronicle and a Noh play. The paper includes a summary in Japanese, and all the references are in Japanese. With a moving story and vivid…[Read more]

मुक्त आर्थिक धोरण आणि डॉ. आंबेडकरांचे तत्वज्ञान

डॉ. आंबेडकरांच्या आर्थिक चिंतनावर बुद्ध तत्वज्ञानाचा प्रभाव

जागतिकीकरण आणि डॉ.आंबेडकरांचे शेतीविषयक तत्वज्ञान

Bharat Ratna Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar: an eminent socio-economic thinker and epoch-maker shaped the economic destiny of India by introducing many tenets of the State Socialism into the Constitution of free India. He was a post-graduate of Columbia University (U.S.) and obtained his doctoral degree in economics from there in 1917 and D.Sc. degree in…[Read more]

Public talk for International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden University (February 24, 2021) https://youtu.be/77oz4tb8r0Y How did Hindu devotees come to worship an Indian goddess in the ‘Chinese Way?’ What was allegedly Chinese about these rituals and how is this related to the goddess’s Buddhist origins? When did Hindus start to think of Ch…[Read more]

This paper is part of a larger research project that attempts to apply historical social network
analysis to the study of Chinese Buddhist history. The underlying research questions are
whether social network analysis (SNA) metrics can be gainfully applied to Buddhist history,
and whether network visualizations can enable us to better…[Read more]

Course Description
In this seminar we shall read and discuss a selection of recent important works on and around Buddhism and material culture (in English). 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,…[Read more]

Syllabus for a level 2 course on Health, Healing and Religion: Comparative Views. To be taught online Fall 2020.
Please contact me if you want more details of the online content (there are 4 short videos per module, plus other resources)

Mount Putuo, the Chinese Potalaka, is located in the Zhoushan archipelago not far off the coast from Ningbo. The abode of Avalokiteğvara/Guanyin was not only a popular pilgrimage site, but also played a strategic role for the naval control of the archipelago, especially in the Ming and Qing dynasties. In late imperial China, a number of military…[Read more]

Below we develop a method to determine whether the use of grammatical particles in Chinese Buddhist scriptures is characteristic for the period of their translation. The corpus consists of three different Chinese translations of an early Indian Mahāyāna text from two different periods. We use the results of Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to d…[Read more]

Hidden in the Buddhist biographical literature on eminent monks is a large amount of information about who knew whom. It is especially rich for the time between 300 and 1000 CE, when the four major collections of “Biographies of Eminent Monks” (gaoseng zhuan) allow us to date and locate the relationships of individuals to a degree unimaginable for…[Read more]

In this seminar we will examine representations of health and accounts of disease in a variety of Chinese religions. We will explore the various vectors of disease, including the so-called “winds” and various types of demonic infestation. We will identify modes of
healing that employ therapies such as mineral, animal, and vegetable drugs, exo…[Read more]

The author did in situ research for an MA in Asian Religions on Japan’s greatest saint, Kūkai, in his birthplace of Zentsūji, along the Pilgrimage of Shikoku that symbolically recapitulates his career, and at Kōya-san, the mountaintop monastery south of Kyōto that Kūkai founded in the early 9th Century. Kūkai was a key figure igniting the golde…[Read more]

Contemporary engaged Buddhist scholars typically claim either that Buddhism always endorsed social activism, or that its non-endorsement of such activism represented an unwitting lack of progress. This article examines several classical South Asian Buddhist texts that explicitly reject social and political activism. These texts argue for this…[Read more]

This is a formatted version (for e-book readers or printing) of a very long blog post about secular and radical Buddhism. It discusses Stephen Batchelor’s secular Buddhism, Seno’o Giro’s radical Buddhism (as well as its roots in Mahayana philosophy; Nichiren and the Lotus Sutra in particular), and several related topics.

This published Japanese-English guidebook to the island of Shikoku, emphasizing its culture and history, has been available by permission on the Web in French, Spanish, and Dutch at European Websites, as well as this English-Japanese version since 1997. Most of the chapters are bilingual, with English and Japanese alternating for those studying…[Read more]