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New interpretations of the central teachings of early Buddhism, mainly the relationship between identity and perception in early Buddhism.
Presents a history of early Buddhism based solely on dateable artefacts and archaeology rather than received tradition, much of which data is provided by studying Pyrrho's history
Join a rigorous scholar and Buddhist monk on a brisk tour of rebirth from ancient doctrine to contemporary debates. German Buddhist monk and university professor Bhikkhu Analayo had not given much attention to the topic of rebirth before some friends asked him to explore the treatment of the issue in early Buddhist texts. This succinct volume presents his findings, approaching the topic from four directions. The first chapter examines the doctrine of rebirth as it is presented in the earliest Buddhist sources and the way it relates to core doctrinal principles. The second chapter reviews debates about rebirth throughout Buddhist history and up to modern times, noting the role of confirmation bias in evaluation of evidence. Chapter 3 reviews the merits of current research on rebirth, including near-death experience, past-life regression, and children who recall previous lives. The chapter concludes with an examination of xenoglossy, the ability to speak languages one has not learned previously, and chapter 4 examines the particular case of Dhammaruwan, a Sri Lankan boy who chants Pali texts that he does not appear to have learned in his present life. Rebirth in Early Buddhism and Current Research brings together the many strands of the debate on rebirth in one place, making it both comprehensive and compact. It is not a polemic but an interrogation of the evidence, and it leaves readers to come to their own conclusions.
Throughout the centuries, moral philosophers, both Eastern and Western, considered a permanent and eternal law a necessary requirement for the formulation of a moral principle. If such a law was not empirically given, it had to be determined through reason. In contrast, early Buddhism presented a radical theory of impermanence. Interpreters of early Buddhism have been unable to abandon the presupposition of permanence, however, and hence have persisted in viewing nirvana or freedom as a permanent and eternal state to be contrasted with the impermanent world of sensory experience and bondage. Ethics in Early Buddhism is David J. Kalupahana's balanced and brilliantly concise attempt to place the early Buddhist descriptions of the world of experience, the state of freedom, and the moral principle leading to such freedom within the framework of impermanence.
Sinceits founding by Jacques Waardenburg in 1971, Religion and Reason has been a leading forum for contributions on theories, theoretical issues and agendas related to the phenomenon and the study of religion. Topics include (among others) category formation, comparison, ethnophilosophy, hermeneutics, methodology, myth, phenomenology, philosophy of science, scientific atheism, structuralism, and theories of religion. From time to time the series publishes volumes that map the state of the art and the history of the discipline.
How do archaeologists explore the various dimensions of religion? Lars Fogelin uses archaeological work at Thotlakonda in Southern India as his lens in a broader examination of Buddhist monastic life. He discovers the tension between the desired isolation of the monastery and the mutual engagement with neighbors in the Early Historic Period. He also sketches how religious architectural design and use of landscape helped to shaped these relationships. Drawing on historical accounts, religious documents, and inscriptions, as well as results of his systematic archaeological survey, Fogelin is able to shed new light on the ritual and material workings of Early Buddhism in this region, and shows how archaeology can contribute to our understanding of religious practice.
This book offers a new interpretation of the relationship between 'insight practice' (satipatthana) and the attainment of the four jhànas (i.e., right samàdhi), a key problem in the study of Buddhist meditation. The author challenges the traditional Buddhist understanding of the four jhànas as states of absorption, and shows how these states are the actualization and embodiment of insight (vipassanà). It proposes that the four jhànas and what we call 'vipassanà' are integral dimensions of a single process that leads to awakening. Current literature on the phenomenology of the four jhànas and their relationship with the 'practice of insight' has mostly repeated traditional Theravàda interpretations. No one to date has offered a comprehensive analysis of the fourfold jhàna model independently from traditional interpretations. This book offers such an analysis. It presents a model which speaks in the Nikàyas' distinct voice. It demonstrates that the distinction between the 'practice of serenity' (samatha-bhàvanà) and the 'practice of insight' (vipassanà-bhàvanà) – a fundamental distinction in Buddhist meditation theory – is not applicable to early Buddhist understanding of the meditative path. It seeks to show that the common interpretation of the jhànas as 'altered states of consciousness', absorptions that do not reveal anything about the nature of phenomena, is incompatible with the teachings of the Pàli Nikàyas. By carefully analyzing the descriptions of the four jhànas in the early Buddhist texts in Pàli, their contexts, associations and meanings within the conceptual framework of early Buddhism, the relationship between this central element in the Buddhist path and 'insight meditation' becomes revealed in all its power. Early Buddhist Meditation will be of interest to scholars of Buddhist studies, Asian philosophies and religions, as well as Buddhist practitioners with a serious interest in the process of insight meditation.
A clear, elegant clarification of the basic teachings of early Buddhism, ideal for both general readers and scholars. Discover the birth of Buddhism and the essentials of Buddhist teachings with this clear, comprehensive explanation of early Buddhism’s key doctrines. You’ll come away with: insight into the beginning of Buddhism and the significance of its core beliefs—dependent arising, non-self, moral life, the diagnosis of the human condition, the critique of theoretical views, and the nature of Nibbana; a lucid understanding of the Buddha’s challenge to the concept of the subject as a self-entity and the reality of both the subject and object, perceiver and perceived, as a dynamic process; a grasp of early Buddhist teachings as representing a middle position (equally aloof from spiritual eternalism and materialist annihilation) and a middle path (equally aloof from self-mortification and sensual indulgence); and the experience of the Buddha’s teachings on attaining liberation as comprehensible, sensible, and something we can make part of our own practice.