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This chapter explores the relationships between Buddhist devotees and figurative images, particularly regarding images of Shakyamuni, which Buddhists conceive as enlivened beings possessed with agency. Building on recent studies of miraculous images and consecration practices, this chapter describes some of the ways in which devotees venerate images, the agency attributed to images, and the methods by which images are invested with their powers. Finally, the history of image veneration and enlivenment is addressed; the author asks whether these practices can be considered core features of Buddhism from its earliest days, or if they were later additions to the spectrum of reverent activities.

An article published in the Chicago Daily Tribune on September 19, 1886, offered a distinctively nineteenth-century angle on “The Buddhist Mahatma Craze” then sweeping through the ranks of the urban elite in the United States. If the Tribune article shows that religious ferment is a constant feature of American religious life, it also highlights elements of American journalism that have dramatically changed since the 1880s. What we would now consider editorializing is mostly absent from current religion coverage in our mainstream news media. Also, an unalloyed element of racism, coupled with almost uniformly uncritical support for missionary and military enterprises in Asia, once informed most of the reporting on immigrant Buddhists and Buddhism in general. This article explores how the largest daily newspapers in America's three most populous cities—the New York Times, the Chicago Daily Tribune, and the Los Angeles Times—reported on Buddhism from the 1870s to the present.

This chapter examines the power and associated practices of the recited word in Theravada Buddhist traditions. It highlights Sri Lankan Buddhist recitation practices, considering a variety of recitations and their ritually performed contexts across several historical and literary periods. It examines the rhythmic chanting of Buddhist “discourses” (suttas) as paritta (recitation for protection) as the foremost chanting practice, as well as other chanting practices such as recitations of prose Pali texts, specific verse (gāthā) texts of the Dhammapada, as well as popular recitations of Sinhala poems (kavi). Vernacular chantings used during the pilgrimage to Śrī Pāda are also examined.

As in many other religious and ethical traditions, the status of suicide in Buddhism is contested and ambiguous, from the earliest Pāli record through to twentieth-century Mahāyāna praxes, and in a sense particular to Buddhist thought, paradoxical. This chapter will focus on three main areas: (1) the canonical accounts of suicide in the Śrāvakayāna and Mahāyāna traditions; (2) their theorization in a Buddhist psychological and phenomenological understanding of suicide; and (3) the ramifications of that understanding for contemporary social and medical practice, namely in assisted suicide and autothanasia, and for recent Buddhist history, above all for evaluating the Tibetan Buddhist self-immolations evident since 2009.

This chapter examines the legal details surrounding the full ordination of women into the Buddhist monastic traditions. These legal details need be appreciated in order to understand difficulties involved in current attempts to revive an order of female monastics, bhikṣuṇīs, where it has come to be extinct. The chapter begins with the account of the foundation of the bhikṣuṇī order in the way this is found in the Dharmaguptaka, Mūlasarvāstivāda, and Theravāda Vinayas. Next it surveys the legal parameters that emerge from one of these gurudharmas, which concerns bhikṣuṇī ordination, and how according to these three Vinayas subsequent ordinations were carried out. Then it turns to the transmission of the bhikṣuṇī ordination lineage until modern times to set the frame for appreciating the present situation.

This chapter has two major goals. The first is to introduce some of the major sets of bodhisattva precepts and to discuss their significance in both India and East Asia while paying attention to some of the areas that our current state of knowledge does not allow us to understand. Besides the contents of the precepts, bodhisattva ordinations and the expiation of wrongdoing are considered. The second part of the chapter, with particular emphasis on the Tendai school of Japan, focuses on how the bodhisattva precepts led to a more nuanced understanding of Buddhist ethics by focusing on such issues as killing and compassion.

Buddhism deals directly with the emotions as a chief concern of its doctrine and practice. The Buddha's core teaching of the Four Noble Truths begins with an emotional truth, that is, that life inevitably involves sorrow, suffering, and grief. Given their foundational concern with human vulnerability to suffering, it is not surprising that Buddhist traditions developed various systems of knowledge that explore human feeling with great subtlety, and advanced certain technologies to redress the pain in our emotional experience. In the various languages used by Buddhists, however, there is no term that corresponds exactly to the generic category “emotion,” and thus emotion as such is not theorized in Buddhist thought. This article reflects on how Buddhist thinkers have shaped human experience in distinctive ways through their analysis of affective life. It first discusses the Abhidhamma texts as the most systematic rendering of early Buddhist treatments of psychology. It then considers meditation techniques and their work with mental processes and examines the nuances of friendship and the social nature of other emotions.

The article examines evidence for characteristic Buddhist positions regarding the nature and soteriological status of deities. It establishes that deities are but one of several classes of transient entities that need spiritual guidance and argues that by accepting the existence of such entities Buddhism is, according to the operating definition of the volume, a theistic tradition. It also shows that, whereas later Buddhist thinkers developed sophisticated critiques of concepts of a universal God developed within Indian Hindu tradition and are committed to a strongly atheist stance, texts representing early Buddhism tend to be epistemologically cautious rather than directly atheist. This is picture is explored through the exposition of verses from Śāntideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra and supplemented by reference to suttas and jātakas from the Pali canon. Finally, it dismisses a quasi-theistic interpretation of some aspects of Buddhist traditions.

The Buddhist tradition is justifiably known for its commitment to the primacy of ethical reflection. On the issue of nonhuman animals, the tradition-wide commitment to an undertaking to refrain from killing, known as the First Precept, offers a moving example of humans’ abilities to apply ethics to nonhuman animals on questions about animal protection for companion animals, food animals, entertainment animals, wildlife, and captive animals. Buddhist reflections on humans’ relationship to nonhuman animals, including questions of non-lethal harms, also have features that are illuminated, as is the First Precept, by a comparison with contemporary animal rights and animal protection debates.

This chapter examines the various attitudes toward female ordination and constructions of bodies in Buddhist texts, doctrine, and culture to provide an overview of the complexities of gender at play in the Buddhist tradition. It specifically explores the historical and contemporary struggles for the full ordination for nuns, themes of motherhood and the maternal in Buddhist literature, and attitudes toward bodies, non-self, and subjectivity. The latter section of this chapter moves beyond the more traditional subjects associated with topic of Buddhism and gender and focuses on role of the laity and laywomen, past and present, in the maintenance and flourishing of the Buddhist tradition. Thus, this section of the chapter explores dana (giving) as a form of pragmatic reciprocity to render a more complex and vibrant form of Buddhism that attends to the experiences of the multitude of peoples that make up the larger category of “Buddhists.”

Buddhism is flourishing on the Internet and digital media. However, the form and usage patterns of Buddhist media technologies have varied considerably from the earliest oral texts to the latest online versions of the Buddhist canon. Do such media transformations merely transmit the old dharma in a new bottle, or do they change Buddhism’s message? Are these changes to be welcomed or shunned? This chapter explores how various media technologies tend to promote particular aspects of Buddhism, and also how different Buddhist worldviews shape how these media are used. First, it sketches a short genealogy of Buddhist media technologies. Second, it concentrates on contemporary digital media, briefly describing Buddhist bulletin boards, email lists, websites, computer apps, virtual worlds, and video games. Third, the chapter explains digital media’s procedural, participatory, encyclopedic, and spatial affordances. Finally, it illuminates how digital media affordances are shaped by the technological worldview of convert Buddhism.

This chapter takes a step toward the theorization of discourses of race and racialization within the American Buddhist context. Far from being neutral observers, Buddhist Studies scholars have participated in the racialization of particular American Buddhisms. After mapping the landscape of key works on race, ethnicity, and American Buddhism, this chapter takes as a case study a collection of black Buddhist publications that reflect on race and ethnicity. Thus far, scholarship has ignored black Buddhists, yet black Buddhist reflections on race challenge dominant paradigms for the interpretation of the history of Buddhism and Buddhist teachings in the United States. This chapter concludes with suggestions for future avenues for research, including ways that we may connect the work of black Buddhists to the wider context of American religious history and American engagements with Asia.

While Buddhism is often referred to as a ‘non-theistic religion’, it has the potential to play a unique mediating role between theistic religions, with their emphasis on faith and divine revelation, and the natural sciences, with their ideals of empiricism, rationality, and scepticism. The main body of this article focuses on Buddhist approaches to cultivating eudaimonic well-being, probing the nature of consciousness, and understanding reality at large. In each case, religious, scientific, and philosophical elements are blended in ways that may not only lend themselves to dialogue with Western science, but push forward the frontiers of scientific research as well as interdisciplinary and cross-cultural inquiry. The article also argues that Buddhism has developed a science of consciousness, with a few exceptions regarding sciences with no controlled experiments.

The discourse about the similarity and compatibility between Buddhism and science has persisted from the late nineteenth century into the current day as a central feature of contemporary Buddhism. A consistent aspect of this meeting of traditional Buddhism and modern Western science is the desire to turn the moral narratives implied by scientific theories toward ethical and spiritual visions, in explicit opposition to mechanistic and matter-reductionistic worldviews. This chapter examines the most recent expressions of this impulse, which focus on the Buddhist doctrine of dependent arising (pratitya-samutpada) and displace reductionistic theories in evolutionary biology, cognitive science, and physics with new insights from systems science.

Buddhism has the reputation of being tolerant of people with non-normative sexual orientations, and for the most part of its history Buddhism does not seek to control laypeople’s sexuality. This chapter first draws from the discourses of contemporary Buddhist teachers to show the ways in which core Buddhist teachings, such as co-arising, compassionate alleviation of suffering, and middle way, can lend themselves in support of sexual and gender minorities. Then it goes further back to classical resources and explores the ways in which the traditional portrayal of the multimorphic bodhisattva Avalokitesvara (Chinese: Guanyin; Vietnamese: Quan Am; Korean: Kwan Um; Japanese: Kannon; Tibetan: Chenrezig) can inspire some rethinking on the issues of minoritized identities.

This chapter explores archaeology’s contribution to scholarly understandings of Buddhist attitudes toward the “natural” environment and the relevance of such material for global discourse on the contemporary climate-change and biodiversity crises. It draws on evidence from central India for monastic engagement with food production, land and water use in lowland zones, as well as attitudes toward, and engagement with, upland forested areas, including the monastic occupation of prehistoric rock-shelters clustered around hilltops that were developed into architectural monastery complexes during the late centuries bce. Both sets of evidence need to be viewed together in order to address critically text-based discourse on Buddhist environmental ethics with its predominant focus on Buddhist attitudes toward the suffering of animals and the “beauty” of “nature,” over and above human-centric variables, and to reassess art-historical discourse on monastic gardens as arenas for transcending and viewing “nature” from a distance. Such an approach also helps to break down socially constructed polarizations between “peripheral” forests and “productive” lowland agriculture that have long since shaped discourse on India’s religious, political, and environmental history.

This chapter addresses the question of whether it can ever be doctrinally or ethically appropriate in Buddhism to discriminate against women. It does this by assessing arguments for female inferiority that are found historically within the texts of the tradition. It attempts to demonstrate that such views are not doctrinally or ethically reinforced or substantiated, and therefore appear to have found their way into this religious literature through the ingestion of cultural mores and norms, rather than through advocacy of them as foundational and fundamental to the tradition. However, once engrained as part of revered texts, challenging such views can appear as sacrilegious if done by a practitioner, or as evidence of non-comprehension/lack of respect for tradition by an outsider. Anālayo discusses something akin to this in his chapter in this volume, in noting how differences in interpretation of texts can result in differing standpoints.

Some Africans were aware of Buddhism at a very early stage in history—indeed, some of the earliest evidence for Western knowledge of Buddhist traditions comes from Northeast Africa—yet today Africa is the least Buddhist of the inhabited continents. This chapter charts the complex history of Buddhist traditions in Africa and sketches the current distribution of these traditions on the continent. Inevitably, legacies of colonial occupation have affected the distribution of Buddhist traditions in Africa. In South Africa there is an overwhelmingly white (Caucasian) convert community that barely interacts with small ethnic Buddhist traditions. Only in recent years has a new approach to Buddhist traditions arisen, a service-oriented approach that sees Africa not as a potential source of converts, but as a field for the practical application of compassion.

Buddhism’s development in Australia and Oceania is a history of transnational global flows in these regions, with the evolution of Buddhism in these countries being closely tied to immigration and travel. Here the history and demographic developments in Australia and the nations of Oceania are analyzed, with a case study examining in greater depth how the growth of Buddhism in Australia reflects the effects of both cultural contexts and the influence of transnational Buddhist organizations. The emerging field of transnational Buddhism is identifying the conditions that may be necessary for the nations of Australia and Oceania to take the evolutionary step necessary to strategically position Buddhism so that these nations become global Buddhist hubs.