Kategoria BISAC: Religion >> Buddhism - Rituals & Practice

Challenging Western notions of Buddhism as a self-effacing path to rebirth and enlightenment, Sharon Suh shows how first-generation Korean Americans at Sa Chal Temple in Los Angeles have applied Buddhist doctrines to the project of finding and knowing the self in everyday life. Buddhism, for these Buddhists, serves as a source of empowerment and as a wellspring of practical and spiritual relief from myriad everyday troubles.

Painful life events and circumstances--psychological stresses, marital discord, adjustments to immigrant life, racial and religious minority status--prompt a...

Imagining the Course of Life offers a rich portrait of rural life in contemporary Southeast Asia and an accessible introduction to the complexities of Theravada Buddhism as it is actually lived and experienced. It is both an ethnography of indigenous views of human development and a theoretical consideration of how any ethnopsychology is embedded in society and culture. Drawing on long-term fieldwork in a Shan village in northern Thailand, Nancy Eberhardt illustrates how indigenous theories of the life course are connected to local constructions of self and personhood. In the process, she...

Meditation is the inward focus of attention in a state of mind where ego-related concerns and critical evaluations are suspended in favor of perceiving a deeper, subtler, and possibly divine flow of consciousness. Usually accompanied by muscle relaxation, it has an overall beneficial and often healing effect. As such, it has made major inroads in Western society, aiding in stress relief, pain management, and various psychiatric conditions.

Research in meditation tends to focus on the concrete healing effects of the practice, working either with a single form or using an indeterminate...

This collection brings together studies of the history, textual tradition, and contemporary interpretation of Shin Buddhism by leading scholars in the field of Pure Land Buddhist studies. The historical studies included here span the range of Pure Land from its origins in India through its development as a distinct system of Buddhist praxis--that is, the dialectic of doctrine and practice--in China, to its rise as a separate and self-identified Pure Land (Jodo) tradition in Japan. In recent decades the term Pure Land Buddhism has come to be used very inclusively, as a term for all forms of...

This edition updates existing text and adds three new essays on...