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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

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Religion

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Buddhism

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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Merit Transference And The Paradox Of Merit Inflation, Matthew Hammerton Sep 2023

Merit Transference And The Paradox Of Merit Inflation, Matthew Hammerton

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Many religious traditions and ethical systems hold that individuals accrue merit through their good intentions, acts, and character, and demerit through their bad intentions, acts, and character. This merit and demerit, accumulated by individuals throughout their lives, gives each person a kind of ethical “score” that can determine what they deserve, and influence whether good or bad things happen to them (e.g., divine punishments and rewards, a favourable or unfavourable rebirth, etc.). In some traditions (most notably Buddhism, but also to a limited extent in Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity), “merit transference” is a feature of these merit-based ethical systems. This …


Buddhism Co. Ltd? Epistemology Of Religiosity, And The Re-Invention Of A Buddhist Monastery In Hong Kong, Junxi Qian, Lily Kong Feb 2018

Buddhism Co. Ltd? Epistemology Of Religiosity, And The Re-Invention Of A Buddhist Monastery In Hong Kong, Junxi Qian, Lily Kong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This article re-theorises the relationships between secularity and religiosity in modernity. While geographers have recognised that the secular and the religious are mutually constituted, this article pushes this theorisation further, arguing that the religious and the secular are in fact hybrid constructs that embrace simultaneously the sacred and profane, the transcendent and the immanent. Albeit the significant advancement in disrupting enclosed epistemologies of secular modernity, relatively less work has sought to theorise the possibility of religion as a hybrid operating at the secular–religious interface. Focusing on the ways in which a non-Western religion, Buddhism, performs entangled relationships between religiosity and …