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Articles 61 - 90 of 111

Full-Text Articles in Buddhist Studies

Case Study: Religion, Socialism And Secularization In Modern Japan: The New Buddhist Fellowship, James Mark Shields Mar 2021

Case Study: Religion, Socialism And Secularization In Modern Japan: The New Buddhist Fellowship, James Mark Shields

Faculty Contributions to Books

No abstract provided.


The Illusion Of Self Revisited: Replies To Critics, Karsten J. Struhl Jan 2021

The Illusion Of Self Revisited: Replies To Critics, Karsten J. Struhl

Comparative Philosophy

Anand Vaidya, Sean Smith, and Mark Siderits have presented thoughtful comments and provocative challenges to my article “What Kind of an Illusion is the Illusion of Self?” Their challenges raise significant questions about the nature of illusion, whether Buddhism is denying the self in all senses of the term, whether there could be a self that exists for some limited duration of time and has at least some measure of control, whether there is a phenomenal illusion of self, whether the neuropsychological assumptions embedded in Thomas Metzinger’s Phenomenal Self Model is consistent with Buddhist metaphysics, the usefulness of evolutionary psychology …


Is The Self Really That Kind Of Illusion?, Anand J. Vaidya Jan 2021

Is The Self Really That Kind Of Illusion?, Anand J. Vaidya

Comparative Philosophy

Karsten Struhl has offered an intriguing account of what kind of illusion the self is. His account is based on Buddhist philosophy, neuropsychology, and neuroscience. This critical notice examines his arguments, and aims to question whether or not the self is the kind of illusion Struhl argues it to be.


Buddhist Modernism, Scientific Explanation, And The Self, Sean Smith Jan 2021

Buddhist Modernism, Scientific Explanation, And The Self, Sean Smith

Comparative Philosophy

No abstract provided.


Born Believer?, Mark Siderits Jan 2021

Born Believer?, Mark Siderits

Comparative Philosophy

No abstract provided.


Empty Or Emergent Persons? A Critique Of Buddhist Personalism, Javier Hidalgo Jan 2021

Empty Or Emergent Persons? A Critique Of Buddhist Personalism, Javier Hidalgo

Comparative Philosophy

In contrast to Buddhist Reductionists who deny the ultimate existence of the persons, Buddhist Personalists claim that persons are ultimately real in some important sense. Recently, some philosophers have offered philosophical reconstructions of Buddhist Personalism. In this paper, I critically evaluate one philosophical reconstruction of Buddhist Personalism according to which persons are irreducible to the parts that constitute them. Instead, persons are emergent entities and have novel properties that are distinct from the properties of their constituents. While this emergentist interpretation is an interesting and well-motivated reconstruction of the Personalist position, I ultimately reject it on substantive grounds. I distinguish …


Born Believers?, Mark Siderits Jan 2021

Born Believers?, Mark Siderits

Faculty Publications - Philosophy

A Response to Karsten Struhl’s “What Kind of an Illusion is the Illusion of Self”.


ポスト汎神論から超物質主義へ―鈴木大拙と新仏教―, James Mark Shields Oct 2020

ポスト汎神論から超物質主義へ―鈴木大拙と新仏教―, James Mark Shields

Faculty Contributions to Books

In modern Western thought, pantheism remains a powerful if controversial undercurrent. Recent re-evaluations of the work of Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) point to pantheism’s radical implications for metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and politics. Pantheism (Jp. hanshinron 汎神論) also has significant valence within Japanese Buddhist modernism, particularly in the work of scholars and lay activists who articulated the outlines of a New Buddhism (shin bukkyō 新仏教) from the 1880s through the 1940s. For these thinkers, pantheism provided a “middle way” between materialism and idealism, as well as between theism and atheism. In the postwar period, lapsed radical turned Buddhist Sano Manabu …


A Dilemma For Buddhist Reductionsim, Javier S. Hidalgo Oct 2020

A Dilemma For Buddhist Reductionsim, Javier S. Hidalgo

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

This article develops a dilemma for Buddhist Reductionism that centers on the nature of normative reasons. This dilemma suggests that Buddhist Reductionism lacks the resources to make sense of normative reasons and, furthermore, that this failure may cast doubt on the plausibility of Buddhist Reductionism as a whole...Can Buddhist philosophy make sense of reasons? In this article, I have examined whether one important Buddhist view—Buddhist Reductionism— has the resources to justify the existence of reasons. My diagnosis is pessimistic. I have argued that Buddhist Reductionism lacks the resources to make sense of reasons and, furthermore, that this failure casts doubt …


Skeptical Buddhism As Provenance And Project, James Mark Shields Sep 2020

Skeptical Buddhism As Provenance And Project, James Mark Shields

Faculty Contributions to Books

The past century and a half has seen various attempts in both Asia and the West to reform or re-conceptualize Buddhism by adding a simple, often provocative, qualifier. This paper examines some of the links between “secular,” “critical,” “sceptical,” and “radical” Buddhism in order to ascertain possibilities in thinking Buddhism anew as a 21st-century “project” with philosophical, ethical, and political resonance. In particular, I am motivated by the question of whether “sceptical” Buddhism can coexist with Buddhist praxis, conceived as an engaged response to the suffering of sentient beings in a globalized and neoliberal industrial capitalist world order. Let …


What Kind Of An Illusion Is The Illusion Of Self, Karsten J. Struhl Jul 2020

What Kind Of An Illusion Is The Illusion Of Self, Karsten J. Struhl

Comparative Philosophy

Both early and later forms of Buddhism developed a set of arguments to demonstrate that the self is an illusion. This article begins with a brief review of some of the arguments but then proceeds to show that these arguments are not themselves sufficient to dispel the illusion. It analyzes three ways in which the illusion of self manifests itself – as wish fulfillment, as a cognitive illusion, and as a phenomenal illusion (what might be called the “I” sense). With respect to this last, the article reviews some recent developments in cognitive neuropsychology and neuroscience to discuss the way …


Izutsu’S Zen Metaphysics Of I-Consciousness Vis-À-Vis Cartesian Cogito, Takaharu Oda, Alessio Bucci Jul 2020

Izutsu’S Zen Metaphysics Of I-Consciousness Vis-À-Vis Cartesian Cogito, Takaharu Oda, Alessio Bucci

Comparative Philosophy

Chief amongst the issues Toshihiko Izutsu broached is the philosophisation of Zen Buddhism in his book Toward a Philosophy of Zen Buddhism. This article aims to critically compare Izutsu’s reconstruction of Zen metaphysics with another metaphysical tradition rooted in Descartes’ cogito ergo sum. Putting Izutsu’s terminological choices into the context of Zen Buddhism, we review his argument based on the subject-object distinction and establish a comparison with the Cartesian cogito. A critical analysis is conducted on the functional relationship between subject and object in Izutsu’s metaphysics of Zen (meditation). This is examined step by step from the perspective of …


Gomyō And Kūkai In Early-Heian Intra-Buddhist Conversations, Ronald S. Green Feb 2020

Gomyō And Kūkai In Early-Heian Intra-Buddhist Conversations, Ronald S. Green

Philosophy and Religious Studies

This paper is about the relationship between the famous Japanese esoteric Buddhist Kūkai and the less-famous Gomyō, who you've probably never heard of but maybe should have. My paper responds to the work of two recent scholars, Fujii Jun, who says that Kūkai was a Sanron (Japanese Mādhyamika) priest, and Matsumoto Gyoyu, who speculates about the origins of and thinking behind certain passages in Kūkai's Jūjūshinron. The paper points to the intellectual significance for Kūkai of his close relationship with Gomyō and other Yogācāra scholars of his day, and how this is reflected in the Jūjūshinron and Kūkai's thought broadly. …


Flower Unfurling: Buddhist Modernism And The Early Writing Of James Joyce, Erin Garrow Feb 2020

Flower Unfurling: Buddhist Modernism And The Early Writing Of James Joyce, Erin Garrow

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation traces the history of the references to Buddhism in Stephen Hero, James Joyce’s first and unpublished novel, through the author’s previous writing, his sources, and his context, in order to determine how—if at all—the tradition bore upon his earliest depiction of consciousness. Acknowledging that Joyce habitually revisited and refined earlier ideas and prose, it attends to previous essays, notebooks, book reviews, conversations, letters, epiphanies, poems, and autobiographical prose; to available material, bibliographical, and biographical evidence about the specific volumes and performances to which Joyce had access; to language and paratext—including advertisements, introductions, and appended essays—in those volumes; …


The “Indirect Message” In Kierkegaard And Chán Buddhism, Zdeněk Zacpal Jan 2020

The “Indirect Message” In Kierkegaard And Chán Buddhism, Zdeněk Zacpal

Comparative Philosophy

The article seeks to analyse Kierkegaard’s indirecte Meddelelse, which the author proposes to translate as ‘indirect message’. It attempts to consider and illuminate this concept and its general characteristics, types and cases in Kierkegaard's work. They are to serve as a baseline for investigations of indirect messages in Buddhism, especially the famous ‘public cases’ (gong-àn / kōan 公案) of the Chán Buddhists. The author tries to specify indirect messages on both sides of the cultural divide in terms of some Western philosophers. Kierkegaard’s theoretical rationale for his indirect message is profound, sophisticated and appropriate to the theoretical …


On What Is Real In Nāgārjuna’S “Middle Way”, Richard H. Jones Jan 2020

On What Is Real In Nāgārjuna’S “Middle Way”, Richard H. Jones

Comparative Philosophy

It has become popular to portray the Buddhist Nāgārjuna as an ontological nihilist, i.e., that he denies the reality of entities and does not postulate any further reality. A reading of his works does show that he rejects the self-existent reality of entities, but it also shows that he accepts a "that-ness" (tattva) to phenomenal reality that survives the denial of any distinct, self-contained entities. Thus, he is not a nihilist concerning what is real in the final analysis of things. How Nāgārjuna’s positions impact contemporary discussions of ontological nihilism and deflationism in Western philosophy is also discussed.


The Conclusion In Which Nothingness Is Concluded, Marissa Rimes Dec 2019

The Conclusion In Which Nothingness Is Concluded, Marissa Rimes

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

Samuel Johnson’s The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia is ironically most often classified as an “oriental philosophic tale,” but is rarely analyzed from the point of view of oriental philosophy. Although Buddhism’s ambiguities, inwardness, and nothingness, provoke anxiety in Western critique, Johnson’s The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia does something unique from eighteenth-century British thought in that it disavows this Buddaphobia by actively employing a similar line of thought. Through the lens of a Buddhist framework many of the text’s renownedly gloomy implications, in regard to its circular structure and inconclusiveness, are freed from the great sludge of …


Carrying Buddha Into The Streets: Buddhist Socialist Thought In Meiji Japan, James Mark Shields Jun 2019

Carrying Buddha Into The Streets: Buddhist Socialist Thought In Meiji Japan, James Mark Shields

Faculty Contributions to Books

No abstract provided.


A State Of Impermanence: Buddhism, Liberalism, And The Problem Of Politics, Cory Michael Sukala Mar 2019

A State Of Impermanence: Buddhism, Liberalism, And The Problem Of Politics, Cory Michael Sukala

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the relationship of Buddhist political thought and liberal political thought at the level of first principles. I will examine the tension created by the Buddhist view of political life as instrumental and secondary to man's being as a function of the transition of the Buddhist world into the sphere of Western political life, which views the role of politics as primary to man's nature. In Part I, this will be accomplished through a consideration of the origins of political life and the foundation of the political state in each tradition as viewed through the themes of human …


Review: Melissa Anne-Marie Curley, Pure Land, Real World: Modern Buddhism, Japanese Leftists, And The Utopian Imagination, James Mark Shields Mar 2019

Review: Melissa Anne-Marie Curley, Pure Land, Real World: Modern Buddhism, Japanese Leftists, And The Utopian Imagination, James Mark Shields

Other Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.


Recapture, Transparency, Negation And A Logic For The Catuṣkoṭi, Adrian Kreutz Jan 2019

Recapture, Transparency, Negation And A Logic For The Catuṣkoṭi, Adrian Kreutz

Comparative Philosophy

The recent literature on Nāgārjuna’s catuṣkoṭi centres around Jay Garfield’s (2009) and Graham Priest’s (2010) interpretation. It is an open discussion to what extent their interpretation is an adequate model of the logic for the catuskoti, and the Mūla-madhyamaka-kārikā. Priest and Garfield try to make sense of the contradictions within the catuskoti by appeal to a series of lattices – orderings of truth-values, supposed to model the path to enlightenment. They use Anderson & Belnaps's (1975) framework of First Degree Entailment. Cotnoir (2015) has argued that the lattices of Priest and Garfield …


The Search For Microbial Martian Life And American Buddhist Ethics, Daniel S. Capper Jan 2019

The Search For Microbial Martian Life And American Buddhist Ethics, Daniel S. Capper

Faculty Publications

Multiple searches hunt for extraterrestrial life, yet the ethics of such searches in terms of fossil and possible extant life on Mars have not been sufficiently delineated. In response, in this essay I propose a tripartite ethic for searches for microbial Martian life that consists of default nonharm toward potential living beings, default nonharm to the habitats of potential living beings, but also responsible, restrained scientific harvesting of some microbes in limited transgression of these default nonharm modes. Although this multifaceted ethic remains secular and hence adaptable to space research settings, it arises from both a qualitative analysis of authoritative …


Radical Social Ecology As Deep Pragmatism: A Call To The Abolition Of Systemic Dissonance And The Minimization Of Entropic Chaos, Arielle Brender May 2018

Radical Social Ecology As Deep Pragmatism: A Call To The Abolition Of Systemic Dissonance And The Minimization Of Entropic Chaos, Arielle Brender

Student Theses 2015-Present

This paper aims to shed light on the dissonance caused by the superimposition of Dominant Human Systems on Natural Systems. I highlight the synthetic nature of Dominant Human Systems as egoic and linguistic phenomenon manufactured by a mere portion of the human population, which renders them inherently oppressive unto peoples and landscapes whose wisdom were barred from the design process. In pursuing a radical pragmatic approach to mending the simultaneous oppression and destruction of the human being and the earth, I highlight the necessity of minimizing entropic chaos caused by excess energy expenditure, an essential feature of systems that aim …


起死回生(Resuscitation): Japan's Search For Machines And Their Meanings, Justin P. Mcdonnell May 2018

起死回生(Resuscitation): Japan's Search For Machines And Their Meanings, Justin P. Mcdonnell

Master's Projects and Capstones

Japan’s lost decade(s) ushered in a new era of economic and societal malaise, marked by a shrinking population, an increased proportion of elderly people, inequality, neo-nationalism(s), uncertainty, and isolation. This project seeks to understand how Japan is trying to address these issues and reconstruct itself from the lost decade(s) with the use of artificial intelligence (jinkou chihou) and robotics along with the societal implications of this technology. This interdisciplinary research utilizes innovative, historical narratives (Morris-Suzuki,1988, Hornyak 2006), and the socio-cultural milieu of Japan and its traditions (Allison 2013; Katsuno 2010) to further appreciate and acknowledge Japanese perspectives and …


Medieval Japanese Zen: Catalyst For Symbol System Formation, Kendall Ann Roper May 2018

Medieval Japanese Zen: Catalyst For Symbol System Formation, Kendall Ann Roper

Dissertations, Masters Theses, Capstones, and Culminating Projects

Post-modernism asserts that the world as we know it does not exist independently from the symbolic interpretations we formulate about it. This symbolic and ever unfolding interpretation of reality applies to our understanding of science as well as philosophy, to religion as well as art. In striving to describe religious experiences, various cultures have developed complex symbolic languages whose purpose is to reference a culturally understood version of sacred reality as presented through religion. Religions contribute to shaping these cultural perceptions of reality by utilizing symbolic acts, objects, events, qualities, or concepts to express otherwise inexpressible elements of a culture’s …


Kreeft's "Between One Faith And Another: Engaging Conversations On The World's Great Religions" (, Elizabeth Pearson May 2018

Kreeft's "Between One Faith And Another: Engaging Conversations On The World's Great Religions" (, Elizabeth Pearson

The Christian Librarian

No abstract provided.


Experiences Of Wildness And Value, Hannah G. Mclean Jan 2018

Experiences Of Wildness And Value, Hannah G. Mclean

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.


Sensory Dots, No-Self, And Stream-Entry: The Significance Of Buddhist Contemplative Development For Transpersonal Studies, Charles D. Laughlin Sep 2017

Sensory Dots, No-Self, And Stream-Entry: The Significance Of Buddhist Contemplative Development For Transpersonal Studies, Charles D. Laughlin

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies

Based on the author’s nearly 50 years of meditation, it is observed that as a given alternative state is accessed and used over the span of years, experiences and capacities within that state are not merely static but may themselves shift as a practitioner develops neuropsychologically. An ethnographer using a substance within the context of a cultural practice may gain helpful direct insights into that cultural practice, but the researcher may fail to realize that the state attained by a novice may be substantively different from that gained by an elder or shaman with years of experience in the practice. …


Immanent Frames: Meiji New Buddhism And The 'Religious Secular', James Mark Shields Jun 2017

Immanent Frames: Meiji New Buddhism And The 'Religious Secular', James Mark Shields

Faculty Journal Articles

The secularization thesis, rooted in the idea that “modernity” brings with it the destruction—or, at least, the ruthless privatization—of religion, is clearly grounded in specific, often oversimplified, interpretations of Western historical developments since the eighteenth century. In this article, I use the case of the New Buddhist Fellowship (Shin Bukkyō Dōshikai 新仏教同志会) of the Meiji period (1868–1911) to query the category of the secular in the context of Japanese modernity. I argue that the New Buddhists, drawing on elements of classical and East Asian Buddhism as well as modern Western thought, promoted a resolutely social and this-worldly Buddhism that …


Beginner's Mind, Martin L. Benson May 2017

Beginner's Mind, Martin L. Benson

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

My art distills my relationship to spirituality, digital culture, and the practices and side-effects therein, into a simplified visual language. The work manifests in the form of paintings, drawings, and light sculptures. Meditation and mindfulness training are a large part of my influence and interests. I often wonder how mindfulness practice can be mirrored in my artwork, not only in my process for creating the work, but also with what the resulting imagery does for the viewer. My intention is to provide an art form that invites one to look and experience one’s own capacity to observe, without the need …