Seeing, Touching, Holding, and Swallowing Tibetan Buddhist Texts

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 137-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cathy Cantwell
Keyword(s):  
Tibetan Buddhism ◽  
Sensory Experience ◽  
Tibetan Buddhist ◽  
Sacred Texts ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Rich Material ◽  
Scholarly Attention ◽  
Book Culture

The iconic dimension of holy books has drawn increasing scholarly attention in recent years (e.g. Iconic Books and Texts, James Watts, ed., London, Equinox, 2013). Asian Buddhism provides rich material for considering the ritualization of engagement with sacred texts. In Tibetan Buddhism, this aspect of book culture is perhaps especially pronounced (see, for instance, Schaeffer 2009, especially Chapter 6; Elliott, Diemberger and Clemente 2014). This paper explores the topic in relation to the engagement of the senses in Tibetan context, through seeing, touching, holding and tasting texts. It would seem that it is not the sensory experience in itself, but rather the physical experience of a transmission and incorporation of the sacred qualities from the books into the person which is emphasized in these practices. Parallels and contrasts with examples from elsewhere are mentioned, and there is some consideration of the breadth of the category of sacred books in the Tibetan context in which Dharma teachings may take many forms.

scholarly journals Macho Buddhism: Gender and Sexualities in the Diamond Way

2011 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-103
Author(s):  
Burkhard Scherer
Keyword(s):  
Tibetan Buddhism ◽  
Gender Stereotyping ◽  
Sexual Ethics ◽  
Tibetan Buddhist ◽  
Historical Source ◽  
The West ◽  
Cultural Attitudes ◽  
Continuity And Change ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Previous Scholarship

Western Tibetan Buddhist movements have been described as bourgeois and puritanical in previous scholarship. In contrast, Ole Nydahl’s convert lay Karma Kagyu Buddhist movement, the Diamond Way, has drawn attention for its apparently hedonistic style. This article addresses the wider issues of continuity and change during the transition of Tibetan Buddhism from Asia to the West. It analyses views on and performances of gender, sexual ethics and sexualities both diachronically through textual-historical source and discourse analysis and synchronically through qualitative ethnography. In this way the article demonstrates how the approaches of contemporary gender and sexualities studies can serve as a way to question the Diamond Way Buddhism’s location in the ‘tradition vs modernity’ debate. Nydahl’s pre-modern gender stereotyping, the hetero-machismo of the Diamond Way and the mildly homophobic tone and content of Nydahl’s teaching are interpreted in light of Indian and Tibetan Buddhist sexual ethics and traditional Tibetan cultural attitudes on sexualities. By excavating the emic genealogy of Nydahl’s teachings, the article suggests that Nydahl’s and the Diamond Way’s view on and performance of gender and sexualities are consistent with his propagation of convert Buddhist neo-orthodoxy.

Senses of Vibration

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shelly Trower
Keyword(s):  
Sensory Experience ◽  
Cultural Imaginary ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Senses ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Brain

The study of the senses has become a rich topic in recent years. Senses of Vibration explores a wide range of sensory experience and makes a decisive new contribution to this growing field by focussing not simply on the senses as such, but on the material experience - vibration - that underpins them. This is the first book to take the theme of vibration as central, offering an interdisciplinary history of the phenomenon and its reverberations in the cultural imaginary. It tracks vibration through the work of a wide range of writers, including physiologists (who thought vibrations in the nerves delivered sensations to the brain), physicists (who claimed that light, heat, electricity and other forms of energy were vibratory), spiritualists (who figured that spiritual energies also existed in vibratory form), and poets and novelists from Coleridge to Dickens and Wells. Senses of Vibration is a work of scholarship that cuts through a range of disciplines and will reverberate for many years to come.

scholarly journals The configuration of happiness and unhappiness as part of the auditory landscape: the work of Albert Camus

Cahiers ERTA ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 57-79
Author(s):  
Sofia Chatzipetrou
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Study ◽  
Auditory Perception ◽  
Albert Camus ◽  
Sensory Experience ◽  
Field Recording ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Symbolic Universe

This essay aims to analyze the poetics of the soundscape in Albert Camus’ work, based in the notions of happiness and unhappiness. Our purpose will be to define the characteristics of the symbolism of auditory perception, which are elaborated on the double configuration between happiness and unhappiness. The fact that the symbolic universe of Camus outlines a total sensory experience does no longer need to be demonstrated. Starting from his first lyrical writings to the Notebooks, his writing appeals arouses all the senses. Through a comparative study of examples relating to happiness and unhappiness and while underlining the predominant place of silence in Camus’ aesthetics, we will come off to the conclusion that Camus’s work constitutes a real kind of field recording.

Sensuous Experience, Performance, and Presence in Third Intermediate Period Biography

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Frood
Keyword(s):  
Sacred Space ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Sensory Experience ◽  
Intermediate Period ◽  
The Senses ◽  
The Temple ◽  
Third Intermediate Period

This chapter analyses biographical motifs relating to sensory experience found in inscriptions largely belonging to one tenth-century bc priestly family in Thebes. The four statues which are the focus of discussion (CG 42225; CG 42226; CG 42227; CG 42228) were dedicated in the temple precinct of Karnak by Hor IX for himself, his ancestor, and his wife. Inscriptions on a statue of Horakhbit I (CG 42231) from Karnak are also treated. Celebration of the senses is found in these texts through the fusion of biography with themes known from harpists' songs, a genre previously associated with tombs; the use of myrrh, a pleasurable and ritual substance; and through phraseology that mobilises the sensuous geographies of sacred space. Study of how such motifs relate to other features of biography across the statues offers insights into transformations of more than one genre and developments in the function of statues in temples.

Foundationalism and Peter's Confession

1990 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 403-413
Author(s):  
Marcus Hester
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Basic Belief ◽  
Sacred Texts ◽  
Belief In God ◽  
The Senses ◽  
The Middle Ages

One part of the Clifford–James dispute is still with us, namely a more inclusive foundationalism which has grown out of criticism of evidentialism in relation to belief in God. ‘Evidentialism’ will here mean the view, attributed to thinkers in the middle ages, that foundational premises must be either self-evident or evident to the senses. One answer now given by some (chiefly Plantinga) to such foundational questions is that belief in God is a properly basic belief, though not properly basic in an evidentialist sense. Thus one can rationally hold such a belief without proving it by argument. I will argue that belief in some specific personal God, such as Allah, Yahweh or Jesus as the Christ (Peter's confession), as constituted by sacred texts is the form belief takes for Christian believers and that there are special questions as to whether such beliefs can be shown to be properly basic.

The Classification of Smells and the Order of the Senses in Indian Religious Traditions

Numen ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 374-419 ◽  
Author(s):  
James McHugh
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
Sensory Experience ◽  
The Other ◽  
Aesthetic Value ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Sense Of Smell ◽  
The Senses

AbstractIn the course of producing complex analyses of sensory experience, traditional Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist scholars in South Asia examined the nature of smell. These scholars were most often interested in the fundamental qualities of smells, i.e. how many types of odor there are. Faced with this difficult task, the three sectarian groups initially produced three different accounts, though in later works most scholars adopted very similar classifications of smell. In part, this may be because of the difficulties involved in classifying smells, but the article also suggests that it was mutually beneficial to abandon contentious material in less significant parts of a system in order to focus discussion on more central issues. Amongst all the sense-objects, odors were most consistently defined by terms implying an aesthetic value. The article also examines the place of the sense of smell within the three different orders of the senses that these three schools of thought used. These sense-orders reflect divergent classificatory principles, and the place of smell in relation to the other senses highlights different aspects of the sense of smell. Unlike their stance on the classification of odors, the three schools of thought always maintained distinct orders of the senses, which must have been a regular reminder of difference in philosophical priorities.

Study on the Composition of Inner Mongolia Wudangzhao Monastery Building Complex

2013 ◽  
Vol 357-360 ◽  
pp. 141-144
Author(s):  
Yun Zuo
Keyword(s):  
Inner Mongolia ◽  
Tibetan Buddhism ◽  
Tibetan Buddhist ◽  
Architectural Style ◽  
Different Types ◽  
History Of ◽  
Almost All ◽  
Tibetan Architecture

Tibetan Buddhist monasteries embody almost all achievements of the Tibetan community in religious, scientific, cultural and artistic. The erection of Tibetan Buddhist monasteries are closely related to the history of Tibetan Buddhism in Inner Mongolia. As the Tibetan Buddhism had been spread to Inner Mongolia in different periods, Tibetan Buddhist monasteries presented different features in its architectural style. Wudangzhao Lamasery is the grandest integral monastery complex still remaining in Inner Mongolia.Its buildings have high value of art and characteristically Tibetan Buddhist Architectural style on monasterys arrangement and style. Different types of the building gathered together form a Tibetan monastery, buildings complex reflected the intact standard of Tibetan Architecture. They express the Tibetan traditional mountain worship idea, and Buddhist the Mandala Cosmology and Three Realms idea.

scholarly journals Generative Meditations: Exploring Generative Art From the Perspective of Tibetan Buddhist Philosophy

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Benjamin Jack
Keyword(s):  
Tibetan Buddhism ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Buddhist Philosophy ◽  
Computational Creativity ◽  
Tibetan Buddhist ◽  
Generative Art ◽  
Generative Processes

<p>the purpose of this thesis is to document and explore the subjective struggles I have encountered in my own practise as a generative artist rather than to provide an objective overview of computational generative art. Hopefully this process will give some context from the ground up (from an artist’s perspective) to some of the larger questions that I and others in the field are asking about generative art.  From the preliminary questions arising from these struggles I begin to explore and develop a generative art practise that primarily focuses on the topics of human experience and ideas directly related to human experience. This is opposed to using generative processes to explore ideas fundamentally based on computation (a-life, emergence, computational creativity, and data etc..). The foundation of, and reasons behind, such a focus are based on the non-realist and non-materialist philosophical tenets of Tibetan Buddhism, in particular the philosophy of the Madhyamika-Prasangika school of thought. The purpose of developing a generative practise based on the philosophy and symbolism of Tibetan Buddhism is to find a method to create personally relevant artwork with a firm foundation in a well established culture of art and philosophy. I might add however, that this isn’t merely a self-reflective exercise but rather it should be of interest to others in the field of (and study of) Generative art to see how this artistic method might be approached from a vastly different philosophical stance to the materialist view that receives the majority of attention in the field.</p>

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