Buddhist Monks and Christian Friars: Religious and Cultural Exchange in the Making of Buddhism

2016 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-21
Author(s):  
Eva M. Pascal
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Exchange ◽  
South East Asia ◽  
The West ◽  
Global Consensus ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Bona Fide ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The Buddha

There is a global consensus that various traditions practised throughout parts of Asia can all be linked to one cohesive religion called ‘Buddhism’. However, there is a long history as to how the West came to that consensus. Prior to the Iberian exploration, it was common to divide the religious world into four categories: Christianity, Judaism, Islam and all others under various permutations of superstition, heathenism or paganism. This article explores the rich encounter and exchange between Iberian friars and Buddhist monks, particularly in Siam (modern-day Thailand) that catalysed the identification of a common tradition in Asia thought to be centred on the person of the Buddha. It argues that one important part of the history of the identification of Buddhism as a single and bona fide religion begins with the encounter in the sixteenth century of Spanish friars with Buddhism. The social and political strength of institutional Buddhism in Siam, coupled with recognition of similar religious life and appreciation of ascetic values between monks and friars, triggers the identification by the friars of a distinct religion across Asia. The friars made the case that they were witnessing people with their own religion, distinguishable from undifferentiated superstition or idolatry. The consensus of the friars introduced an ideational core for the idea of Buddhism, based on one founder common to traditions in East and South-east Asia. These arguments set a foundation for Buddhism as a religion thought to closely mirror Christianity.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Winter
Keyword(s):  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Rich Diversity ◽  
The Social ◽  
Local Contexts ◽  
History Of ◽  
Religious Oppression ◽  
The Rich ◽  
To Come

This concluding chapter summarizes key themes and presents some final thoughts. The book has shown that the multiplicity of lived ʻAlawi experiences cannot be reduced to the sole question of religion or framed within a monolithic narrative of persecution; that the very attempt to outline a single coherent history of “the ʻAlawis” may indeed be misguided. The sources on which this study has drawn are considerably more accessible, and the social and administrative realities they reflect consistently more mundane and disjointed, than the discourse of the ʻAlawis' supposed exceptionalism would lead one to believe. Therefore, the challenge for historians of ʻAlawi society in Syria and elsewhere is not to use the specific events and structures these sources detail to merely add to the already existing metanarratives of religious oppression, Ottoman misrule, and national resistance but rather to come to a newer and more intricate understanding of that community, and its place in wider Middle Eastern society, by investigating the lives of individual ʻAlawi (and other) actors within the rich diversity of local contexts these sources reveal.

Las Yslas de Esperar en Dios: The Jesuit Mission in Moro 1546–1571

1988 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 593-606
Author(s):  
John Villiers
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Society Of Jesus ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Conditions ◽  
Jesuit Missionaries ◽  
Mission Field

The numerous and voluminous reports and letters which the Jesuits wrote on the Moro mission, as on all their missions in Asia, are perhaps of less interest to us now for what they reveal of the methods adopted by the Society of Jesus in this remote corner of their mission field or the details they contain about the successes and failures of individual missionaries, than for the wealth of information they provide on the islands where the Jesuits lived and the indigenous societies with which they came into contact through their work of evangelization. In other words, it is not theprimary purpose of this essay to analyse the Jesuit documents with a view to reconstructing the history of the Moro mission in narrative form but rather to glean from them some of the informationthey contain about the social and political conditions in Moro during the forty years or so in the sixteenth century when both the Jesuit missionaries and the Portuguese were active in the regio Because the Jesuits were often in close touch with local rulers and notables, whether or not they succeeded in converting them to Christianity, and because they lived among their subjects for long periods, depending upon them for the necessities of life and sharing their hardships, their letters and reports often show a deeper understanding of the social, economic and political conditions of the indigenous societies and, one suspects, give a more accurate and measured account of events and personalities than do the official chroniclers and historians of the time, most of whom never ventured further east than Malacca and who in any case were chiefly concerned to glorify the deeds of the Portuguese and justify their actions to the world.

Architecture, Modernism and Nation-Building in Kemalist Turkey

1994 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 37-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sibel Bozdoğan
Keyword(s):  
Nation Building ◽  
Critical Force ◽  
Modern Architecture ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
The West ◽  
Industrial City ◽  
The Social ◽  
Great Transformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 19Th Century

Deeply rooted in “the great transformation” brought about by capitalism, industrialization and urban life, the history of modern architecture in the West is intricately intertwined with the rise of the bourgeoisie. Modernism in architecture, before anything else, is a reaction to the social and environmental ills of the industrial city, and to the bourgeois aesthetic of the 19th century. It emerged first as a series of critical, utopian and radical movements in the first decades of the twentieth century, eventually consolidating itself into an architectural establishment by the 1930s. The dissemination of the so-called “modern movement” outside Europe coincides with the eclipse of the plurality and critical force of early modernist currents and their reduction to a unified, formalist and doctrinaire position.

The Diaspora of the Novel

1992 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-146
Author(s):  
Artemis Leontis
Keyword(s):  
Uneven Development ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
The West ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Economic Transformations ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Type

Reflection on the history of the novel usually begins with consideration of the social, political, and economic transformations within society that favored the “rise” of a new type of narrative. This remains true even with the numerous and important studies appearing during the past ten years, which relate the novel to an everbroadening spectrum of ideological issues—gender, class, race, and, most recently, nationalism. Yet a history of the genre might reflect not just on the novel’s national, but also its transnational, trajectory, its spread across the globe, away from its original points of emergence. Such a history would take into account the expansion of western markets—the growing exportation of goods and ideas, as well as of social, political, and cultural forms from the West—that promoted the novel’s importation by nonwestern societies. Furthermore, it could lead one to examine the very interesting inverse relationship between two kinds of migration, both of which are tied to the First World’s uneven “development” of the Third. In a world system that draws out natural resources in exchange for technologically mediated goods, the emigration of laborers and intellectuals from peripheral societies to the centers of power of the West and the immigration of a western literary genre into these same societies must be viewed as related phenomena.

History of Neuropsychology in Asia

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tatia M.C. Lee ◽  
Wang Kai ◽  
Simon L. Collinson
Keyword(s):  
Information Exchange ◽  
Rapid Development ◽  
Sources Of Information ◽  
Clinical Neuropsychology ◽  
The West ◽  
Multiple Processes ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Rich ◽  
External Forces ◽  
Brain Behavior

Clinical neuropsychology in Asia has emerged from the interactions of multiple processes, including the development of psychology and its subdisciplines worldwide, the entering of psychology into Asia and ongoing intellectual influences from outside of Asia, indigenous responses to those external forces, and homegrown initiatives in studying brain-behavior relationships prior to and since the beginnings of modern neuropsychology. This chapter reviews the history of neuropsychology in China, Hong Kong, Singapore, and other Asian regions. With globalization and increasing ease of information exchange, neuropsychological practice in Asia will continue to be shaped by influence from the West interacting with the indigenization process to shape the development of neuropsychology in Asia. Rapid development of neuroscience leads to cutting-edge findings and discovery of brain-behavior relationships, which has and will continue to be one of the rich sources of information that guides and shapes neuropsychological practice in Asia and worldwide.

Metal Mirrors from Altai Sites of the Xiongnu Time

2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 357-375
Author(s):  
Alexey A. Tishkin ◽  
Nikolay N. Seregin
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Metal Alloys ◽  
Visual Examination ◽  
The West ◽  
The Social ◽  
Archaeological Materials ◽  
Long Time ◽  
History Of ◽  
Made In ◽  
Comprehensive Study

Abstract Metal mirrors are important indicators when reconstructing the history of the ancient peoples of Altai on the basis of archaeological materials. Among the latter there are imported products, recorded in the mounds of the Xiongnu time (2nd century BC – 1st century AD). The article gives an overview of the results of a comprehensive study of the mirrors. Only one mirror was found intact, and the rest are represented by fragments. This collection of 19 archaeological items is divided into two groups, reflecting the direction of contacts of the Altai population in this period. The first demonstrates Chinese products that could have entered the region indirectly from the Xiongnu who dominated Inner Asia. Some of them were made in the previous period, but were used for a long time. The analyses of metal alloys from the Yaloman-II site supplements the conclusions made during the visual examination. The second group, through its origin, is associated with the cultures of the so-called Sarmatian circle, whose sites were located to the west of the Altai. A separate section of the article is devoted to a discussion of reconstruction of some aspects of the social history of the nomads and their world.

The Modern City

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
DIANE E. DAVIS
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Mexico City ◽  
Political Alliances ◽  
The Social ◽  
Shifting Balance ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The City ◽  
Rich History

What constitutes modern Mexico? Is there a clear distinction between the historic and modern Mexico City? And if there are, does this distinctions hold up throughout the twentieth century, when what is apparent is a mix of legacies coexisting overtime? This chapter discusses the semiotics of history and modernity. It discusses the struggle of the Mexico City to find its own image including its struggle to preserve historic buildings amidst the differing political alliances that either promote change or preserve the past. However, past is not a single entity, hence if the preservation of the rich history of Mexico is pursued, the question arises as to what periods of history represented in the city are to be favoured in its future development. In this chapter, the focus is on the paradoxes of the Torre Bicentenario and on the pressures to preserve Mexico’s past, the ways they have been juxtaposed against the plans for its future and how the balance of these views has shifted over time. It determines the key actors and the institutions who have embraced history as opposed to progress, identifies the set of forces that dominated in the city’s twentieth-century history, and assesses the long-term implications of the shifting balance for the social, spatial and built environmental character of the city. The chapter ends with a discussion on the current role played by the cultural and historical authorities in determining the fate of the city.

Conservative Liberalism as a Disciplinary Revolution

2020 ◽  
pp. 77-96
Author(s):  
Kenneth Dyson
Keyword(s):  
Social Economic ◽  
Social Process ◽  
Time Consistency ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Exclusive Property ◽  
Franz Böhm ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Internal Fragmentation ◽  
Porous Boundaries

This chapter examines economic and monetary discipline. It notes that conservative liberals accorded great importance to law as the source of discipline, as exemplified by Franz Böhm, Louis Brandeis, and Maurice Hauriou. The chapter considers discipline in the history of liberalism, noting that it is not the exclusive property of conservative liberalism—though it is its predominant characteristic. It considers the social, economic, and political functions of rules, notably the work of Friedrich Hayek; the Currency and Banking Schools; the difficulties that arise in the choice, design, and use of rules; the reinforcement provided by credibility and time-consistency literature since the 1970s; the legitimacy and accountability problems of unelected power; the question of when discipline becomes the enemy of democracy and liberty; and the respective roles of the state and the market as sources of destabilizing shocks. The chapter stresses the rich and revealing use of metaphor by conservative liberals: their rejection of engineering metaphors for those of gardening, architecture, health and medicine, and religion. Ordo-liberalism is characterized as an open-ended tradition, with internal fragmentation and porous boundaries, its membership including migrants as well as natives. The notion of a mainstream is defined by a social process of selecting key texts as essential references and citations.

Lucian as Social Satirist

1961 ◽  
Vol 11 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 199-208 ◽  
Author(s):  
B. Baldwin
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Social Problem ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Dio Chrysostom ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Practical Politics ◽  
Revolutionary Movements ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Actual Participation

This paper owes its inspiration to a remark made by Professor M. Rostovtzeff; in a note in his Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire on the widespread social unrest of the first two centuries A.D., having cited other literary authorities such as Dio Chrysostom, Aelius Aristides, etc., he writes: ‘The social problem as such, the cleavage between the poor and the rich, occupies a prominent place in the dialogues of Lucian; he was fully aware of the importance of the problem.’ No one, as far as I know, has attempted to collect and discuss the main passages in Lucian on this topic, and the latest writer on this aspect of Lucian reaches a conclusion quite opposed to Rostovtzeff and one which I believe to be wholly misleading. The aim of this paper is to collect and discuss the main references in Lucian to the social problem interpreting them in the light of Lucian's life and background, and the social and economic conditions of his age. In particular I shall stress the importance of the Cynic tradition as it bears on Lucian's attitude, but shall endeavour to show that this tradition is firmly rooted in practical politics and actual participation in social revolutionary movements and goes far beyond the repetition of mere ethical cliches generally ascribed to it.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document