scholarly journals An Icon in Motion: Rethinking the Iconography of Itinerant Monk Paintings from Dunhuang

Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (9) ◽  
pp. 479
Author(s):  
Haewon Kim

This essay reconsiders the iconography of the group of paintings from Dunhuang commonly referred to as “itinerant monk paintings.” In an effort to acknowledge the paintings as a tradition unto themselves and highlight their visual language, this study focuses on the issues surrounding Baosheng Buddha and the unique feature of depicting the main icon in motion. The first matter is discussed in relation to the religious and artistic contexts of the inscriptions preserved in some paintings, and possible changes in the main figure’s identity from a monk worshiping Baosheng Buddha to the incarnation itself. The main icon’s mobile nature is examined in terms of its walking posture and cloud vehicle. Considering the tradition of xingdao seng or xing seng (walking monks) in monastery murals, this paper illuminates a growing interest in the Tang (618–907) period in portraying walking monks that underscores their position and role in the world of sentient beings. Furthermore, it demonstrates that the cloud vehicle played a critical role in underlining the main icon’s extensive and rapid travel to facilitate his encounter with and saving of sentient beings.

Author(s):  
Zahra R. Babar

The six oil monarchies of the Persian Gulf together form one of the most concentrated global sites of international labor migration, with some of the highest densities of non-citizens to citizens seen anywhere in the world. A somewhat unique feature of the region is that while it hosts millions of migrants, it allows almost no access to permanent settlement. Gulf States have hosted large cohorts of migrants for more than half a century but have done so without efforts toward formal integration through citizenship. Although labor migration as a phenomenon is both permanent and prominent, the Gulf States’ mechanism for governing migration systematically reinforces the temporariness and transience of their migrant populations.


2021 ◽  
Vol 03 (01) ◽  
pp. 40-47
Author(s):  
Mukhtyar Nabi ◽  
◽  
Saddam Hussain ◽  
Muhammad Kamran ◽  
◽  
...  

Prison is a place for rehabilitation of offenders in every country of the world. The present study has tried to explore the present-day situation of the prison system of Pakistan and discuss its overcrowding condition in all four provinces. There are total 120 prisons in the country which hold authorized space for not more than 57,712 prisoners, but the number of inmates is 77,275, which is far away from the authorized space. This congested prison system not only creates hurdles in rehabilitation of prisoners but makes them more criminal by mixing of low and high frequency offenders. It also leads to various health and behavioral problems. Rehabilitation is only possible if there is balance in authorized and available prisoners in the prisons. The present article has come up with some viable suggestion for concerned authorities that can better perform their duty in eradication of this problem. The authors discussed the role of parole and probation officers in the elimination of these numbers in prison. The majority of the prisoners in our prisons are under-trail, thus the role of the judiciary has also been explored in balancing the incarceration ratio in prisons. Keywords: Prison System, Overcrowded Prisons, Parole and Probation, Judiciary, Courts, Pakistan


2017 ◽  
pp. 42-52
Author(s):  
Debasis Poddar

Hindu Kush Himalayan region (hereafter the HKH) - with 3500 odd kilometres stretched in eight countries- is default resource generation hub for about one-fifth population of the world. The ecosystem-growing delicate these days- seems to play a critical role for the survival of flora and fauna along with the maintenance of all its life-sustaining mountain glaciers. Ten major rivers to carry forward hitherto sustainable development of these peoples fall into question now. Further, in the wake of global climate change today, the delicate HKH ecosystem becomes increasingly fragile to unfold manifold consequences and thereby take its toll on the population. And the same might turn apocalyptic in its magnanimity of irreversibledamage. Like time-bomb, thus, climate ticks to get blown off. As it is getting already too delayed for timely resort to safeguards, if still not taken care of in time, lawmakers ought to find the aftermath too late to lament for. Besides being conscious for climate discipline across the world, collective efforts on the part of all regional states together are imperative to minimize the damage. Therefore, each one has put hands together to be saved from the doomsday that appears to stand ahead to accelerate a catastrophicend, in the given speed of global climate change. As the largest Himalayan state and its central positioning at the top of the HKH, Nepal has had potential to play a criticalrole to engage regional climate change regime and thereby spearhead climate diplomacy worldwide to play regional capital of the HKH ecosystem. As regional superpower, India has had potential to usurp leadership avatar to this end. With reasoningof his own, the author pleads for better jurisprudence to attain regional environmental integrity inter se- rather than regional environmental integration alone- to defendthe vulnerable HKH ecosystem since the same constitutes common concern of humankind and much more so for themselves. Hence, to quote from Shakespeare, “To be or not to be, that is the question” is reasonable here. While states are engaged in the spree to cause mutually agreed destruction, global climate change- with deadly aftermath- poses the last and final unifier for them to turn United Nations in rhetoric sense o f the term.


Author(s):  
Debbie Hopkins ◽  
James Higham

Since the turn of the 21st Century, the world has experienced unprecedented economic, political, social and environmental transformation. The ‘inconvenient truth’ of climate change is now undeniable; rising temperatures and the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme events have resulted in the loss of lives, livelihoods and habitats as well as straining economies. Increasingly mobile lives are often dependent on high carbon modes of transport, representing a substantial contribution to global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the underlying cause of anthropogenic climate change. With growing demand and rising emissions, the transport sector has a critical role to play in achieving GHG emissions reductions, and stabilising the global climate. Low Carbon Mobility Transitions draws interdisciplinary insights on transport and mobilities, as a vast and complex socio-technical system. It presents 15 chapters and 6 shorter ‘case studies’ covering a diversity of themes and geographic contexts across three thematic sections: People and Place, Structures in Transition, and Innovations for Low Carbon Mobility. The three sections are highly interrelated, and with overlapping, complementing, and challenging themes. The contributions offer critical, often neglected insights into low carbon mobility transitions across the world. In doing so, Low Carbon Mobility Transitions sheds light on the place- and context-specific nature of mobility in a climate constrained world.


Author(s):  
Tessa Dwyer

This chapter presents a case study of global TV site Viki (www.viki.com), which offers amateur subtitling in around 200 languages for media from around the world. It focuses on the ways in which fansubbing and fan repurposing of technology has been adopted in the corporate and media industries via crowdsourcing, underscoring the commerce/community tensions that characterise ‘participatory culture’. In its aim to overcome the geopolitical constraints that limit the availability of media in many parts of the globe, Viki deploys a legal, business framework that overrides the national and linguistic biases of professional subtitling and dubbing via the ‘chaos’ of fan agency and interventionist practice. It also pinpoints the critical role played by language and multilingual publics within the evolving dynamics of convergence. Finally, this case study explores claims that fansubbing and other forms of community translation may be contributing to the ongoing marginalisation of linguistically diverse publics by enabling industry players to continue to underserve minor language communities.


Author(s):  
Manu Venugopal

The drug development phase is one of the most time-consuming and expensive stages in the lifecycle of a drug. Marred by patent expirations, price regulations, complexities in disease conditions, life sciences companies are facing a daunting task to bring new molecular entities into the market. Digital health technologies are playing a critical role in addressing some of the challenges faced during drug development. In this chapter, the author talks about the challenges and key trends in the world of drug development, use of new digital health technologies, and the future of drug development. As an example, the author dives into a specific case study on the use of virtual assistants in clinical trials and the benefits of its usage on patients, healthcare professionals, and life sciences companies.


Author(s):  
Robin G. Qiu

In this information era, both business and living communities are truly IT driven and service oriented. As the globalization of the world economy accelerates with the fast advance of networking and computing technologies, IT plays a more and more critical role in assuring real-time collaborations for delivering needs across the world. Nowadays, world-class enterprises are eagerly embracing service-led business models aimed at creating highly profitable service-oriented businesses. They take advantage of their own years of experience and unique marketing, engineering, and application expertise and shift gears toward creating superior outcomes to best meet their customers’ needs in order to stay competitive. IT has been considered as one of the high-value services areas. In this chapter, the discussion will focus on IT as a service. We present IT development, research, and outsourcing as a knowledge service; on the other hand, we argue that IT as a service helps enterprises align their business operations, workforce, and technologies to maximize their profits by continuously improving their performance. Numerous research and development aspects of service-enterprise engineering from a business perspective will be briefly explored, and then computing methodologies and technologies to enable adaptive enterprise service computing in support of service-enterprise engineering will be simply studied and analyzed. Finally, future development and research avenues in this emerging interdisciplinary field will also be highlighted.


Author(s):  
Robin G. Qiu

In this information era, both business and living communities are truly IT driven and service oriented. As the globalization of the world economy accelerates with the fast advance of networking and computing technologies, IT plays a more and more critical role in assuring real-time collaborations for delivering needs across the world. Nowadays, world-class enterprises are eagerly embracing service-led business models aimed at creating highly profitable service-oriented businesses. They take advantage of their own years of experience and unique marketing, engineering, and application expertise and shift gears toward creating superior outcomes to best meet their customers’ needs in order to stay competitive. IT has been considered as one of the high-value services areas. In this chapter, the discussion will focus on IT as a service. We present IT development, research, and outsourcing as a knowledge service; on the other hand, we argue that IT as a service helps enterprises align their business operations, workforce, and technologies to maximize their profits by continuously improving their performance. Numerous research and development aspects of service-enterprise engineering from a business perspective will be briefly explored, and then computing methodologies and technologies to enable adaptive enterprise service computing in support of service-enterprise engineering will be simply studied and analyzed. Finally, future development and research avenues in this emerging interdisciplinary field will also be highlighted.


Author(s):  
Abhishek Singh ◽  
Anjali Kaushik

Citizens are important stakeholders and play a critical role in advocating and enabling public institutions to become more transparent, accountable, and effective and suggest innovative solutions to complex development challenges. Citizen engagement is at the core of good governance. Mygov.in is a platform to engage citizens and get their input and suggestions for various government policies and plans in India. MyGov platform provides an opportunity to citizens across the world to engage directly with the government departments, policymakers, and implementers. MyGov is planned as the key platform for all citizen engagement needs of the country across various departments and ministries. The presence of such a digital platform in a democratic country reflects willingness on part of the government to share information and make citizens a partner in decision making. This chapter elaborates on the need, discusses the MyGov initiative, compares it to other such initiatives globally and highlights major issues and concerns in the citizen engagement process.


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