Amy K. Donahue. ‘Exclusion, violence, and reference: A poststructuralist reading of the classical Nyāya and Buddhist pramāṇa debates’. PhD diss., University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, 2011. 172 pp. UMI Number: 3485454.
From the Abstract
The dissertation draws on the work of contemporary poststructuralist queer, feminist, and postcolonial theorists to set the ground for a poststructuralist reading of the classical Nyāya and Buddhist Pramāna debates.
Pha bong kha pa Byams pa bstan ʼdzin ʼphrin las rgya mtsho (David Gonsalez, tr.) The extremely secret Dakini of Naropa: Vajrayogini practice and commentary. Ithaca, N.Y.: Snow Lion Publications, 2011. 408 pp. ISBN 9781559393867. [official site]
From the Blurb
The Extremely Secret Dakini of Naropa is the commentary to the practice of Vajrayogini in the Naro Kacho lineage composed by Kyabje Pabongkha [1874–1941] as revealed to him directly by Vajrayogini herself. This text has become the basis for almost every subsequent Vajrayogini commentary in the Gelug tradition.
Restriction: The material in this book is restricted. This book may be read only by those who have received a Highest Yoga Tantra empowerment. [Unless you are an Indologist, in which case you may consider this requirement beneath you.]
Extreme philology: typed text can be recovered from a reflected image of the writer’s hand motions, even when the writing device itself is in motion and the writing itself is invisible. For example, if you sit at the front of a vehicle and type on a mobile phone, someone at the back of the vehicle can record the reflection in glasses or a window and extract the typed text from the recording. The process is innovative, but its constituent elements are not; it chains digital magnification, image stabilization, difference matting and optical character recognition into a single hair-raising violation of privacy:
Rahul Raguram, Andrew White, Dibyendusekhar Goswami, Fabian Monrose and Jan-Michael Frahm. ‘iSpy: Automatic Reconstruction of Typed Input from Compromising Reflections’. ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), 2011. [author’s site / PDF]
From the Abstract
Using footage captured in realistic environments (e.g., on a bus), we show that we are able to reconstruct fluent translations of recorded data in almost all of the test cases, correcting users’ typing mistakes at the same time. We believe these results highlight the importance of adjusting privacy expectations in response to emerging technologies.
Karen Maria Muldoon-Hules. ‘Brides of the Buddha and Other Stories: Reading the Women’s Stories of the 8th “Varga” of the “Avadānaśataka” in Context’. PhD dissertation, University of California at Los Angeles, 2011. 455 pages. ISBN: 9781124885032; ProQuest document ID 2462477631.
author: @ UCLA. Book: 2017. Brides of the Buddha: Nuns’ Stories from the Avadanasataka. ISBN 9781498511452 [official site]
From the Abstract
There has been little in the way of systematic examinations of the evidence on marriage customs among Buddhists, and our understanding of the lives of early Buddhist women is still quite limited. Much of what has been published on early Buddhist women is based on Pali texts from Sri Lanka. Fortunately, ten stories or avadanas about women in the Avadānaśataka, a north Indian text probably compiled 2nd-4th century C.E., offer a chance to nuance [sic] that understanding. These stories provide evidence for marital customs among north Indian Buddhists during this period, customs that show significant Brahmanical influence. In addition, these ten avadānas hint at a changing position for Buddhist nuns that may have been related to an increasingly conservative view of women emerging in the Brahmanical tradition and a revamping of the asrama system into sequential life-stages for men.
David R. Kittay. ‘Interpreting the Vajra Rosary: Truth and Method Meets Wisdom and Method’. PhD diss., Columbia University, 2011. xxii+820 pp. ISBN: 9781124782362. ProQuest document ID: 2428776231.
Abstract
This essay, accompanied by the first full English translation of the Vajramālā or Vajra Rosary, one of the explanatory Tantras of the Buddhist Guhyasamāja, or Secret Community, Tantric system, and a partial translation of Alaṃkakalaśa’s Commentary, sets out a novel hermeneutic method by which twenty-first century scholars of religion might approach the interpretation of the Tantra and other texts.
Add a punctuation mark to improve this paragraph (p.783).
Zo Margaret Newell. ‘Picturing the Goddess: Images and the Imagination of Modern Hindu Religious Identity’. PhD diss., Vanderbilt University, May 2011. 293 pp. [official site / PDF]
From the Abstract
This project inquires into the role of visual print technology in the construction of a pan-Indian sense of religious identity at the end of the colonial era. I take as my starting point the statement by Sri Ramakrishna of Calcutta that “a real Hindu” is someone who has, and worships, pictures of deities — specifically, pictures of the mother goddess — and proceed to the phenomenological and historical consideration of a selected set of images.
Zonewell (2010:258 Fig.42). A good man goes to war.
Jonathan Silk not only studies Mahāyāna Buddhism; he thinks about it as well. Is that unusual? Put it this way: I feel that I can recommend his work on that basis alone.
For starters: timely thoughts on Buddhist studies in his Oratie, Lies, Slander and the Study of Buddhism, delivered April 1st, 2008 (but no laughing matter). Offering so much to discuss, I present just this excerpt:
I would be a happy man had I a nickel — that’s a small denomination American coin – for every time I have been told that Buddhism is not a religion, but rather a philosophy, a way of life. This is more than a rhetorical strategy by which an interested Westerner allows himself to explore Buddhism without feeling an apostate for doing so. For it derives its validity only by denying Buddhist traditions their intrinsic identity, and Buddhists — traditional, Asian Buddhists — their autonomy. Once one denies that Buddhism is a religion, it ceases to be an integral part of anyone’s life. Buddhism becomes something optional, adventitious, incidental even to the people whose lives it structures. For Westerners disaffected with religion, this may be a happy solution. But at least for the scholar, it is an impossibility, for it constitutes a refusal to acknowledge the tradition in its multiplicity and complexity, or even in its most intrinsic nature. [2008:12]
Stout, Daniel R. ‘How the Buddhist concept of Right Speech would be applied towards diplomatic actions using the media: a case study from the 2002 State of the Union’. M.A. thesis, 2009. [http://hdl.handle.net/2097/1485/PDF]
From the Abstract
State of the Union Address, 2003 (AP)In this analysis it is argued that current strategies of media diplomacy do lead to violence because they encourage power plays, violence, and overemphasis on national ego. The proposed alternative is to embrace a Buddhist alternative identified as Right Speech to overcome current deficiencies. The study found that President Bush’s 2002 State of the Union violated the tenets of Right Speech. The implications of violations including the increased likelihood of violence between nation states will be discussed.
* Royal, James F. Buddhism and the Production of American Cool. PhD Dissertation, University of Florida, May 2010. [PDF]
Keanu Reeves as Siddhartha Gautama
Today there is no shortage of people in the Western hemisphere who identify as Buddhist. At the same time, there is a remarkable absence of the Buddhist mainstream transmitted in Sanskritic texts and institutions in the West. Have you ever wondered why it is so hard to find anything like the pan-Indian tradition in your neck of the woods? More to the point, just how Buddhist are the icons of Buddhism which have sprung up in North America and elsewhere?
Such questions rarely receive the attention they deserve in the literature on self-styled Western Buddhism. Now, I am pleased to say, a new dissertation by James F. Royal* sheds light of unprecedented brilliance upon the Western milieu.
One of Royal’s main claims is that much of the Buddhist presence in the West is less about putting Buddhism into practice in a new context than about neutering and undermining it. Buddhism is made to align with the notion of cool, which Royal defines as:
a key guiding motif in the marketing of postwar and then post-Cold War consumer culture for middle-class America.
An ideology of renunciation becomes a quest for personal aggrandisement; ego-denial becomes ego-affirmation. This redefinition of Buddhism is enacted and encouraged by a number of high-profile media players:
American films and advertisements of the last 20 years have taken the religion as a sign of Otherness that itself seems to promote consumption and America’s technological lineage of control.
In his dissertation, Royal examines not only the teachings but the motives of such figures as:
…Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose use of Buddhism for capitalist-imperialist ends set the stage for the work of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. […] later uses of the religion, in 1990s film and 2000s advertisement, show a Buddhism that is more overtly procapitalist, a move that reflects America’s identity crisis in the post-Cold War, especially in its relationship with China, but also Asia generally.
While Royal also examines self-styled Buddhists who “ostensibly provided a critique of capitalism”, his overriding concern is to show how
the discourse of cool has tried to appropriate seemingly subversive elements back into the capitalist fold.
Although I have not yet seen Dr. Royal’s dissertation in full—an extract was kindly provided—I expect that it could become a landmark in our understanding of how Buddhism is made to appear in the West, and more generally, how it is subverted to carry out the ends of modern consumerism.
Abstract (part): One of the most remarkable facets of capitalism is its ability to incorporate disparate, even antithetical, systems into its ever-enlarging sphere of influence, especially in the 20th and 21st centuries as technology makes the world interconnected. To make such a transformation, consumer capitalism has employed a discourse of ‘cool’ to rein in potentially threatening figures and ideologies and bring them back into the circuits of consumption. Especially ripe for analysis is the incorporation of Buddhism, since the creed is the fastest-growing of the world religions in the U.S. The key moment for its mobilization, the 1950s, occurred during a period of escalating tensions with communism, in which a flourishing consumer capitalism was touted as the way to defeat the U.S.S.R. During this period, representations of Buddhism entered pop culture as a challenge to mainstream consumerism. Yet, now representations of Buddhism support consumer capitalism, for instance, in ads and films. Thus, this dissertation seeks to understand how seemingly antithetical discourses can promote the proliferation of capitalism, and how political and capitalist imperatives can motivate representations of a foreign religion. This dissertation examines postwar figures who have used Buddhism in their cultural productions, although it highlights writers from earlier periods who framed Buddhism for later adoption.
