Buddhist amulets have been a topic of academic research for decades. But scholarly presuppositions that amulets have circulated primarily in popular Buddhist milieus, related only tangentially to the pursuits of elite practitioners, has limited our appreciation of how amulets have inflected philosophical and contemplative concerns. This article aims to challenge this lopsided perspective by...
Contemporary Buddhist meditators in the West are likely to find themselves engaged in practices with rich associations with both religious and scientific worldviews. Meditation-related challenges can provoke existential concerns that make unexplored relationships between religious and scientific worldviews more important and explicit for Western Buddhist meditators, who may turn to both...
This paper is a proposal for analyzing the Pārāyanavagga as a text that fundamentally expresses a theory of intentionality in early Buddhism. Through a comparison with Husserl’s phenomenology and Peirce’s phaneroscopy, the paper argues that the contents of the Pārāyanavagga—as reintroduced in later suttas that further develop these reflections and which will be analyzed in depth—reveal how...
ABSTRACT Thai religious and ritual life is diverse and dynamic, drawing on a wide range of influences including Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism, Brahmanism and spirit cults. A notable feature of Thai religiosity is its productivity, with a continual increase in the number of new spiritual figures at the centre of devotional cults that often have no direct precedents in established forms of...
The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered a global mental health crisis, leading to widespread psychological distress and long-term impacts, as highlighted by the WHO on World Mental Health Day 2022. Beyond the pandemic, increasing life pressures and traumatic experiences further elevate the risk of mental disorders, particularly psychosomatic conditions where psychological factors affect physical...
The aim of this article is to put Śaṅkara's (c.750 CE) deconstructions of individual identity in dialogue with his ethical support of Vedic identity categories. Śaṅkara is regarded as one of the most significant propounders of the ancient Veda-rooted (āstika) tradition (darśana) of Advaita Vedānta. This tradition argues that the innermost self (ātman) of all individuals (jīva) is non-dual...
Empirical evidence has demonstrated the beneficial effects of mindfulness in the enhancement of positive psychology factors and cognitive performances, as well as in the remission of psychological distress. Researchers have proposed mechanisms for mindfulness' comprehensive effects, such as through mental flexibility, and examined indices of neurophysiological changes. This study provided a new...
The strategy of this paper is to explore how traditional Buddhist teachings respond to contemporary challenges. The effects of these contemporary crises have brought immense tribulation globally. We humans can create and destroy the natural relationships of the environment. Since the twentieth century, Buddhism has been revived with its new way of response, as Buddha's teachings mainly focus on...
This article aims to provide a comparative analysis between Husserl’s phenomenology and the Pāli Abhidhamma. To conduct this analysis, I will mainly draw on some books of the Abhidhamma and three works by Husserl. What emerges from this study are interesting convergences between the two systems of thought, which allow us to consider, in some respects, a true Buddhist phenomenology codified in...
The Abhidhamma, a classical Buddhist doctrine, offers a profound understanding of cognitive processing and sensory perception, concepts formulated over 2700 years ago and recently reflected in modern neuroscience. It presents a sophisticated cognitive model in which consciousness (citta), mental factors (cetasika), and materiality (rūpa) co-arise and function in a causally interdependent...