Chinese-Buddhist Encounter

Western Buddhist Experience: The Journey from Encounter to Commitment in Two Forms of Western Buddhism

This thesis explores the nature of the socialization and commitment process in the Western Buddhist context, by investigating the experiences of practitioners affiliated with two Buddhist Centres: the Theravadin Blue Mountains Insight Meditation Centre and the Gelugpa Tibetan Vajrayana Institute. Commitment by participants is based on the recognition that, through the application of the beliefs...

A Dependency Treebank of the Chinese Buddhist Canon

We present a dependency treebank of the Chinese Buddhist Canon, which contains 1,514 texts with about 50 million Chinese characters. The treebank was created by an automatic parser trained on a smaller treebank, containing four manually annotated sutras (Lee and Kong, 2014). We report results on word segmentation, part-of-speech tagging and dependency parsing, and discuss challenges posed by th...

Prolegomenon to the Study of Medieval Chinese Buddhist Literature

Eye on religion: miracles in the Chinese Buddhist tradition.

Books on Buddhism for general readers rarely mention miracles. Instead, the emphasis is usually on the life of the Buddha, his teachings, and the monastic order, the so-called “Three Treasures.” This is a heritage left by the European scholars who first became interested in Buddhism in the 19 century. Take the example of T.W. Rhys Davids, who founded the Pali Text Society in 1886 in England, an...

17 Buddhist Bioethics

Describing anything as ‘Buddhist’, including in this case a distinctively Buddhist bioethics, is fundamentally problematic from both a historic and Buddhist point of view. Historically, the Buddhist tradition has evolved in dozens of countries for 2500 years, with no one tradition having clear doctrinal authority over the others. Internally, even if a common Buddhist ethics was implicit in the ...