Author affiliation: Franklin and Marshall College. Special Focus: Buddhists and the Making of Modern Chinese Societies
關鍵詞
secularism; modern Buddhism; meditation; mindfulness; vipassanā
摘要
Buddhism in the modern world offers an example of (1) the porousness of the boundary between the secular and religious; (2) the diversity, fluidity, and constructedness of the very categories of religious and secular, since they appear in different ways among different Buddhist cultures in divergent national contexts; and (3) the way these categories nevertheless have very real-world effects and become drivers of substantial change in belief and practice. Drawing on a few examples of Buddhism in various geographical and political settings, I hope to take a few modest steps toward illuminating some broad contours of the interlacing of secularism and Buddhism. In doing so, I am synthesizing some of my own and a few others’ research on modern Buddhism, integrating it with some current research I am doing on meditation, and considering its implications for thinking about secularism. This, I hope, will provide a background against which we can consider more closely some particular features of Buddhism in the Chinese cultural world, about which I will offer some preliminary thoughts.
目次
The Religious-Secular Binary 112 Secularism and Early Buddhist Modernism 115 S. N. Goenka and the De-Religioning of Meditation 117 The Secularization of Meditation 119 Secularism and the Reconfiguration of Buddhism in China and Tibet 122 Buddhism, Binaries, and Ironies 126 References 127
