(Post-) Buddhism without Rebirth
Traditional Buddhists tend to believe that rebirth and karma are essential parts of the Buddhist worldview and that one, therefore, cannot be a Buddhist without accepting those. For example, the 14th Dalai Lama has written that โas long as you are a Buddhist, it is necessary to accept past and future rebirthโ, which means that you canโt be a Buddhist without believing in rebirth. Many Buddhist modernists, on the other hand, consider the doctrine of rebirth and karma unimportant, or radically reinterpret it in an attempt to bring it in line with a more or less Western, โmaterialistโ worldview, or...
Universal Liberation
Taixu ๅคช่ was one of the most influential thinkers of modern East-Asian Buddhism. In 1904, at the age of 14, he became a monk at Xiวo Jiวhuรก temple ๅฐไน่ฏๅฏบ in Suzhou, China. Soon after, he developed an interest in modern science, left-wing politics, and Buddhist reform. A decade later (partially due to changing political circumstances) he had himself sealed in a cell in a monastery to study Buddhist scripture and philosophy. After he left his cell in 1917, he revived a Maitreya Pure Land cult, but also continued working for the modernization and revival of Buddhism in China under the...
Buddhism and the State: Rฤjadhamma after the Sattelzeit (New Paper)
Published today in the Journal of Buddhist Ethics. abstract โ Rฤjadhamma is a list of ten royal virtues or duties that occurs in the jฤtaka tales and that has been influential in Southeast Asian Buddhist political thought. Like pre-modern political thought in Europe โ that is, thought before the Sattelzeit โ Buddhist political thought lacks a concept of the โstateโ and is concerned with kings and similar rulers. Here I propose a modernized interpretation of rฤjadhamma as virtues/duties of the state. The full text (in pdf format) can be downloaded here.