The New Polytheism: Updating the Dialogue between East and West (original) (raw)
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Special Series : The Spirit of India — Buddhism and Hinduism ( 1 )
2003
Daisaku Ikeda, the president of Soka Gakkai International (SGI), and Ved P. Nanda, the renowned scholar of international law and vice provost and professor at the University of Denver, are currently collaborating, via correspondence, on the publication of their dialogues. The dialogues between the two leaders took place during their meetings in 1994, 1996, and 1997. During the professor’s 1997 visit to Japan, an agreement was reached to publish the dialogues. Since then, the terrorist attacks on the U.S. in 2001 have plunged the world into a frightening new era, revealing an underlying virulent animosity pushing civilizations toward conflict, and compelling humanity in the 21st century to pursue the well-being of all the world’s peoples and build a harmonious global society through dialogue between the civilizations. In their dialogues, President Ikeda and Professor Nanda discuss how to awaken in humanity a vision of hope as they explore the following themes from the viewpoint of Bu...
Buddhism and Global Secularisms
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. T he wave of scholarship on secularism that has arisen in recent decades paints a more nuanced picture than the reigning model throughout most of the twentieth century. For most of the twentieth century, social theorists adhered to a linear narrative of secularism as a global process of religion waning and becoming less relevant to public life. In this view, the processes of disenchantment, social differentiation, displacement, and the growing dominance of instrumental reasoning and scientific thinking would gradually come to occupy the spaces once inhabited by religion, and religion would fade away or at least become increasingly a matter of private belief. The classical secularization narrative parallels a prominent narrative of Buddhism in the modern world. In the nineteenth and twentieth-century, authors from around the globe began to create a narrative of Buddhism, celebrating the rediscovery of " true " Buddhism, in part by western scholars: a Buddhism of texts, philosophy, psychology, meditation, and ethics that contrasted starkly with the " degenerate " Buddhism that colonists found on the ground in places they occupied. The latter Buddhism was
Truth, Diversity, and the Incomplete Project of Modern Hinduism (2008)
Hermeneutics and Hindu Thought: Toward a Fusion of …, 2008
This constructive philosophical and hermeneutical project seeks to begin the reconception of Neoved›ntic thought in order to better approximate modern Hindu aspirations towards universality and pluralism, as well as to facilitate the translation of Hindu categories into the terminology of the modern Western world. Focusing first on such representatives of the Hindu tradition as Sw›mı Day›nanda Sar›swatı (the founder of the Ärya Sam›j), Sri Ramakrishna, Sri Aurobindo, and Mahatma Gandhi, I explore the compatibility of their thought with Alfred North Whitehead's system of process thought and Jain philosophy. I then develop a preliminary outline of a pluralistic Hindu process theology. The compatibility of both Jainism and process thought with Neoved›nta will be examined, as well as the ability of a synthesis of all three to articulate, in a way that is both logically elegant and compelling, some of the deeper assumptions underlying the views of modern Hindu thinkers, specifically on the issue of truth and religious diversity.
Synthesis philosophica, 2017
Being a Bosnian pioneer in the field of Eastern and comparative philosophy, the author of this essay on understanding is personally dedicated to the cultivation of a new spirit of philosophy that cuts across classical borders and opens its understanding of "universality" to a multitude of cultural and intellectual histories. Paving the way for establishing a platform for an Islamic-Hinduist-Buddhist-Confucian dialogue in the Balkans, while simultaneously joining hands with what has already been done in the meantime by other researchers in this field, and exploring Buddhist, Chinese and Islamic studies in the context of the persisting challenges that India, China, and the Islamic world face, he believes that the broadening of philosophical horizons in this regard will be an exciting experience and a cross-cultural exchange taking into account that dialogue between them is more than necessary today-especially when dialogue increases the effectiveness of listening as the basis for symbiotic coexistence. Also, this essay underlines the importance of a relation between the contemporary Islamic, Chinese, and Buddhist thought and civilisation, as well as the importance of Islamic works in the language of neo-Confucianism, and the rise of an intellectual current in China called Han Kitab and prominent Chinese-Muslim thinkers such as Liu Zhi, Ma Zhu, Wang Daiyu and others. The interaction between the Islamic, Hinduist and Buddhist thought is also stressed in the paper. Finally, the author summarises what he had learned from Tu Weiming, Sachiko Murata, S. H. Nasr and other prominent scholars about the unique blend of Buddhism and Confucianism in their relation with Islam, which has made up its appearance and development in India and China for over one millennium and especially from the seventeenth century onwards. Those acquainted with Islamic languages will find a wealth of terminology that will help bridge the gap between the included philosophical and theological traditions in their quest for global peace. Finally, intersecting worlds and identities, the author presents a common universe of the included discourses, which is today pushed aside by tunnel vision and short-sightedness, in these miserable times of unprecedented parochialism and narrow-mindedness, instead of keeping the matter in these academic tracks, which will inevitably stimulate true intercultural thinking and dialogue between civilisations in relation to globalisation and cultural pluralisation embodying the wisdom of our predecessors in philosophy and creating a worldwide symbiotic society for the 21st century.
Hinduism Meets the Global World: the "Easternization" of the West?
The Changing World Religion Map, ed. Stan Brunner, vol. 3, part VII. Springer: Berlin:, 2015
As a rapidly expanding collection of recent literatures has demonstrated, the topic of “religious diasporas” and their consequences for the West has received considerable attention over the last several years, particularly in the light of globalization, new modes of migration and increasing ethnic and religious diversity (Esman, 2009; Knott & McLoughlin, 2010; Safran, 2007).1 And although much of this attention has been focused on Muslims and so-called Islamic fundamentalism, “Hindus” and their various cultural and religious traditions have received a good deal of consideration as well, especially with respect to the discourse on the so-called “resurgence of religion.”2 Judging from the increase in Islamaphobia and other related phenomena, it would appear that the impact of Muslim traditions has been largely negative (Allen, 2010; Sander, 2010, 2011; Sander & Larsson, 2006). And yet even Eurabianism’s voice of alarm that warns against the impending “Islamization of the West” views the “Muslim threat” more in terms of its external challenge to Western cultural, political and social ideals than its capacity to deeply penetrate and fundamentally transform “indigenous Western” views, beliefs, values, standards, etc. (for example, Bawer, 2006; Caldwell, 2009: Fallaci, 2002; Sander, 2010; Ye’or, 2005). In other words, the factual impact of Islam on “Western consciousness” is considered to have been generally small. When it comes to Hindu traditions, on the other hand, the opposite seems to have been the case, especially since the 1960s, that is, the Western reception of Indic philosophies and religions can be best portrayed as a philia (a fondness) and not as a phobia (an aversion). According to Colin Campbell (2007), for example, the ideas, beliefs and practices of Indian religious traditions have today so extensively penetrated various sectors of Western culture and consciousness that it is not unreasonable to characterize the half-century event as “the Easternization of the West:” a fundamental cultural shift in worldview towards an Eastern ideal type.