Lost in Žižek, Redeemed in Cloud Atlas: Buddhism and Other Tales of "Asian Religions" in Western Cinema and Affective Circulation (original) (raw)
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Dynamic Encounters between Buddhism and the West
East Asian Journal of Philosophy, 2024
Contents -Dynamic Encounters Between Buddhism and the West Introduction Laura Langone & Alexandra Ilieva 1-6 -Early Encounters With Buddhism Some medieval European travelogue authors offer first insights into a foreign religion. Explorations of an unchartered territory Albrecht Classen 7-24 -Declaring Buddhism Dead in the 19th Century The Meiji oligarchy and protestant mission in Japan a foreign religion. Explorations of an unchartered territory Tomoe I. M. Steineck 25-45 -Between Awakening and Enlightenment The first modern Asian Buddhist and the first Buddhist Englishman Iain Sinclair 47-73 -Sublime Disappearances Feeling Buddhism in late-nineteenth-century Western music Julian Butterfield 75-93 -Absolute Nothingness and World History Universalizing Asian logic as a world-historical mission Niklas Söderman 95-113 -Befriending Things on a Field of Energies With Dōgen and Nietzsche Graham Parkes 115-137 -Wabi-Sabi and Kei How Sen no Rikyū’s Zen-inspired ideas of human placedness and interpersonal respect enable a human-present world-harmonizing (Wa) within object-oriented ontology Jason Morgan 139-157 -The Question Concerning Technology A Japanese reply Tiago Mesquita Carvalho 159-187 -Madhyamaka and Pyrrhonian Approaches to the Skeptical Way of Life Christopher Paone 189-209 -Two Paths A critique of Husserl's view of the Buddha Jason K. Day 211-232
In this paper, I analyse the image creation of Zen Buddhism as emerges from films produced in Europe and North America. In particular, I explore Marc Rosenbush’s Zen Noir (2004), Zen & Zero by Michael Ginthör (2006), and Erleuchtung Garantiert (1999) by Doris Dörrie. Comparatively, I examine a recent Japanese production on the life and teachings of the Sōtō Zen master Dōgen titled Zen and directed by Takahashi Banmei (2009). The aim of this analysis is to explore if and how depictions of Zen in western movies mirror representations of this religious tradition made ad hoc for the ‘West’ and, conversely, what is the image of Zen Buddhism as appears in Japanese productions. This will be considered in a comparative perspective in order to identify differences, possible common patterns and mutual influences which may have shaped the cinematic perception of this form of Japanese Buddhism in Europe and North America.
Review of Buddhism and American Cinema Edited by John Whalen-Bridge and Gary Storhoff
The strength of this volume is in the number of articles that (1) describe the orientalism inherent in certain representations of Buddhism and (2) critique the alarming trend to pass off violence as " Buddhism " in American cinema. The weakness of the volume is in the number of articles that (3) are possibly orientalist in their representations of Buddhism and (4) have a tendency to pass off immoral action as " Buddhism " in American cinema. The tension between these four types of articles is nothing if not curious, but may be attributable to the differing methodologies of the various authors. This review treats examples of these four types of articles. It also offers suggestions for understanding this incongruity and, at times, offers alternative interpretations to those of the authors.
Of Light and Shadows: Buddhism, Cinema, and the Question of Diffused Religion in Modern China
International Journal of Buddhist Thought & Culture, 2024
While the scholarship on premodern Chinese Buddhism has explored the tradition’s rich diffusion throughout various realms of sociocultural life, the study of modern Chinese Buddhism leans heavily towards its monastic, institutional, and overtly “religious” forms. This split mirrors the logic of modern secularization, whereby religion should be rationally differentiated from the broader social fabric, institutionalized, and delimited within its own discrete functional sphere. This article rethinks the putative rupture between Chinese Buddhism’s past and present incarnations. Through the prism of cinema, a technology that arrived on Chinese shores at the same moment as the Western concept of religion, I illuminate the overlooked continuities between premodern and modern diffusions of Buddhist thought and culture. Drawing from film theory, evolutionary anthropology, and religion and media studies, the first section constructs a selective genealogy of proto-cinematic phenomena across the history of religions in China. I highlight three transmedia genres—lantern shadow plays, medieval “transformation tableaux” paintings, and late imperial vernacular novels—that illustrate how Buddhistic “sight and sound” was enmeshed with religious pedagogy, ritual practices, social ethics, and popular entertainment in premodern society. The second section examines the ways in which film’s advent, indigenization, and growth overlapped with coeval transformations of the Chinese religious field during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At a time when traditional religiosities were being institutionalized or anathemized by political power, the cinema, I argue, served as an intermedial space where Buddhist morals, myths, aesthetics, and epistemic sensibilities continued unobstructed, at least until the early 1930s. Finally, I conclude with brief reflections on some avenues for future research in Chinese Buddhism, secular Buddhism, and religion and media studies.
Religious Concepts in Popular Film (Case Study: Buddhism in Martial Arts Cinema
Cinema is a medium that shifts the borders of reality and imagination; hence this medium can be used to express concepts that also consider the distinction between reality and fiction (illusion). One of the traditions deeply dedicated to reality and illusion is the Buddhist tradition, and the cinema that has been formed under the influence of this tradition, through the cultural traditions of the land of China, is the Martial Arts cinema. Not only can a picture narration of many of the complex philosophical concepts of Buddhism be seen in this cinema, but without regard towards the Buddhist concepts, many of the pictures of this cinema would not be understandable and deemed as childish and worthless. In this paper, while stating the common features of cinema and Buddhism, we have tried to show some of the complex but fundamental concepts of Buddhism, including atheism, despondency, ideology, suffering, and compassion within the Martial Arts cinema.
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
The masters go West : A story of Buddhism ’ s adaptation to new " fields
2013
The reach and appeal of Buddhism are its faculty of adaptation to other cultural backgrounds and languages, and its egalitarian view of sentient beings. Taking a cultural anthropology perspective, this paper would like to illustrate the fact that Buddhism as a globalized and multi-faceted religion is not a new phenomenon, and that Tibetan Buddhism’s diffusion in the West is due to different factors.