This chapter traces the cultural history of lotus in the Chinese tradition: from its appearance in The Classic of Poetry and Han dynasty rhapsodies to the exuberant wordplay on ‘lotus’/’love” in the popular songs of the Southern Dynasties, from the flower of carnal desires to a symbol of enlightenment in Buddhism, from the neo-Confucian appropriation of the lotus as a sign of moral purity to the name of the most notorious female character in Chinese fiction, lotus is inscribed with various literary, cultural, social, and religious significance. Focusing on the changing and expanding story of the lotus, this chapter suggests that the lotus is a plant of hybridity, a site of contested meanings, and that its botanical and literary lives are intricately intertwined with the social and cultural histories of China.

This chapter explores the long-term patterns of mainland south-east Asian strategic conduct and the variables behind it. In this region, the ancient Khmer Empire, the Tai polities and the Burmese, whose statecraft was influenced by Hindu and Buddhist belief, were warlike. The Hindu–Buddhist imperial concept of cakravati became the expansionistic norm shared among ambitious monarchs. Thereupon, the south-east Asian polities continually engaged in warfare to impose control over the population and tributaries. Wars were waged to displace the mass of the vanquished to enhance the victor’s economic capacity and prestige. The development of military strategy and war aims generally were geared towards the displacement and resettlement of the enemy population. Interestingly, territorial gains were minor objectives except for the crucial lines of communication and coastal areas vital for trade; polities would secure and expand their power spheres rather than dominating demarcated spaces. The fortification of the central polity also led to protracted siege warfare. In this war of attrition, stratagems, such as ruses and guerilla raids on enemy camps and supply lines, were widely employed against invading armies. There were continual shifts from forceful subjugation and vassalage to the strategic destruction of enemy polities from the twelfth to the nineteenth century in order to seize the centre. Failure to muster manpower and secure influences led to the decline and destruction of the state by more aggressive neighbors. Polities that survived or were revived then pursued a more expansionist policy and waged pre-emptive warfare against smaller states and peer competitors. The military means to achieve such strategic goals consisted of a mass of corvée forces that formed the main body. The core of the army consisted of skilled professional units comprising the aristocratic royal elite and foreign adventurer ‘specialist’ mercenaries. Gunpowder weapons became the crucial instruments to maintain tactical superiority on the battlefield and in siege warfare, as well as assuring control over the displaced population. War elephants and cavalry forces operated as shock units to smash and scatter enemy forces in set-piece battles. However, sieges were the majority of military conduct.

This chapter explores political developments in the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) from the coup against President Ngô Đình Diệm in November 1963 to the consolidation of General Nguyễn Văn Thiệu’s power as president in late 1968. The dominant feature of politics in the RVN during this time was the monopolization of political power by a divided military. But noncommunist civilian groups challenged military rule in the form of street protests, armed rebellion, and constitutional assemblies, forcing the military to accede to elections and the return to constitutional government in 1967. These changes created limited opportunities for competitive politics but also granted a veneer of legitimacy to military rule as Nguyễn Văn Thiệu won election and outmaneuvered his rivals within the armed forces. The chapter addresses the powerful influence that the United States, as well as historic faultlines in Vietnamese noncommunist nationalism such as religion, regionl and differing experiences of colonialism and communism, exercised on RVN politics. The chapter contends that the RVN was both an outpost of the American empire and a site of febrile postcolonial politics.

Barth’s idea of religion as faithless, wilful and arbitrary.

Barth’s discussion of religion limited to the Abrahamic faiths.

Buddhism as not wilful and self-centred

Affinities between Buddhism and Christianity Hinduism as a way of devotion to a personal Lord.

Religions as complementary ways of true faith

East Asian ways as preparations for life in God

Religions as giving different descriptions of spiritual reality.

Barth’ later recognition of truth in other faiths, but only when agreeing with revelation in Christ.

The global and historical entanglements between articifial intelligence (AI)/robotic technologies and Buddhism, as a lived religion and philosophical tradition, are significant. This chapter sets out three key sites of interaction between Buddhism and AI/robotics. First, Buddhism, as an ontological model of mind (and body) that describes the conditions for what constitutes artificial life. Second, Buddhism defines the boundaries of moral personhood and thus the nature of interactions between human and non-human actors. And finally, Buddhism can be used as an ethical framework to regulate and direct the development of AI/robotics technologies. It argues that Buddhism provides an approach to technology that is grounded in the interdependence of all things, and this gives rise to both compassion and an ethical commitment to alleviate suffering.

Chapter 4 explains why Christianity did not become the faith of more than a small minority of warlords and why it was rejected and ultimately persecuted by the rulers who unified Japan in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The plural religious scene – including competing sects of Buddhism, alongside Confucianism and Shinto – afforded an intellectual opening for Christianity. This mattered in particular to the conversion of certain elites in the Gokinai of the 1560s. However, the most emotional debates centred on the dynamics of immanent power noted in the last chapter, and here Buddhism, as a transcendentalist system, found ways of countering the force of Christian arguments. Indeed, on an institutional level, too, the sangha represented a formidable enemy for daimyo contemplating conversion. This chapter then proceeds to analyse the actions, diplomatic letters and anti-Christian edicts of Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Ieyasu in order to identify the terms by which Christianity was identified as a subversive and unnecessary force. The transcendental elements of Japanese religion therefore played a decisive role in constraining the reach of the Japanese Christian movement. Lastly, the unifiers were intent on sacralising their authority, particularly post-mortem, and Christianity had little to offer in this regard.

This chapter examines Kerouac’s Buddhism and is informed by archival research of his unpublished Buddhist writing, which in provides a more complete understanding of Kerouac’s Buddhism than what can be learned from his published works. A detailed analysis of his published and unpublished writing reveals that Kerouac’s Buddhist period should be separated into an Early Buddhist Period (1953–58) and a Later Buddhist Period (1959–mid-1960s). Kerouac’s Early Buddhist Period is one of intense study and practice. And while his enthusiasm for the religion certainly decreased from 1959 to his death in 1969, it is inaccurate to state that he did not study Buddhism after 1958, as revealed by his unpublished diaries. Thus, 1959 through to 1967 should be identified as his Later Buddhist Period during which he continued his textual study, occasional meditation practice, and reworking of Buddhist texts. Additionally, this chapter argues that Kerouac believed himself to be a transmitter of Buddhism for Americans and that the Buddhism he believed helped his own suffering – and was, by extension, most useful for American practitioners – was largely rooted in the Diamond Sūtra (Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra) and in key Mahāyāna ideas.

Rich historical records from pre-modern Japan allow us to imagine ‘sexuality’ despite the absence of an explicit lexicon referring to it. The chapter examines three systems of thought: the Kami (Deities) Way, Mahayana Buddhism, and Confucianism. The Kami Way was the native cult and the spiritual foundation for Japan’s first state. Inscribed in its texts such as the Kojiki (Records of Ancient Matters, 712 CE) are vivid descriptions of deities’ bodies and performances steeped in symbolic meanings. Buddhism’s treatment of sexuality varied as widely as its diverse offerings of doctrines and practices. At least for the priestly figures, however, it denounced desire for and intercourse with women but affirmed sex with men. Confucianism, which arrived from the continent alongside Buddhism, taught social order and disapproved of all human relations, including sexual ones, that threatened the stable moral order and the gender hierarchy. The three systems of thought operated symbiotically, and reflected and shaped social rules, norms, and power relations of a given historical moment. Mostly more celebratory than condemning of the sexual body, pre-modern sources have no vocabulary for virginity as a boundary to be guarded or conquered, nor a body-altering institution such as the castration of eunuchs.

This chapter provides an overview of Buddhist sexualities ranging from monastic celibacy in India, China and Japan, to Buddhist lay sexualities, to altruistic sexuality in Indian Mahayana Buddhism. It then examines religious sexuality in tantra in India and Tibet, including transgressive discourses in Indian Buddhist liturgies and sexual yoga techniques in Tibetan Buddhist literature. The chapter argues that these diverse and contradictory discourses all represent a shared concern with regulating sexuality and harnessing it for soteriological purposes. Both the renunciation of sensual experience in Indian monastic literature and the embrace of sensual experience in Tibetan sexual yoga have been framed as means for relieving suffering and attaining soteriological success. With examples from Vinaya literature, yogini tantras, premodern and contemporary literature, this chapter highlights the rich diversity of Buddhist sexualities and gender constructs.

Wagner’s fascination with Indian literary culture followed a similar impulse from Schopenhauer, Friedrich Schlegel, and Karl Köppen, among others, as part of an ‘oriental renaissance’. The German construction of India, after William Jones’ pioneering work on Sanskrit Upanishads while in the East India Company, accrued around the promise of philological routes to the origins of world culture, demonstrating a primordial link between Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit. It also offers a context for Wagner’s passion for Buddhism, as distinct from Vedic Hinduism, and the figure of the Buddha, most notable in Die Sieger and Parsifal, but also traceable in the Ring.

This chapter sketches the main features of the landscape of “faith” in Tokugawa-period Japan. This was a time when every person in Japan was legally obliged to register with a Buddhist temple, while simultaneously most people were actively engaged in numerous other faith-related activities, from membership in pilgrimage groups to making donations to roaming troupes of pseudo-religious street performers. The multifarious purveyors of faith-related services competed for custom, and the authorities were obliged to arbitrate in a never-ending stream of lawsuits and conflicts. Temple affiliation was rendered compulsory because faith needed to be policed, so as to ensure that “pernicious creeds” (notably foreign Christianity) would not corrupt the populace. Yet warrior administrators consistently refused to become a party in disputes about doctrinal matters, preferring to grant people a free choice in matters of faith and limit temples’ hold over their parishioners.

The poet Rabindranath Tagore linked the scholarly quest for ‘India in Asia’ to visions of an Indian cultural renaissance, Asianist agendas and the Visva-Bharati project to inaugurate a global civilizational dialogue. This chapter examines the relationship between Orientalist scholarship, interwar Asianism and emerging visions of Indian exceptionalism. Tagore and like-minded GIS-members mobilized the ancient, transregional circulation of Buddhism to pitch Greater India as an internationalist template with contemporary relevance. Epitomizing India’s civilizational legacies abroad, the ancient Pan-Asian Buddhist ecumene was evoked as a cultural counter-geography and harmonious ‘empire of culture’. Reinforcing Theosophical visions of ancient India as Asia’s spiritual fount, and drawing on the visionary writings of the Japanese art historian Okakura Tenshin, this Buddhist past, and especially the legacies of the Mauryan emperor Ashoka, were contrasted with the aggressive mode of past and present Western colonizing schemes. The topos of ‘ancient bonds’ energized calls to unite under the spiritual banner of a ‘Greater India’ and a rejuvenated ‘East’.

Three Indian religions are considered, in the likely order of their origin. In each case a history and analysis are first offered before a specific issue is addressed in more detail. For Jainism it is the question of reincarnation. Here it is suggested that similar concerns for justice underly both Jainism’s almost physical embedding of karma in the universe and western theism’s postulation of a doctrine of resurrection. If so, it is what is scientifically and metaphysically possible which is in dispute (the status of soul and body) rather than different moral values. With Buddhism its moral approach is considered, partly through using Gavin Flood’s comparative study on asceticism and partly through drawing parallels with the influence of Stoicism on early Christian ethics. Finally, the impersonal character of the divine advocated in Sikhism is given sympathetic treatment through considering some issues raised by Neo-Platonism. Each of these questions will be considered further in subsequent chapters.

Buddhist nationalism has emerged again as a topic of scholarly and media attention, driven primarily by campaigns of violence and expulsion against Muslims in Myanmar, but also by similar dynamics in Sri Lanka and Thailand. Recent research on the intersections between Buddhism and nationalism not only follows the scholarly critique of methodological nationalism – resisting the urge to naturalize the nation and read it back anachronistically into history – it also questions assumptions of Buddhism as a unitary or even stable object of inquiry. “Buddhist nationalism,” where it exists, does not necessarily follow a set pattern; moreover, it is the conscious and largely intentional creation of actors with the relevant authority and stature to frame the two components as intrinsically connected. In doing so, they construct it through narratives and symbols of legitimation that are recognizably Buddhist and linked to particular cultural, ethnic, or political configurations.