Academic literature on the topic 'Buddhist mythology'

AbstractThe Buddhist Sanskrit term antarābhava refers quite literally to existence (bhava) in an interval (antarā) and designates the temporal space between death and subsequent rebirth. It is apparent that, among the early schools of Buddhism in India, the status of this intermediate existence inspired considerable controversy. However, in spite of its controversial beginnings, the concept of the antarābhava continued to flourish and to exert a significant force upon the theories and practices of the later Northern Buddhist traditions. Questions concerning the conceptual origins of this notion and its theoretical connections with earlier Indian systems of thought have received little scholarly attention, despite a growing popularity of literature on the subject of death in Buddhist traditions. In this essay the possible links between the early conceptual systems of Hinduism (the Vedic and Upaniṣadic traditions) and Buddhism are examined to determine whether certain theoretical developments in Hinduism may have contributed to the emergence of the Buddhist notion of a postmortem intermediate period. The conclusion is drawn that the early Buddhists, in formulating a concept of the antarābhava, borrowed and reinterpreted elements from Hindu cosmography and mythology surrounding the issue of postmortem transition.

Introduction. The article examines an understudied issue of how and to what extent Buddhism had influenced the Buryat epic of Geser. Over the past two millennia, the Buddhist factor — starting from the Xiongnu era — has been to a certain degree reflected in various areas of spiritual life of Turko-Mongolian nomads and their descendants. Goals. So, the work aims to study impacts of Buddhism on such a significant monument of the Buryat oral poetic tradition as Geseriad. Results. The method of comparative analysis proves instrumental in identifying terms and concepts of Indo-Buddhist origin that constitute an ancient dimension in narrative structures of the uliger (epic). Those constants include as follows: hумбэр уула ‘Mount Sumeru’ associated with the world Mount Meru that serves to mark a center of the earth and universe in ancient Indian mythology; hун далай ‘milk sea’ that has an ancient Indian prototype in the Samudra Manthana episode. Similarly, some other cosmogonic concepts of ancient India — such as замби (Sanskr. Jambudvīpa ‘Jambu mainland’) and галаб (Sanskr. kalpa ‘aeon’) — had penetrated the Buryat folk mythological tradition through Buddhism to get completely absorbed and adapted. The Buryat Geseriad also contains traces of Indo-Buddhist mythology at the level of zoomorphic images, especially notable in the case of Khan Kherdig ‘king of birds and devourer of serpents’. Conclusions. The southern borrowings had become organically integral to the epic of Geser — its plot and images — so that nowadays tend to be perceived as quite ‘autochthonous’ and indigenous elements of the narrative. This circumstance attests to that Buddhist vestiges in the Buryat epic have a long history.

In 2014 Lama Gelongma Zangmo of Scotland sparked curiosity when she suggested that the Loch Ness monster or “Nessie” is actually a naga––a fantastic creature from Buddhist mythology. Visitors to her Tibetan practice center on the shores of the Loch will be able to leave offerings to Nessie. Without exaggerating the significance of these offerings within the larger context of Zangmo’s practice, this article suggests that efforts to ritually incorporate Nessie into a Buddhist cosmology is an index of broader changes in Buddhism’s arrival to the West. First, Zangmo’s open discussion of cosmology, ritual, and supernatural beings is a marked distinction from “Protestantized” Western Buddhism, which has historically presented Buddhism as a rational and philosophical alternative to Christianity. This suggests that Buddhists in the West have become less concerned with conforming to Protestant notions of “proper” religion. Second, Zangmo’s praxis is significant to broader patterns of how Asian religions adapt to Western topography. Whereas Asian immigrants have sometimes re-imagined Asian sacred sites in Western countries, Zangmo was taken the opposite strategy of “Buddhicizing” a local monster. This suggests that similar transformative moves can be expected as a globalized world continues to transplant religious traditions from one continent to another.

The article focuses on the contribution of Esper E. Ukhtomsky, an outstanding collector of Buddhist sculpture and painting in pre-revolutionary Russia, to the study of Buddhist art. In addition to the main episodes of the biography, little covered earlier in research, the author examines how Ukhtomsky, who had the largest private Buddhist collection in the Russian Empire, contributed to the study of Buddhist art and collaborated with Albert Grunwedel, to whom he provided part of his collection, resulting in the famous Grunwedel’s work “The Mythology of Buddhism in Tibet and Mongolia”. Ukhtomsky himself published pamphlets in which he contributed to the clarification and understanding of Buddhism and the East by the reading public. In 1890–1891 Ukhtomsky was one of the retinues that accompanied the future Emperor Nicholas II, his brother and the Greek Prince on a journey to the East. It was Ukhtomsky who had the honor to write a trip report — “Journey to the East of His Imperial Highness the Sovereign Heir Tsesarevich” in three volumes. The article shows how Ukhtomsky worked with Asian material on the example of the book by Archbishop Nilus “Buddhism, Considered in Relation to Its Followers Living in Siberia” (1858), where Ukhtomsky left numerous marginalia. In his marginal notes, the author translated Mongolian terms into Russian, quoted major authors of Buddhist studies, and left his own reflections on what Archbishop Nilus, who was engaged in missionary activity in Siberia, managed to learn and understand.

The transformation of the wrathful deity Mahākāla into the god of happiness and fortune Daikokuten in Japanese Buddhism. This study is devoted to the process of the transformation of the wrathful Hindu deity Mahākāla into the god of happiness and fortune Daikokuten in Japanese Buddhism. While in Hinduism and Vajrayāna Buddhism, Mahākāla was a wrathful deity, performing the functions of the Dharma protector, then as a result of the transference of this deity to the Japanese culture, his functions changed. The earliest examples of this process have been already marked in China, from where they later went to Japan. In the paper are traced the description of Mahākāla in the Japanese Buddhist textual tradition in the most notable Japanese text “Daikokutenjin-ho 大黒天神法” (“The Law of the Great Black God”), his iconography and the transformation in local folklore. The formation of Mahākāla iconography in Japan was influenced by a process of the Shintō-Buddhist syncretism, which combined the esoteric doctrines of the Tendai school, traditional Japanese Shintō mythology, Buddhist cosmology and related elements of Hinduism. All these trends are also well traced in Japanese folklore. As a sequence, we could come to conclusion that the process of transformation of the wrathful Hindu deity Mahākāla into one of the Japanese gods of happiness Daikokuten was influenced by the desire to rid Mahākāla of his original destructive deadly attributes, since they were not combined with the original Japanese Shintō tradition, referring to death and its manifestations as an impurity.

The article discusses a Tibetan-Mongolian cosmological model of Buddhist universe presented in the Oirat translation of one of the most popular Buddhist ritual texts — The Sūtra of Eight Luminous of Heaven and Earth. Materials. The sūtra was translated into Oirat by Ven. Zaya Pandita Namkhaijamts at request of Princess Yum Agas in the 1650s, and is referred by scholars as a Buddhist apocrypha of Chinese origin. Nevertheless, in the literary tradition of Mongolic peoples it was always viewed as the authentic Word of the Buddha (buddhavacana). Results. The analysis of the Oirat manuscript of the sūtra shows that the model of Buddhist universe includes several components. The first one of Indian origin is related to the cosmology of classical Buddhism described in Vasubandhu’s Abhidharmakośa, including the astronomical conception of twenty-eight nakśatra constellations and nine planets, as well as some classes of beings of the Buddhist universe. The second component contains elements of Chinese astrology, such as the astrological diagram of the golden turtle, which encloses animals of the twelve-year cycle, and eight trigrams representing different elements. The last component belongs to original Tibetan mythology and includes a classification of supernatural beings co-existing with humans between heaven and earth — nāgas (Tib. klu), nyen spirits (Tib. gnyan) and spiritual lords of earth (Tib. sa bdag). Indian influence can also be traced in the classification of nāgas, the latter including eight great nāgas known in classical Buddhism, and five castes of nāgas structurally correlated with traditional Indian society. The detailed classification of the spiritual lords of earth presented in the sūtra was later included in the well-known Tibetan astrological work Vaiḍurya dkar po of Desi Sangye Gyatso. This classification represented in the Oirat translation includes some names which are absent in the Tibetan version of the sūtra (for comparative analysis the work examines a version of the sūtra included in the gZungs ’dus collection). This indicates that Ven. Zaya Pandita Namkhaijamts would also use another Tibetan version of the sūtra when making his Oirat translation.

In this study, the values of storytelling to be applied to a culture tourism program were suggested by interpreting the Confucian ideology of Joseon and architectural changes in the later generations in terms of modern mythologies through Ahndong Bongjeongsa Temple. As the research method, Bongjeongsa Temple was examined from the aspect of Roland Barthes’s modern mythologies and discussed in three viewpoints found in the historical flow. The categories are the Confucian mythologic feature that shows the symbolism of how Bongjeongsa Temple was built through a human phoenix, the modern mythologic feature which dismantles the building to which Confucian supremacy was applied at the point of cultural assets restoration in 1960s, and the inherited mythological feature that the space of Manselu of Bongjeongsa Temple where Confucianism and Buddhism had been exchanged was applied to the construction of Seowons and to the elements of modern architecture later. The mythological values of storytelling culture tourism centered around Bongjeongsa Temple are as follows: First, Bongjeongsa Temple clearly reveals the semiotic meanings of ‘a phoenix’, ‘heavenly lamp’, ‘placenta of a king’ and etc. with its tale of establishment, and the analytic contents of the Buddhist tales implying a unified nation of those times should be reflected as the value of culture tourism storytelling. Second, the symbolized tradition in which a phoenix represents a king in the Bongjeongsa Temple foundation tale and the Confucian myth where Toegye is praised as a human phoenix need to be discussed as culture tourism contents that can be developed into an ideological value after being mixed with Buddhistic beliefs. Third, the dismantlement of ‘Wuhwalu’ and ‘Jinyeomun’ was the act of space restoration eliminating the complexity from the exchange between Buddhism and Confucianism, and needs to be recognized as the storytelling value to reflect on the modern mythological behavior exerted on Bongjeongsa Temple from which the historical trail had been erased. ‘Manselu’ of Bongjeongsa Temple is the space where monks and classical scholars interacted, and ‘Mandaelu’ of Byeongsanseowon, a Confucian building, has the common architectural element. It is the concept of ‘Nuhajinib’, shift of space and an entrance function, and ‘Lu malu’ to which nature was introduced with Chagyeong technique, and has been settled as the value of an inheritance factor of the traditional architectural culture today. Therefore, the archetetural elements related to the foundation tale of Bongjeongsa Temple can create the storytelling value with the implication of liberal arts that tourists can actually recognize with traditional architecture.

The paper analyzes the plots and motives of Altai myths about the creation of the earth and man with the use of comparative material from the folklore of peoples with which the Altai people had close contacts in the past, in particular from Russian and Buryat-Mongolian folklore. The motives characteristic of these versions are considered: diving behind the earth; creation of the earth; the creation of man; the dog protects the human body; desecration of the human body; spilled elixir of immortality; lost heaven; the overthrow of the devil from heaven; competition of deities for primacy in the rule of the world. In the Altai folk tradition, two versions of the myth of the creation of the world and man are distinguished: the first is dualistic (pagan) and the second is “Buddhist”. In the dualistic version of the myth, the main characters are two deities – Ulgen and Erlik. In the plot of the “Buddhist” version of the myth, unlike the dualistic one, 4 deity brothers participate in the act of creation: Yuch-Kurbustan (Three Kurbustan) and Erlik. This story is joined by a Buddhist legend about how bodhisattvas competed in order for the victor to become the ruler of the world.

This study has a limited object, but it touches upon a pregnant theme. Not long ago it was supposed that Indian texts which resembled Western were either so clearly older than the latter that, if contact could be posited, the latter must have learnt from the former, or the themes must be testimony to a common inheritance of the sundered portions of an Indo-European “race”. The relative dates of texts have come into question, and the prospect that Indian authors could have been inspired, at least in part, by Western authors (obvious in some contexts) is no longer alarming. That Buddhist authors could have learned from Judaeo-Christian stories is no longer surprising, or baffling.A later movement of Buddhist stories westwards is proved (as is well known) by the story ofBarlaam and Ioasaphattributed to St John Damascene; and I recently stumbled across a piece of Buddhist mythology adapted to a Jewish situation. 4 Since this is the immediate cause of the present disclosure a very brief summary is needed.