Word: asian
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...FACE OF BUDDHA, by Jerrold Schecter. The first comprehensive, country-by-country analysis of modern Buddhism's entry into the political arena discusses the attempt of militant monks to cope with the conflict between tradition and transition in Asian life...
Some 2,500 years after the death of its founder, Siddhartha Gautama, Asian Buddhism has come to life in ways that puzzle and often confound Westerners. Gautama taught the denial of self, a reverence for life and a search for the Middle Way to noninvolvement. Yet his modern disciples are everywhere involved in the turmoil of their times. In Ceylon, a Buddhist monk assassinated one Prime Minister, and Buddhist ward politicians turned another out of office. In Viet Nam, the grisly silhouette of a Buddhist toppling in flames of protest has symbolized the Buddhists' own private wars against...
...year's Buddhist uprisings, which Premier Nguyen Cao Ky expertly quelled with a combination of "tenacity and guile," the book reconstructs the sorties to the barricades in Viet Nam. There, as elsewhere in Asia, the Buddhists' problem is to resolve "the conflict between tradition and transition in Asian life...
Because Buddhism has for so long been "the ultimate source of Asian values," says Schecter, it was inevitable that the pressures of colonialism and modernization would stretch the faith into new shapes. One of the strangest shapes may some day emerge from the confrontation between Buddhism and science; the Vietnamese Buddhists hope eventually to create a Buddhist university whose curriculum would include engineering, mathematics and medicine, but today that prospect seems close to fantasy. At present, Buddhism is less concerned with adopting Western ways than with providing a kind of "cultural defense" against them. Part of that defense rests...
...authors of this statement are all doctoral candidates specializing in modern China. A number of our colleagues in East Asian studies at Harvard have shared the expense of this publication with us. For further information write Edward Friedman, 18 Mellen St., Cambridge, or John W. Dower, 52 Duff St., Watertown...