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World Religions: Buddhism

This guide aims to provide some information on major world religions. The religions covered on this guide includes Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, among others.

Introduction

The religion of Buddhism originated in India during 525 BCE. Siddhartha Gautama, referred to as the Buddha, was a prince who became disillusioned with his life of wealth ("Buddhism", 2001). Buddhism includes various philosophical and cultural traditions based on the teachings of Buddha.

At NU, the School of Sciences and the Humanities offers a subject dedicated on Buddhist Religious Traditions. This particular subject (REL 212: Buddhist Religious Traditions) deals with Buddhism, its origins, developments, and other socio-political and cultural issues. A course guide has been created which highlights available library resources that students can use in their studies about Buddhism. 

What's on the shelves?

Buddhism in America

Buddhism in America provides the most comprehensive and up to date survey of the diverse landscape of US Buddhist traditions, their history and development, and current methodological trends in the study of Buddhism in the West, located within the translocal flow of global Buddhist culture. 

Buddhist and Islamic Orders in Southern Asia

Over the last few decades historians and other scholars have succeeded in identifying diverse patterns of connection linking religious communities across Asia and beyond. Yet despite the fruits of this specialist research, scholars in the subfields of Islamic and Buddhist studies have rarely engaged with each other to share investigative approaches and methods of interpretation. 

Buddhists, Shamans, and Soviets

History in the Soviet Union was a political project. From the Soviet perspective, Buryats, an indigenous Siberian ethnic group, were a "backwards" nationality that was carried along on the inexorable march towards the Communist utopian future. When the Soviet Union ended, the Soviet version of history lost its power and Buryats, like other Siberian indigenous peoples, were able to revive religious and cultural traditions that had been suppressed by the Soviet state.

Buddhist Women Across Cultures

Illuminates the lives and thought of women in Buddhist cultures, integrating them more fully into the feminist conversation.

Classical Buddhism, neo-Buddhism and the question of caste

This book examines the interface between Buddhism and the caste system in India. It discusses how Buddhism in different stages, from its early period to contemporary forms—Theravāda, Mahāyāna, Tantrayāna and Navayāna—dealt with the question of caste. It also traces the intersections between the problem of caste with those of class and gender. 

The Enlightened Gene

Eight years ago, in an unprecedented intellectual endeavor, the Dalai Lama invited Emory University to integrate modern science into the education of the thousands of Tibetan Buddhist monks and nuns in exile in India. This project, the Emory Tibet Science Initiative, became the first major change in the monastic curriculum in six centuries. Eight years in, the results are transformative. 

Imagination and narrative: lexical and cultural translation in Buddhist Asia

The diffusion of religious thought in Buddhist Asia has been marked by new modes of expression. Sometimes this has meant textual translation, as highlighted in chapters about Chinese and Japanese Buddhist texts or the analysis of manuscripts in northern Thailand. 

Buddhism and Islam on the Silk Road

In the contemporary world the meeting of Buddhism and Islam is most often imagined as one of violent confrontation. Indeed, the Taliban's destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in 2001 seemed not only to reenact the infamous Muslim destruction of Nalanda monastery in the thirteenth century but also to reaffirm the stereotypes of Buddhism as a peaceful, rational philosophy and Islam as an inherently violent and irrational religion. 

Ebooks

Databases

Relevant Links

Journals

Useful Links

Reference

Buddhism. (2001). In J. M. Palmisano (Ed.), World of sociology, Gale. Gale. Credo Reference: http://p2048-ezproxy.library.nu.edu.kz.ezproxy.nu.edu.kz/login?url=https://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/worldsocs/buddhism/0?institutionId=7630

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