This paper thoroughly examines the gender patterns of religious activity within the Vietnamese – the largest non-European migrant community in Poland. Basing on the result from anthropological field-work which I conducted in two pagodas currently operating in the suburbs of Warsaw I analyse this issue in the light of traditional gender patterns of religious life in Vietnam, as well as in the context of the politicisation of spiritual life under communist rule. The results of my research prove that whether a religious institution will become a ‘women’s sphere’ or will remain under the influence of male actors depends to a great extent on its political emplacement and relations with formal institutions of the Viet-namese state.
The aim of this article is to present the relation between Christianity and Korean culture. The problem here is not the concept of Christianity, but the concept of Korean culture. In the Korean thought is hard to distinguish between religion and philosophy. Philosophy, religion and culture are synonyms for “philosophy of life”.
The original Korean philosophy is Shamanism and received from China Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism. In the case of Christianity we have to consider Catholic Church, Protestant Church and Orthodox Church. Special attention we have to pay to the Korean theology, which is based on Korean tradition. Special role in the history of Catholic Church in Korea played Korean martyrs. Sanguis martyrum, semen christianorum.
The aim of this article is to present the relation between Christianity and Japanese culture. The problem here is not the concept of Christianity, but the concept of Japanese culture. In the Japanese thought is hard to distinguish between religion and philosophy. Philosophy, religion and culture are synonyms for “philosophy of life”. The original Japanese philosophy is Shinto and received from China Confucianism, and Buddhism. In the case of Christianity we have to consider Catholic Church and Orthodox Church. Special attention we have to pay to the process of inculturation of the Good news in the Japanese soil.
Early Buddhism was a predominantly spiritual movement which should ideally culminate in Enlightenment. Yet, it was embedded in the specific social environment of ancient India which included a hereditary caste system. Using the Buddhist Pāli texts and non-Buddhist literature from up until the last centuries BCE the article examines the four main hereditary categories (vaṇṇa, jāti, gotta, and kula) and how Early Buddhism related to them. We conclude that the Buddha and Early Buddhism did not oppose but rather confirmed the hereditary systems in society as well as its designations within the monastic community. The Buddha hereby followed the customs of earlier ascetic movements and imposed no specific rules on the monastics to eradicate their former social identity.
The science of lexicography with its focus on etymology reaches back to ancient times; the history of Tibetan dictionaries is almost as old as the written language itself. About 1,200 years ago, the wish to translate the Buddhist scriptures in Sanskrit initiated the compilation of the first bilingual dictionary. lt provides Tibetan synonyms for Sanskrit terms and is written in Tibetan script. lt was compiled and used by monks who worked as scholars and translators. Throughout the following centuries, Tibetan dictionaries have been compiled, and, as will be shown, this happened for various reasons. As the Tibetan language is not yet fully explored, new dictionaries for Tibetan are still being worked on. One of these is under preparation in Munich; it will be the focus of the main part of this article. As the paper addresses a wider audience and not specifically scholars of Tibetan studies, l will situate Tibetan lexicography within a broader context, commencing with a brief introduction into the Tibetan script and language followed by a survey on the development of Tibetan lexicography and dictionaries. Then, the paper introduces the Wörterbuch der tibetischen Schriftsprache, an ongoing long-term project at the Bavarian Academy for Sciences and Humanities in Munich.
This paper addresses the questions that were left unanswered in my previously published works on the Mongolian translations of the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā. It shows that the five earliest Mongolian translations of the sutra were based on the Tibetan version known as gzo sbyangs, suggesting that in the first half of the 17th century the gzo sbyangs version, which is a rarity today, dominated the transmission of the Aṣṭasāhasrikā in Mongolia and was later replaced by the widely spread phreng ba can version. Two of the early Mongolian translations have preserved a rare Tibetan colophon. Currently this colophon is known to have survived in a unique Tibetan manuscript kept at the Otani University, Japan. The colophon declares that the sutra was edited by several figures of the snga dar period, whose identities are under question.
The aim of this paper is to explain the meaning of two mural fragments housed in the Central Asian Collection of the Museum für Asiatische Kunst, Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. The two mural fragments under discussion, nos. III 9023a and III 9023b–c (Pl. 1, Fig. 1), were brought to Berlin by the 4th Turfan Expedition in the year 1914 from the Buddhist cave monasteries in Kizil in the area of Kucha on the Northern Silk Road, today’s Province Xinjiang, an autonomous region of the Peoples Republic of China. The murals show peculiar waterscape with persons trying to cross it; they can be compare with similar representations from the area of Kucha.