This omnibus panel brings together four papers examining the constructive use of Buddhist repertoires in constituting new understandings of self, other, and a shared world. William Moore offers a close reading of a passage from the Mahāvastu and examines the history of the passage's reception, arguing that together these point the possibility of a counter-normative masculinity that is at least sometimes valued rather than derided. Wendy Dossett explores Buddhist addiction recovery, showing how a complex set of distinctively Buddhist engagements with the addiction as fundamentally connected to the basic truth of suffering has emerged in the anglophone world. Gereon Kopf introduces his "Twelve Wolf-Encounter Pictures,” through which he analyzes resistance to multiculturalism and aims to create conditions for constructive multilogues. Finally, Christina Kilby considers the use of Buddhist ritual frameworks for achieving human security, showing how mandalas are used to organize time in ways that seek to guarantee future flourishing.
Prior studies of gender in Indian Buddhism offer two distinct readings of Ānanda, the Buddha's cousin and personal attendant. The first sees Ānanda as a paradigm for normative Buddhist masculinity, while the second sees Ānanda occupying a liminal gender position in the Buddhist sangha, a foil rather than a mirror to the normative masculinity exemplified by the Buddha. Scholars developing this second, counter-normative reading have referenced a passage from the Mahāvastu in which Ānanda allegedly calls himself a "womanish, witless" man. This paper performs a close reading of that striking passage in the original Sanskrit, and makes the case that Ānanda is deliberately depicted in the Mahāvastu and other Indian Buddhist texts as a man at odds with the hegemonic masculinity of his peers, though the value judgements attached to his gender position have varied widely over the course of Indian Buddhist literature's transmission and reception.
The phenomenon of Buddhist addiction recovery offers an important case-study in the effort to lay bare the complex and contradictory elements of ‘Buddhist Modernism’ (McMahan 2008, 2012). Buddhist addiction recovery is, however, not a unitary phenomenon. This paper contributes both to an under-researched area of addiction recovery studies, and to the study of contemporary anglophone Buddhism, by illuminating the philosophical and epistemological diversity across Buddhist addiction recovery pathways. It also exposes the contextual inadequacy of the modernist therapeutic turn as a categorical framework.
The past decades have seen an increase in theories envisioning multi-cultural encounters and analyzing the hidden and obvious power dynamics that govern them. This paper suggests an innovative approach to assess and negotiate these theories. It introduces a metapsychology inspired by Buddhist philosophy, illustrated by original pictures and poems, to examine multicultural engagement, to negotiate the major representatives among the leading theoretical responses to diversity and globalism, to develop a heuristic model that interprets each theory in their own right, and to envision innovative strategies that enable co-existence across boundaries, imagined and historically sedimented. Finally, it proposes a brand new theoretical approach to the study of both cultures and theories.
In this presentation, I investigate mandala-inspired frameworks for human security drawn from Buddhist traditions and suggest potential contributions they can make to the human security and humanitarian response fields. In my exploration of mandalic modes of imagining and creating security, I analyze the ritual of "securing the six directions" from the Sigalovada Sutta in the Theravāda tradition; the security framework offered in the Tibetan Kalachakra mandala; and the "mandala of security" model developed by Ven. Professor Pinnawala Sangasumana, which incorporates elements from both Theravada and tantric Buddhism.