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This article investigates how Buddhist notions of gender were represented and reshaped in traditional Chinese theater through a close reading of an eighteenth-century play entitled Fuhutao (Stratagem of taming the tigress). The play includes three episodes of mock Dharma sermons delivered by Guanyin Bodhisattva, the shrew, and the shrew-tamer, respectively. The playwright unconventionally chose to gender his Guanyin character as male in order to establish the religious authority of masculine supremacy. He also creatively turned the concept of the "great hero," a symbol for the spiritual heroism of buddhas, into a trope for male dominance over the female. Unlike the playwright's original conception, stage adaptations of the play from the late Qing to the early twentieth century often spotlighted the shrew's sermon on subduing husbands, a scene that had both theatrical appeal and potentially subversive power. This study argues that Buddhist ideas about gender and the formalities of ritual provided writers and actors space to experiment with new ways to dramatize male-female relationships – innovations which might both consolidate as well as challenge the patriarchal social order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among the most noteworthy practices in Buddhist temples in China today are yuan or wish-vow actions. Wish-vows encompass both wish-making (xuyuan 许愿) and vow-giving (fayuan 发愿), with both modalities embraced by average temple-goers from a general population. Chinese Buddhist liturgies encourage ritual performers to adopt a bodhisattva stance, wishing/vowing for the well-being of all beings. This introduces an ethical dimension to yuan performances. This paper analyzes the continuity in practice between wish-making and vow-giving, exploring how popular and Buddhist understandings of ritual entangle and how ritual generates meaningful narratives for practitioners. The article shows how the human pursuit of ritual effects and ethical self-transformation are not contradictory but rather complementary processes. Considering this Chinese ritual situation deepens our comprehension of votive practices in syncretic religious traditions. Additionally, it offers a new direction for considering religious potentialities in late socialist societies. Furthermore, it usefully challenges the use of the term "prayer" in Chinese contexts. In this way, the article bridges anthropology, Chinese studies, and religious studies and enhances our conceptual toolkit for studying ongoing human transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Buddhist rituals in Vietnam, characterized by region and religious sects and more or less influenced by Chinese Buddhism over the centuries, have relatively different characteristics among regions, especially the Northern Delta region, Hue City and Ho Chi Minh City. Directly influenced by the teachings and laws of Buddhism, Buddhist rituals in Vietnam have also contributed a unique cultural identity to the world's Buddhist community, which affirms the unity in diversity of Buddhism in Vietnam and the world. Based on specialized and interdisciplinary approaches, the article presents the key features of Buddhist rituals in Vietnam today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Buddhist rituals that simulate offering the cosmos are often characterized in terms of what they represent rather than their physical actions, material ephemera, or visual depictions. Newar and Tibetan versions of the cosmic offering, however, arise from closely related cosmological texts, but exhibit differences in performance and product. Further, depictions of these rituals in painting create new visions of the cosmos that affect conceptions of the world even outside their original context. Ritual performances and artworks thus become sources for cosmological thinking beyond their authoritative texts. A detailed comparison of Newar and Tibetan rituals and artworks creates nuance in notions of a shared Himalayan Buddhist world-view and highlights complex relationships between texts, practices, depictions, and traditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of "ritual syntax" is developed by relating it to cognitive studies of ritual, providing a fuller theoretical basis. Developing theoretical grounding requires differentiating between the members of five pairs of concepts: production is not the same as analysis, syntax is not the same as semantics, ritual is not the same as the mental, cognition is not the same as the mental, and syntax is not the same as language. These distinctions help avoid overly strong interpretations of the analogy between ritual and language. A discussion of "ritual" suggests that it is best conceptualized in terms of multiple scalar characteristics with degrees of ritualization. Two Buddhist practices, insight meditation and homa, are introduced as instances for the cognitive study of ritual. Syntax involves not simply ordering of elements, but also hierarchical organization of those elements. While syntax allows sentential elements to move within a sentence, ritual tends toward invariance. Invariance seems to contradict the claim that ritual is syntactically organized. However, rituals are often modeled on ordinary activities, producing a kind of "semantic" motivation for invariance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With over forty thousand attendees every year, the Shinnyo-en Hawaii Lantern Floating--an adapted version of the traditional Japanese Buddhist obon ritual, tōrō nagashi- is among the largest annually held Buddhist rituals undertaken outside of Asia. One way to approach understanding of this rite is as an example of a 'glocal' Buddhist ritual. Drawing from Roland Robertson's framework of glocalization, this study examines the steps Shinnyo-en took to adapt its global message to a new local culture. While other examples of the tōrō nagashi are found in Hawaii, none have developed on the rite to the extent that Shinnyo-en has. Some innovations include: moving the date of the rite to Memorial Day, the inclusion of local cultural elements and other religious groups, and allowing the public to personalize the individual lanterns. Through examples of the ritual's various Hawaiian and global elements, I explain why the Shinnyo-en version of the lantern floating rite, over other versions of the same rite, came to reach its status as the Hawaiian Lantern Floating Ceremony. Finally this study argues for the important, often overlooked role of both ritual and new religious movements in globalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Continuing further on the path laid out by Michael Allen's pioneering work on rituals that centre on Newar Buddhist girl children in Nepal, this study analyses liturgies pertaining to a religious practice called ‘bārhā pikāyagu’ that ends a period of seclusion undergone by Newar girls before menarche. The article looks at three ritual manuals currently used by Buddhist priests in Lalitpur, Kathmandu and Bhaktapur, respectively. In its aim to supply a textual background to Allen's ethnography of this ritual, the study tries to place these manuals at the conjunction of other ritual textual genres, such as prescriptions for domestic rituals for women that include cosmological, demonological and pregnancy-related aspects, and attempts to explore their composition, their intention and their place within the larger ritual literature of Buddhism among the Newars. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The cult of the sacred scriptures in early Buddhism had an impact on Chinese Buddhism, which manifested itself by the rise of the scriptural platform in the medieval period. The rise of the scriptural platform shows that in medieval China the very places associated with particular Buddhist texts and figures have become the objects of worship and pilgrimage, and they constantly appeared in Buddhist writings as the commemorative sites for particular scriptures and their commentaries. Various forms of the scriptural platforms also illustrated the rich practice of Buddhist texts in medieval China, such as translating, commenting, copying and reciting, as well as worshipping. Occasionally the scriptural platforms also appeared as the sacred places for housing sacred scriptures, which later would be replaced by the Buddhist monastic library. Practice of the Buddhist texts remained, yet the scriptural platform disappeared due to the rise of Chan Buddhist literature. This study suggests that the material culture, the rituals and the texts can barely be separated from each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

La reconstruction religieuse en Chine contemporaine implique non seulement des adaptations stratégiques aux conditions socio-politiques locales, mais aussi des réponses novatrices aux défis modernes dans leur généralité, tels que le moindre taux de participation des jeunes aux rituels en raison de l’affirmation de l’autonomie et de la mobilité individuelles. Sur la base d’une étude de cas portant sur un camp d’été bouddhique, l’auteur analyse dans quelle mesure le camp constitue une nouvelle forme de mobilisation religieuse des jeunes. Au-delà des limites de la communauté habituelle et du calendrier traditionnel, le camp crée un contexte temporaire et ambivalent de pratique collective, dans lequel les frontières entre croyants et non-croyants, entre religieux et non-religieux deviennent flexibles, ce qui permet de mieux répondre aux besoins d’ouverture identitaire et d’expérimentation sociale de la jeunesse. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The ritual use of objects and images designed to serve as effigies or surrogates of specific persons, animals or spirits is more or less universal across cultures and time. In Tibet, recent archaeological evidence attests to the use of illustrated effigies possibly dating from the eleventh century. Other early Tibetan images include anthropomorphic figures inscribed on animal skulls. The practical use of effigies in Tibetan ritual, both Buddhist and Bon-po, was almost certainly derived from much older Indian practices transmitted to Tibet. In this article illustrated effigies, their iconography and ritual use are discussed and the article concludes with the translation and transliteration of a short work by the fifteenth-century treasure revealer (gter-ston) and patron saint of Bhutan Padma-gling-pa (1450–1521), which gives instructions on how to draw a liṅga for a ritual of defence against human adversaries. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]