> Texts are more amenable to alteration than people.

> Today you have to understand charity if you want to understand Buddhism.

> This dissertation looks at the political behavior of three Taiwanese Buddhist organizations from 1989 to 1997: the Buddhist Association of the Republic of China (BAROC), the Buddha Light Mountain monastic order (or Foguangshan) and the Buddhist Compassion Relief Tzu Chi Association (or Ciji). > It concentrates on trying to understand the rationale behind the different strategies that each of them has adopted in its interaction with the government.

> Bhikkhus, saying ‘a heap of the unwholesome,’ it is about the five hindrances that one could rightly say this.

Examination of animal remains at a site in Eastern India shows a sharp decline in the number of animals killed there after the introduction of Buddhism and Jainism.

> We examine the extent to which domestic political developments can be understood through a US–China great power lens. Are politically progressive Thais more likely to be pro-US, and more politically conservative Thais likely to favor China? While we find some relationship between liberal domestic political leanings and sympathy for the United States, we also show that conservative domestic political leanings do not automatically translate into support for China.

Four things obscure the sun and moon, so they don’t shine and glow and radiate. And four things corrupt the holy life: alcohol, sex, money, and wrong livelihood.

This pair of articles explains how the arhythmic quality of Sri Lankan Buddhist drum offerings is an intentional avoidance of Indian *tala* metrical theory in order to justify the drumming as as a kind of communal recitation appropriate to offer to the Buddha.

This short book lays out the scientific argument for the simple assertion that people expect statements to be true, showing that honesty is, truly, a universal, human norm.

> Born in 1957, Rurui 如瑞, the abbess of Pushou Monastery 普寿寺 on Mount Wutai, in Shanxi province, belongs to the generation of Buddhists that became monastics after the opening up of China in the 1980s and came to leadership afterwards. > She has been building Pushou Monastery, and the Mount Wutai Buddhist Institute for Nuns (中国五台山尼众佛学院) that it hosts, since 1991, as part of the institutionalised system, and negotiating with both the political authorities and the laity.

> The case-studies are of two of the largest Western convert Buddhist movements in the UK—the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order (FWBO) and Soka Gakkai International-UK (SGI-UK)—and focus on their branches in the multicultural inner-city location of East London. > The findings suggest that most Buddhists of colour in these movements come from the second generation of the diaspora.

> little girls from our flight ran around serving it and they were covered with powdered sugar, too. And I noticed my new best friend— by now we were holding hands—had a potted plant poking out of her bag...

A large collection of short writings and media on a variety of Tibetan cultural topics.

> Buddhist Geeks is an online Buddhist media company and community that launched in 2007. It consists of a weekly audio podcast and a digital magazine component and since 2011, has hosted an annual conference. I will discuss the main characteristics and concerns of the Buddhist Geeks community and explore how it can be situated both in relationship to traditional Buddhism and Buddhist modernism. In conclusion, I reflect on whether Buddhist Geeks signals the emergence of a new, distinctly postmodern stage in the wider assimilation of Buddhism in America.

> While often associated with a liberal demographic, the increasing online visibility of rhetoric such as "snowflakes," "politically correct," "postmodern identity politics," and "cultural Marxism" demonstrates the presence of right-wing sentiments and populations in American convert Buddhism.

> These universities provide education in liberal arts and professional fields, while employing the time-tested methods of traditional Buddhist pedagogy. > Because these universities are generally unknown to the public, I have provided information about their history, academic programs, and the educational success created on their campuses.

> The people with dyslexia proved significantly faster at recognizing the impossible figures.

> Theravada as practiced by most converts in the West is distinguished by the absence of monasticism, its dominant institution. > Nevertheless, Thai Forest monasticism has managed to gain a foothold in the convert West, thanks to the efforts of convert monastics trained in Thailand. > This article analyzes the missionary project to “monasticize” Western lay converts through the history of Birken Forest Monastery in British Columbia, Canada, founded in 1994.

> Taking as its focus twentieth- and twenty-first-century semiautobiographical writings by black American Buddhists, this article explores how black American Buddhists engage with Buddhist teachings to understand themselves as racialized subjects on local, national, and transnational levels.

> This essay focuses on Albert J. Edmunds, a British-American Buddhist sympathizer, and it considers the ways that Western occult traditions, especially Swedenborgianism, moved back and forth across the Pacific and shaped the work of D. T. Suzuki.

> Ultimately, then, religions derive their power from the depth of their spirituality. The power of Zen, for example, flows out of Tokusan's "Thirty Blows" or Rinzai's "Katsu!!!" or Jōshū's "Mu" ("Emptiness"). The power of Jodo Shinshu also originates from one single point of absolute depth: from the nembutsu.

> Subjective feelings are a central feature of human life, yet their relative organization has remained elusive. > We mapped the “human feeling space” for 100 core feelings ranging from cognitive and affective processes to somatic sensations; in the analysis, we combined basic dimension rating, similarity mapping, bodily sensation mapping, and neuroimaging meta-analysis.

> In response, Buddhist leaders divided traditional Buddhist cosmology and practices into the newly constructed categories 'superstition' and 'religion.' Superstition was deemed 'not really Buddhism' and purged, while the remainder of Buddhism was made to accord with Westernized ideas of 'religion.'

> Although he is highly critical of a hybrid culture in which Westernized values are on the ascendant and traditional Asian/Thai values wane, he is by no means hostile to the building of a hybrid culture of resistance where Buddhism and Christianity join hands in confronting injustice.

> The founder of Fo Guang Shan is one of the most influential Buddhist monks in Taiwan and around the world. This study examines the biographies of Hsing Yun as depicted in Fo Guang Shan’s popular media to elucidate the uses and significance of Buddhist hagiography in contemporary Taiwan. I argue that unlike the Buddhist hagiographies of earlier times in which eminent monks were depicted as transcendental beings with superhuman powers and spiritual attainments, the informal and intimate portrayals of Hsing Yun in popular media seek to portray the monk as a worldling bodhisattva