Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Buddhism in Australia'

Doctor of Philosophy
This thesis explores the nature of the socialization and commitment process in the Western Buddhist context, by investigating the experiences of practitioners affiliated with two Buddhist Centres: the Theravadin Blue Mountains Insight Meditation Centre and the Gelugpa Tibetan Vajrayana Institute. Commitment by participants is based on the recognition that, through the application of the beliefs and practices of the new religion, self-transformation has occurred. It follows a process of religious experimentation in which the claims of a religious reality are experientially validated against inner understandings and convictions, which themselves become clearer as a result of experimental participation in religious activity. Functionally, the adopted worldview is seen to frame personal experience in a manner that renders it more meaningful. Meditative experience and its interpretation according to doctrine must be applicable to the improvement of the quality of lived experience. It must be relevant to current living, and ethically sustainable. Substantively, commitment is conditional upon accepting and succesfully employing: the three marks of samsaric existence, duhkha, anitya and anatman (Skt) as an interpretive framework for lived reality. In this the three groups of the Eight-fold Path, sila/ethics, samadhi/concentration, and prajna/wisdom provide a strategy for negotiating lived experience in the light of meditation techniques, specific to each Buddhist orientation, by which to apply doctrinal principles in one’s own transformation. Two theoretical approaches are found to have explanatory power for understanding the stages of intensifying interaction that lead to commitment in both Western Buddhist contexts. Lofland and Skonovd’s Experimental Motif models the method of entry into and exploration of a Buddhist Centre’s shared reality. Data from participant observation and interview demonstrates this approach to be facilitated by the organizational and teaching activities of the two Western Buddhist Centres, and to be taken by the participants who eventually become adherents. Individuals take an actively experimental attitude toward the new group’s activities, withholding judgment while testing the group’s doctrinal position, practices, and expected experiential outcomes against their own values and life experience. In an environment of minimal social pressure, transformation of belief is gradual over a period of from months to years. Deeper understanding of the nature of the commitment process is provided by viewing it in terms of religious resocialization, involving the reframing of one’s understanding of reality and sense-of-self within a new worldview. The transition from seekerhood to commitment occurs through a process of socialization, the stages of which are found to be engagement and apprehension, comprehension, and commitment. Apprehension is the understanding of core Buddhist notions. Comprehension occurs through learning how various aspects of the worldview form a coherent meaning-system, and through application of the Buddhist principles to the improvement of one’s own life circumstances. It necessitates understanding of the fundamental relationships between doctrine, practice, and experience. Commitment to the group’s outlook and objectives occurs when these are adopted as one’s orientation to reality, and as one’s strategy for negotiating a lived experience that is both efficacious and ethically sustainable. It is also maintained that sustained commitment is conditional upon continuing validation of that experience.

This thesis explores the nature of the socialization and commitment process in the Western Buddhist context, by investigating the experiences of practitioners affiliated with two Buddhist Centres: the Theravadin Blue Mountains Insight Meditation Centre and the Gelugpa Tibetan Vajrayana Institute. Commitment by participants is based on the recognition that, through the application of the beliefs and practices of the new religion, self-transformation has occurred. It follows a process of religious experimentation in which the claims of a religious reality are experientially validated against inner understandings and convictions, which themselves become clearer as a result of experimental participation in religious activity. Functionally, the adopted worldview is seen to frame personal experience in a manner that renders it more meaningful. Meditative experience and its interpretation according to doctrine must be applicable to the improvement of the quality of lived experience. It must be relevant to current living, and ethically sustainable. Substantively, commitment is conditional upon accepting and succesfully employing: the three marks of samsaric existence, duhkha, anitya and anatman (Skt) as an interpretive framework for lived reality. In this the three groups of the Eight-fold Path, sila/ethics, samadhi/concentration, and prajna/wisdom provide a strategy for negotiating lived experience in the light of meditation techniques, specific to each Buddhist orientation, by which to apply doctrinal principles in one’s own transformation. Two theoretical approaches are found to have explanatory power for understanding the stages of intensifying interaction that lead to commitment in both Western Buddhist contexts. Lofland and Skonovd’s Experimental Motif models the method of entry into and exploration of a Buddhist Centre’s shared reality. Data from participant observation and interview demonstrates this approach to be facilitated by the organizational and teaching activities of the two Western Buddhist Centres, and to be taken by the participants who eventually become adherents. Individuals take an actively experimental attitude toward the new group’s activities, withholding judgment while testing the group’s doctrinal position, practices, and expected experiential outcomes against their own values and life experience. In an environment of minimal social pressure, transformation of belief is gradual over a period of from months to years. Deeper understanding of the nature of the commitment process is provided by viewing it in terms of religious resocialization, involving the reframing of one’s understanding of reality and sense-of-self within a new worldview. The transition from seekerhood to commitment occurs through a process of socialization, the stages of which are found to be engagement and apprehension, comprehension, and commitment. Apprehension is the understanding of core Buddhist notions. Comprehension occurs through learning how various aspects of the worldview form a coherent meaning-system, and through application of the Buddhist principles to the improvement of one’s own life circumstances. It necessitates understanding of the fundamental relationships between doctrine, practice, and experience. Commitment to the group’s outlook and objectives occurs when these are adopted as one’s orientation to reality, and as one’s strategy for negotiating a lived experience that is both efficacious and ethically sustainable. It is also maintained that sustained commitment is conditional upon continuing validation of that experience.

This study investigates facework (communicative) strategies of Sri Lankans working in Australia and compares them with strategies used by Australians of European origin working in Australia. The study also explores the values of those Sri Lankans as a reflection of their facework, and how Sri Lankans have adjusted their facework to the Australian culture. The study used a survey questionnaire and interviewed Sri Lankans working in Australia for this investigation. The survey questionnaire was used to understand the facework similarities and difference between the Sri Lankans and Australians as explained in Oetzel and Ting-Toomey’s Face Negotiation Model. The survey revealed that Sri Lankans are higher in interdependent self construal, self face concern and other face concern than the Australians. Nonetheless, Sri Lankans are similar to the Australians in other facework strategies. The interviews clarified that Sri Lankans do not change their values by living in Australia, yet they make some changes to how they do things.

The interactions between Chinese religions has occupied an enormous amount of scholarly attention in many fields because there have been direct and indirect consequences resulting from the interactions among Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism. These religious traditions have obviously influenced each other in many respects such as rituals, doctrines, textual materials, philosophy and so on. Accordingly, I will, in this paper, critically analyze the implications of the interactions between Buddhism and Daoism by examining Twofold Mystery. Since Twofold Mystery is heavily dependent on Madhyamaka Buddhist concepts, this study will, on the one hand, examine the influence of Madhyamaka Buddhism on the development of Twofold Mystery. On the other hand, it will critically survey how Twofold Mystery remained faithful to the Daoist worldview.

This thesis is a reflection upon objects of power and their roles in the lives of people through the lens of a single case example: power objects as they appear throughout the narrative, philosophical, and ritual writings of the Tibetan Buddhist ritual specialist Sog bzlog pa Blo gros rgyal mtshan (1552-1624) and his milieu. This study explores their discourse on power objects specifically for what it reveals about how human interactions with certain kinds of objects encourage the flow of power and charisma between them, and what the implications of these person-object transitions were for issues of identity, agency, and authority on the personal, institutional, and state registers in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Tibet.

My investigation of Sog bzlog pa's discourse on power objects shows how the genres of narrative, philosophy, and liturgy are related around such objects, each presenting them from a slightly different perspective. I illustrate how narratives depict power objects as central to the identity of Sog bzlog pa and his circle, mediating relations that are in turn social, political, religious, aesthetic, and economic in tone, and contributing to the authority of the persons involved. This flow of power between persons and objects, I demonstrate further, is connected to tensions over the sources of transformational power as rooted in either objects, or in the people instrumental in their ritual treatment or use. I show how this tension between objective and subjective power plays out in Sog bzlog pa's philosophical speculations about power objects and in his rituals featuring them. I also trace the persistence of this discourse after Sog bzlog pa's death in the seventeenth-century state-building activities of Tibet and Sikkim, and in the present day identity of Sikkim's Buddhist population. Power objects emerge as hybrid subject-object mediators, which variously embody, channel, and direct the flow of power and authority between persons, objects, communities, institutions, and the state, as they flow across boundaries and bind these in their tracks. Finally, I illustrate how this discourse of power objects both complicates and extends contemporary theoretical reflections on the relationships between objects, actions, persons, and meanings.

This dissertation considers how Chinese models of Buddhist social organization and Pure Land thought undergirded the Japanese monk Chōgen’s campaign to restore the Great Buddha of Tōdaiji, destroyed in the Gempei civil war at the end of the 12th century. While Chōgen’s activities as chief solicitor of the campaign partially owed to his network of social connections earned through a selective Buddhist education, Chōgen’s three pilgrimages to China were crucial for providing much of the knowledge, methods, and technologies that made possible the largest religious and civil engineering project attempted in Japan to that time. Though nominally a Buddhist monk, Chōgen embodied the ideal of a polymath. In order to recreate Japan’s foremost Buddhist symbol, he was compelled to assume a wide range of responsibilities: fundraising among aristocrats and warriors; forming a network of lieutenants, donors, and common devotees; managing temple estates that provided revenues; developing transportation infrastructure to carry materials and supplies; casting the Great Buddha statue; overseeing religious rites; and finally, rebuilding Tōdaiji’s halls. These diverse activities required creative forms of religio-social networking and technologies not extant in Japan. During his travels to the Chinese port city of Ningbo, as well as the religious mountains of Tiantaishan and Ayuwangshan, Chōgen learned of Pure Land halls built by lay confraternities, and adopted them as models for the later sanctuaries he constructed around Japan for proselytization and fundraising purposes. He also borrowed organizational principles from Chinese Pure Land societies from the urban centers of Ningbo and Hangzhou in order to create a massive Pure Land network in his homeland that embraced former militants from the civil war, the imperial family, monastics from a wide range of institutions, and even the common populace – all of whom contributed to the Tōdaiji rebuilding effort. Ultimately, the fields of religion and technology that Chōgen imported from China not only enabled the reconstruction of Japan’s most important Buddhist temple, but also brought Japan into the fold of an emerging East China Sea religious macroculture of the late 12th and early 13th centuries that expanded with the activities of traders and later Japanese pilgrims who would emulate Chōgen’s voyages.
East Asian Languages and Civilizations

Philosophy
Ph.D.
In this study I present a new understanding of Vietnamese existentialism during the period 1954-1975, the period between the Geneva Accords and the fall of Saigon in 1975. The prevailing view within Vietnam sees Vietnamese existentialism during this period as a morally bankrupt philosophy that is a mere imitation of European versions of existentialism. I argue to the contrary that while Vietnamese existential philosophy and European existentialism share some themes, Vietnamese existentialism during this period is rooted in the particularities of Vietnamese traditional culture and social structures and in the lived experience of Vietnamese people over Vietnam's 1000-year history of occupation and oppression by foreign forces. I also argue that Vietnamese existentialism is a profoundly moral philosophy, committed to justice in the social and political spheres. Heavily influenced by Vietnamese Buddhism, Vietnamese existential philosophy, I argue, places emphasis on the concept of a non-substantial, relational, and social self and a harmonious and constitutive relation between the self and other. The Vietnamese philosophers argue that oppressions of the mind must be liberated and that social structures that result in violence must be changed. Consistent with these ends Vietnamese existentialism proposes a multi-perspective ontology, a dialectical view of human thought, and a method of meditation that releases the mind to be able to understand both the nature of reality as it is and the means to live a moral, politically engaged life. This study incorporates Vietnamese existential philosophy from 1954-1975 into the flow of the Vietnamese philosophical tradition while also acknowledging its relevance to contemporary Vietnam. In particular, this interpretation of Vietnamese existentialism helps us to understand the philosophical basis of movements in Vietnam to bring about social revolution, to destroy forms of social violence, to reduce poverty, and to foster equality, freedom, and democracy for every member of society. By offering a comparison between Vietnamese existential thinkers and Western existentialists, the study bridges Vietnamese and the western traditions while respecting their diversity. In these ways I hope to show that Vietnamese existentialism makes an original contribution to philosophical thought and must be placed on the map of world philosophies.
Temple University--Theses

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Religious Studies, 2009.
Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Jul 14, 2010). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-12, Section: A, page: 4722. Adviser: John R. McRae.

The Elephant and the Journey is about what and how people see in the land and how this is expressed through art forms. The dissertation consists of three main parts. The first in the introduction explains the use of the narrative figuration form in Thai temple mural painting in my practice, and how I used it to apply to the contemporary context in Australia. The second concerns three main groups of work including Australian landscape paintings in the nineteenth century, aboriginal art works and Thai mural painting, which apply to the topic of landscape. The second part in Chapters I and II, examine how significant the perspective view in the landscape was for artists during the colonial period in Australia. At the same time I consult the practice in Aboriginal art which also concerns land, and how people communicate through the subject and how both practices apply to Thai art, with which I am dealing. Chapter III looks at works of individual artists in contemporary Australia including Tim Johnson, Judy Watson, Kathleen Petyarre Emily Kngwerreye, and then finishes with my studio work during 2004-2005. The third part, the conclusion refers to the notions of cultural geography as suggested by Mike Crang, Edward Relph and Christopher Tilley, which analyse how people relate to a location through their own experience. I describe how I used a Thai narrative verse written by my father to communicate my work to the Australian society in which I now live.

Master of Visual Arts
The Elephant and the Journey is about what and how people see in the land and how this is expressed through art forms. The dissertation consists of three main parts. The first in the introduction explains the use of the narrative figuration form in Thai temple mural painting in my practice, and how I used it to apply to the contemporary context in Australia. The second concerns three main groups of work including Australian landscape paintings in the nineteenth century, aboriginal art works and Thai mural painting, which apply to the topic of landscape. The second part in Chapters I and II, examine how significant the perspective view in the landscape was for artists during the colonial period in Australia. At the same time I consult the practice in Aboriginal art which also concerns land, and how people communicate through the subject and how both practices apply to Thai art, with which I am dealing. Chapter III looks at works of individual artists in contemporary Australia including Tim Johnson, Judy Watson, Kathleen Petyarre Emily Kngwerreye, and then finishes with my studio work during 2004-2005. The third part, the conclusion refers to the notions of cultural geography as suggested by Mike Crang, Edward Relph and Christopher Tilley, which analyse how people relate to a location through their own experience. I describe how I used a Thai narrative verse written by my father to communicate my work to the Australian society in which I now live.

This thesis examines the design of Buddhist temples in traditional Vietnamese style and characteristics within the context of the Australian environment. The legends of the Buddha and his teaching are described with regard to the symbolism in temple components and the meaning of temple form. Buddhist temple architecture in Asia is examined. The study also compares Vietnamese pagodas with temples in China.
Thesis (M.Arch.) -- University of Adelaide, Dept. of Architecture, 1995

碩士
佛光大學
佛教學系
101
When Humanistic Buddhism is being brought to a new country, inevitably, it will change and adapt to the needs of the local people. For Australia, it all began in 1989 when the first venerable was sent to Australia with a mission to build a temple at Wollongong. Master Hsing Yun has the vision that within twenty to thirty years, the overseas FGS branch temples will be in charge by the local people of that country. As NTT is approaching its twentieth next year, it seems there is a gap between reality and Master Hsing Yun’s vision. This thesis research hopes to achieve three purposes. One is to discuss the challenges for the ‘Western Australians’ that are currently volunteering and working at NTT. Two is to find out how will ‘Western Australians’ stay on to become ‘Long-term Devotees’. Three is to provide guidelines to localize Humanistic Buddhism for FGS branch temples in Australia with a focus on ‘Western Australians.’ In conclusion, I will make reference to Master Hsing Yun’s ‘Thirty-year plan’ of localization to evaluate NTT.

This thesis explores the attitudes of Australian practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism to Buddhist social engagement, or, as it is generally referred to, Engaged Buddhism. Social engagement has frequently been cited as a defining characteristic of Western Buddhism possibly because much that has been written on Engaged Buddhism has showcased Engaged Buddhist organisations and highly visible leaders of Buddhist social engagement. Few studies however have investigated what significance Engaged Buddhism holds for less prominent contemporary Buddhists. I therefore set out to explore these themes further through fieldwork-based research by conducting in-depth interviews with Australian practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism. My inquiry began with identifying how Australian Tibetan Buddhists related to the concepts and practices of Engaged Buddhism, but as the project developed, and unexpected attitudes emerged, I increasingly sought to examine how their attitudes toward Buddhist social engagement were informed by contemporary social and cultural concerns. What specific socio-cultural worldviews shape the way that Australian Tibetan Buddhists see Buddhist social engagement? What do participants’ attitudes toward Buddhist social engagement suggest about the direction of Buddhist acculturation in Australia in the twenty-first century? And indirectly, what does it say about Australian culture, its relation to religion and religious engagement in the public sphere? Beyond understanding processes of Buddhist acculturation in Australia, the topic of Buddhist social engagement provides a lens to consider central issues within the sociology of religion today; debates about the privatisation and deprivatisation of religion and more generally theories about secularisation and desecularisation. Engaged Buddhism, explicit in its very name, advocates a public role for Buddhism—a push to use Buddhism as a moral and frequently political resource for social improvement in the public domain. While the Engaged Buddhist movements documented in scholarly works represent a clear example of this, was there evidence of a similar trend amongst Australian Tibetan Buddhists? In carrying out this research I have identified a typology of four distinct approaches toward Buddhist social engagement. Reflecting the values that inform them, I have described these as: secularist, neoconservatist, romanticist and reformist. Though the influences of reformism, romanticism, and neoconservatism were evident in my research, secularism emerged as the most significant underlying worldview shaping attitudes toward Buddhist social engagement; it underlies all the categories. The secularism that participants accommodate to in their approach toward Buddhist social engagement reflects a form of political secularism, one that suggests that controversial religious and existential orientations should be bracketed from public discourse and political life. The influence of this form of secularism induced caution, ambivalence and resistance toward Buddhist social engagement amongst participants. Given the widespread adoption of this approach I suggested that, in method rather than principle, participants work to maintain the ‘secularist truce’; a secularist contract that guarantees religious freedom yet bans religion from the public sphere by relegating it to the private realm. This suggests that, secularism, while ‘allowing’ multiple religions to coexist, significantly frames and constrains participants’ attitudes and approaches to Buddhist social engagement. Given these findings my thesis presents the need to reconsider the widespread assumption that Buddhist social engagement is strongly supported or adhered to by the majority of Western Buddhists. Furthermore my research indicates that secularism continues to be a dominant intellectual background in Australian culture, significantly influencing perceptions of religion, particularly attitudes toward religiously motivated social engagement. It affirms anthropologist Charles Hirschkind’s claim that, ‘the secular is the water we swim in’; or at least suggests that Australian Tibetan Buddhists believe it best to swim with the secular current in the way they approach Buddhist social engagement, thus keeping Buddhism free from the ‘stain of religion’.

Beginning with the understanding that several European discourses compete for the right to interpret the physical traces of past human cultures I have examined what seem to be the major of these in the European context. They are the discourses of the divine, namely paganism and early Christianity, and the discourses of the secular and rational, the principal of which are antiquarianism and archaeology. Since the mid-nineteenth century archaeology has secured for itself official recognition as the proper knowledge of the material past. Archaeology is now to be found practised in almost every part of the world. The transfer of the discourses of archaeology and art history from the West to the non- West has, not surprisingly, included the transfer of the conservation ethic. While the conservation ethic has attained a foothold at a government and elite level in the non- West it appears to have little constituency at a local and non-elite level. In Thailand I have looked at Buddhism and animism as systems of knowledge about the material past and have found beliefs and practices which honour the spiritual essence of ancient remains but rarely seek to conserve their material fabric. In Australia the European conception of Aboriginal heritage is implicated in a primitivist longing for a 'traditional', unchanging Aboriginal culture in which authenticity is partly equated within pastness. Archaeology established its primacy in Australia by mixing its discourse with the discourse of heritage. It now finds its position destabilized as Aborigines themselves borrow elements of the same discourse in a counter-appropriation of their 'archaeological' cultural property. The universality of the conservation ethic is manifestly spurious. The West, in its bid to domesticate the past of the Other World, allies itself with the non-Western state. The state draws upon the material past as a resource for nation-building, monumentalizing the past also in the interests of legitimizing present political arrangements. This alliance of interests is fundamentally anti-religious. Its programme of 'conserving' ancient sites cuts across local practices.

When people, ideas or things migrate across cultural milieux, many opportunities for cultural transformation arise. The focal point of this thesis is a large stupa/temple (Great Stupa) being built at Atisha Centre, a Buddhist retreat near Bendigo in Australia, by members of an international organisation called the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition (FPMT). I approach the planning, promotion and construction of the stupa as an instance of the transplantation of religious material culture, arguing that Atisha Centre and particularly the stupa play a constitutive role by acting as a contact zone (Pratt 1992). Since the Centre is a site of alternate social ordering in which the Buddhists attempt to actualise their universalist ideals in a specific place, I also conceptualise it as a heterotopia (Foucault 1986, Hetherington 1997). The contact zone entails engagement between different socio-cultural domains. One of the key domains is the globalisation of contemporary Buddhism and its permutations in new locales. Stemming from this is the question of how the Buddhists and their imported material culture engage with wider concerns such as various non-FPMT Buddhist, Anglo- Australian and Aboriginal locals’ responses towards the transplantation of a Tibetan temple into a rural Australian locale. The complex and shifting relationships between different kinds of Buddhism feature in relation to different ideas about the value of holy objects. The FPMT conforms to the enlightenment-oriented ideals of “Buddhist modernism” (McMahan 2008) but appears to depart from it in its pronounced emphasis on merit-making and holy objects. However, the project’s proponents consider the stupa a method for enacting their enlightenment aspirations. I attribute the stupa project’s relatively smooth passage through local planning application procedures to proponents’ prior social and cultural capital, which I link to positive public perceptions of Buddhism, aspirations for Bendigo to become more culturally diverse and the economic development the stupa is expected to bring. The literally concrete structure of the stupa not only provides Buddhists with a tangible focal point for their ideals, but also serves as a vehicle for the establishment of Tibetan Buddhism in a new land.