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Scholarly discussions of mindfulness normally treat the term as reflecting a specific, independent, psychological function. Here, mindfulness is placed  within a broader understanding of the Buddhist cultivation of consciousness, with special attention to the ethical aspects of mindfulness. Focusing on sources from early Buddhism, the article demonstrates how ethics was thought to have a positive, indeed a necessary, effect on a successful practice of mindfulness. The article moves beyond the Sati-paṭṭhāna-sutta (“The Foundations of Mindfulness”), which has been emphasized in scholarship, to related texts in the Middle Length Discourses ( Majjhima-Nikāya ) and beyond them to other Pāli sources. Here, we learn that “You should cultivate the four applications of mindfulness based on ethics, established in ethics.” While the emphasis on ethics in these sources reminds us of the conceptual dimensions of mindfulness, it also allows scholars to see both ethics and mindfulness as partaking in the broader attempt to enrich consciousness and make it healthier, softer, and more lucid. Buddhist practice works to change the structures of subjectivity and make them more conducive to liberation, in whatever way it may be defined. Thus, the Buddhist contemplative tradition can be seen to participate in an effort to change the quality of consciousness, rather than being a mere attempt to reach an annihilation of “suffering.” These considerations allow us to see mindfulness as a form of ethical activity in itself.

A complex body of religious practices that spread throughout the Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain traditions; a form of spirituality that seemingly combines sexuality, sensual pleasure, and the full range of physical experience with the religious life—Tantra has held a central yet conflicted role within the Western imagination ever since the first \"discovery\" of Indian religions by European scholars. Always radical, always extremely Other, Tantra has proven a key factor in the imagining of India. This book offers a critical account of how the phenomenon has come to be. Tracing the complex genealogy of Tantra as a category within the history of religions, Hugh B. Urban reveals how it has been formed through the interplay of popular and scholarly imaginations. Tantra emerges as a product of mirroring and misrepresentation at work between East and West--a dialectical category born out of the ongoing play between Western and Indian minds. Combining historical detail, textual analysis, popular cultural phenomena, and critical theory, this book shows Tantra as a shifting amalgam of fantasies, fears, and wish-fulfillment, at once native and Other, that strikes at the very heart of our constructions of the exotic Orient and the contemporary West.

The medieval Tantric literature entails many uncertainties about authorship and dating. The line between authentic and pseudepigraphical in this genre has traditionally been very fluid, and every Tantric text needs to be treated with due caution. In the case of the ✶Sahajasiddhipaddhati, the Tibetan tradition maintains its author to be the 9th–10th century female master Lakṣmī from Uḍḍiyāna. Given this work's significance, its possible female authorship and its inclusion of hitherto unresearched hagiographies of twelve Uḍḍiyāna Tantric teachers including four women, it is most crucial to examine its provenance. If its authenticity can be established, the text would become one of the earliest hagiographical collections of the Indian Tantric tradition, predating by two to three centuries Abhayadattaśrī's standard anthology, ✶Caturaśītisiddhapravṛtti, which differs considerably from Lakṣmī's work. The ✶Sahajasiddhipaddhati is only extant in a Tibetan translation by the Kashmirian scholar Somanātha and the Tibetan translator 'Bro Lotsā ba Shes rab Grags. Since the translated work is undated, the investigation of its provenance must begin with ascertaining the date of its Tibetan witness. Through a wide-ranging reading of medieval Tibetan historical sources and colophons of 11th-century Tantric works, it will be concluded that the translation was produced in Nepal somewhere between the years 1070 and 1090. The discovery sets a terminus ante quem for the Sanskrit original, placing its composition at least a century earlier than Abhayadattaśrī's compilation.

The article introduces a corpus of Tibetan texts containing apparently old Tibetan myths on the Nyen (gnyan); beings representing the natural environment. The myths mostly narrate their conflicts with the original people, which are eventually resolved by ritual means. These texts are known as the Nyen Collections (Gnyan ’bum). Three examples of them are currently known and references from the Tibetan chronicles of the Bon religion speak about the rediscovery of some of its versions in western Tibet prior to 1017. The content, nevertheless, points to eastern Tibet as the place of origin of the core items of these texts. These texts represent a certain mythopoetic lore stemming from oral tradition, which might well be related to the traditions of the Naxi people in the Sichuan province of the PRC, as well as to some surviving traditions in eastern Bhutan and Arunachal Pradesh, as recently described. Extracts from the myths dealing with birds are presented in translation and paraphrase. These myths use their own specific poetic register and manifest an extraordinary veneration of birds. The other aspect of this veneration is the evident tradition of offering birds up to the Nyen. This is in sharp contrast with the orthodox Indo-Buddhist world-view, which does not ascribe any specific value to the animal realm.

For centuries, Buddhist teachers and laypeople have used stories, symbols, cultural metaphors, and anecdotes to teach and express their religious views. In this introductory textbook, Carl Olson draws on these narrative traditions to detail the development of Buddhism from the life of the historical Buddha to the present. By organizing the text according to the structure of Buddhist thought and teaching, Olson avoids imposing a Western perspective that traditional texts commonly bring to the subject.The book offers a comprehensive introduction to the main branches of the Buddhist tradition in both the Mahayana and Theravada schools, including the Madhyamika school, the Yogacara school, Pure Land devotionalism, Tibetan Tantric Buddhism, Zen Buddhism, and village folk Buddhist traditions. Chapters explore the life and teachings of the Buddha in historical context, the early development and institutionalization of Buddhism, its geographic spread across Asia and eventually to the United States, philosophy and ethics, the relationship between monks and laity, political and ethical implications, the role of women in the Buddhist tradition, and contemporary reinterpretations of Buddhism.Drawn from decades of classroom experience, this creative and ambitious text combines expert scholarship and engaging stories that offer a much-needed perspective to the existing literature on the topic.