Buddhism
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Afghanistan was never “Hindu”
Razib Khan argues Afghanistan was never ‘Hindu’ in any comprehensible sense: its highlands were heavily Buddhist until about 900 AD, and he sees the area as a crossroads of Persian,…
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Browncast: An Ex-Muslim Bangladeshi convert to Buddhism speaks
In a BP podcast, the host talks to ‘Alex’, a Bangladeshi freethinker who went from Islam to Buddhism, about Bangladesh’s economic and social situation and the oppression of tribal people…
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“The Buddhist Age”
The author argues that 250 to 750 AD can be thought of as Asia’s ‘Buddhist Age’, and that around 700 Buddhism, though declining in the subcontinent and under threat in…
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The Crusades, Wootz/Damascus Steel, Pandanus and Dumbara Mats,
A post on Sri Lanka’s Pandanus species and the blue-flowered Kora-kaha, covering their uses in cooking, coastal protection, Dumbara mats and the yellow dye for monks’ robes, and tenuously linking…
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A Mongol India, a pagan India?
Taking up a Twitter counterfactual, the author asks what might have followed had the Mongols destroyed the Delhi Sultanate, surveying how the Mongol khanates adopted Islam or Buddhism to speculate…
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One or other, both or neither?
Reposted from Zenpundit, compares Trump’s claim to be the Chosen One with Modi supporters’ ‘Special One’, then turns to the Buddhist catuskoti, or tetralemma, and Nagarjuna’s statements on suchness.
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Westernmost India
Razib Khan cites Isidorus of Charax’s Parthian Stations, which calls the Helmand region White India, to argue that Buddhism carried Indian cultural influence into the Iranian world’s eastern fringe, and…
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Sex and Violence in Tibetan Buddhism, a book review:
A review of Sex and Violence in Tibetan Buddhism by Mary Finnigan and Rob Hogendoorn, on the rise and fall of Sogyal Rinpoche. It covers the sexual abuse claims since…
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Open Thread – Brown Pundits
Open Thread, 4 August 2019, with a prompt from the author’s reading of Buddhism: A History, asking whether Advaita has more in common with classical Indian Buddhism than with East…
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The Dalai Lama is right-
Defending the Dalai Lama’s remark that his successor should be attractive, the author argues that treating ugliness as virtue, and being white as the best thing in the world, is…
