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Background: The purpose of this study was to describe the factors associated with pregnancy planning and to compare pregnancy-planning scores among Buddhist and Muslim Thai women in southern Thailand. Method: Nine hundred and seventy-four pregnant women who met the inclusion criteria were asked to complete the pregnancy planning questionnaire while waiting to see the doctor at the antenatal care clinics of two public hospitals in Songkhla, Thailand. Data were analysed using descriptive statistics, Spearman’s rho correlation, one-way and two-way analysis of variance. Results: The findings of the study revealed that factors associated with pregnancy planning were age, current employment, income, marital status, number of pregnancy and number of children. For adolescent and advanced-age pregnant women, Muslims had significantly higher mean pregnancy-planning scores than Buddhists. Conclusions: These findings indicate that adolescent and advanced-age Thai Buddhist women require advice and interventions to support and facilitate their decision-making regarding pregnancy. Thai Muslim women should be advised about the number and spacing of the children they plan to have. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Artists living in Myanmar practise under isolating conditions arising from continued state restrictions, prevailing market dictates, as well as a failure to appreciate the realities of Myanmar in contemporary artistic spheres. Their isolation not only operates at the level of global politics but is compounded by the lack of information, discourse and critical apparatus, and the desire of international audiences for politically or socially charged subject matter. The question of how issues of belatedness, provinciality and irrelevance may be resolved continues to plague some Myanma artists and the reception of their works outside the country. This article argues for the need for a more complex and fine-grained approach to how contemporaneity is conceived, with reference made to the writer's (co)curation of the 2010 exhibition 'plAy: Art in Myanmar Today' that focuses on works in non-traditional media. Select practices and works are also examined in an attempt to understand artists' responses to isolation, which necessitated the negotiation of practice through gaps and their formations of selfhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper considers various ruminations on the aftermath of the death of a close one, and the processes of grieving and mourning. The conceptual examination of how grief impacts on its sufferers, from different cultural perspectives, is followed by an analytical survey of current thinking among psychologists, psychoanalysts and philosophers on the enigma of grief, and on the associated practice of mourning. Robert C. Solomon reflected deeply on the 'extreme emotion' of grief in his extensive theorizing on the emotions, particularly in his essay 'On Grief and Gratitude', commenting that grief is 'often described as a very private, personal emotion, characterized by social withdrawal and shutting oneself off from the world' (2004: 73). While dialoguing with the spirit of Solomon by way also of a tribute to his immense insights, the paper engages in critical reflections on recent thinking in this area elsewhere - notably, in Heidegger, Freud, Nussbaum, Casey, Gustafson, and Kristeva - and offers a refreshing critique toward an alternative to the received wisdom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By examining practices of naming, especially the recent adoption of a ‘Buddhist’ identity by middle-class Dalits in contemporary Maharashtra, this article analyses the multiple, shifting, and contested meanings of being Dalit. Examining the politics of this plurality shows the varied concerns at work in applying and contesting different names, especially the social and psychological challenges inherent in such acts of self-identification. By in-vestigating the ambiguities and ambivalences of being Dalit and Buddhist, the article demonstrates that the strategies of naming struggle against the burdens of a stigmatised past as well as the challenge of exclusion and inclusion vis-à-vis different Dalit castes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Examining Malcolm Browne's photograph of the burning monk as well as appropriations of it by the Ministers' Vietnam Committee, I argue that self-immolation is a powerful rhetorical act that utilizes self-inflicted violence as a means of performing a visual embodiment of violence done by an 'other.' I assert that the power and resonance of Browne's photograph stem from its freezing in time of what Barbie Zelizer terms 'the about to die moment.' Additionally, this study expands Zelizer's concept by examining how appropriations of the burning monk image demonstrate the resonance of images of the dead and their potential to promote agency and civic engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a preliminary study, 20 'migrant' Buddhist parents and children from England participated in semi-structured interviews to compare their home nurture with classroom presentation of Buddhism. In the home Buddhism received more time allocation and was presented mainly by the mother and monks - the content being that of 'perpetuating structures', often in an ethnic mother tongue and with ethos permeating all aspects of life. In school, by contrast, Buddhism was allocated little or no time, was presented mostly by the teacher - the content being meditation, Precepts and the more material aspects of the tradition - in English and with little in terms of amenable ethos. Dissonance apparent between home and school presentation of Buddhism is compared to similar findings for the Hindu and Sikh communities in Britain, and the need is highlighted for more attention to avoidance of assumptions in content, better use of allocated time and increased involvement of the 'migrant' Buddhist faith community. To this end, recommendations are made for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The basic objective of this research article was to investigate the coverage of minority groups in English press of Pakistan. For this purpose a content analysis of 127 news items were under taken, of which 88 were positive whereas 39 news items were negative relating to minority groups in two leading English newspapers of Pakistan over a period of one year was made. In general, this study found that except Ahmadis the coverage of other minority groups was almost positive. Four hypotheses were developed and tested. The data strongly supported the prediction of four hypotheses. The two news papers have given more coverage to Christian as compared to other minority groups. Similarly, the two newspapers have given least coverage to Buddhist, Parsis and Jains. Overall, it was found that both the newspapers gave positive coverage as compare to negative coverage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous transcultural neuroimaging studies have shown that the neural substrates of self-reflection can be shaped by different cultures. There are few studies, however, on the neural activity of self-reflection where religion is viewed as a form of cultural expression. The present study examined the self-processing of two Chinese ethnic groups (Han and Tibetan) to investigate the significant role of religion on the functional anatomy of self-representation. We replicated the previous results in Han participants with the ventral medial prefrontal cortex and left anterior cingulate cortex showing stronger activation in self-processing when compared with other-processing conditions. However, no typical self-reference pattern was identified in Tibetan participants on behavioral or neural levels. This could be explained by the minimal subjective sense of 'I-ness’ in Tibetan Buddhists. Our findings lend support to the presumed role of culture and religion in shaping the neural substrate of self. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Our recent work showed that self-trait judgment is associated with increased activity in the ventral medial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) in non-religious Chinese, but in the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC) in Chinese Christians. The current work further investigated neural substrates of self-referential processing in Chinese Buddhists. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we scanned 14 Chinese Buddhists, while they conducted trait judgments of the self, Zhu Rongji (the former Chinese premier), Sakyamuni (the Buddhist leader) and Jesus (the Christian leader). We found that, relative to Zhu Rongji judgment, self-judgment in Buddhist participants failed to generate increased activation in the VMPFC but induced increased activations in the DMPFC/rostral anterior cingulate cortex, midcingulate and the left frontal/insular cortex. Self-judgment was also associated with decreased functional connectivity between the DMPFC and posterior parietal cortex compared with Zhu Rongji judgment. The results suggest that Buddhist doctrine of No-self results in weakened neural coding of stimulus self-relatedness in the VMPFC, but enhanced evaluative processes of self-referential stimuli in the DMPFC. Moreover, self-referential processing in Buddhists is characterized by monitoring the conflict between the doctrine of No-self and self-focus thinking during self-trait judgment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article reports on the challenges facing public school leadership in southern Thailand, a region destabilized by renewal of a longstanding insurgency. Seeking to implement national educational reforms on shifting social, political and cultural terrain, educators in this region face extraordinary challenges as they reconsider and renegotiate an institutional position once perceived as secure. Focusing on two schools in one province, this article offers an account of the variety of challenges reported by principals working in this difficult environment. We find the principals employing number of bridging and buffering strategies as improvisational efforts to re-organize, re-establish and re-position the schools in their respective communities. In the concluding discussion, we surface concerns regarding the nature and naturalness, reason and reasonableness of these strategies within local administrative hegemony premised on market and colonial ideologies that may obscure impending legitimation issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Gandhara (modern Afghanistan and Pakistan) and Kashmir had an unbroken socioeconomic, religio-cultural and political bond during the rule of the Kushans (1st-3rd century), Kidarites (3rd-5th century) and the White Huns (5th- 6th century). Even though Gandhara became famous for the Hellenistic art in particular in stone and stucco during the Kushan and post-Kushan era, Kashmir somehow produced nothing of this type. After the setback to the Gandhara art and artistry, Kashmir in the post-Gandhara space developed stone sculpture that was remarkable for its artistic manifestations, iconographical details and distinctive class of blending of exogenous and indigenous elements. This paper seeks to describe an image of the early period of the sculpture. It would also answer many questions related to the introduction of the concept of the goddess Gaja-Lakashmi in Kashmir, Further, it would study the role of external forces in its shaping? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Doctrinally, Buddhism is free of the myths and symbols that make some other religions so intractable to feminist reforms. In its philosophical views and its meditation practices, Buddhism has tremendous potential for deconstructing gender. In less than thirty years, we have gone from a situation in which almost nothing had been written about Buddhist women to a situation in which books and articles appear regularly. There is now a worldwide Buddhist women's movement, many women Buddhist teachers--at least in North America--and a growing consensus that the traditional male dominance of Buddhism is a problem. Yet, despite the advances made in the last thirty years, Buddhism still privileges men above women. So is the glass half full? Are we well on the way to recasting Buddhism in ways that make it more adequate for its female followers? Or is the glass half empty? Is Buddhism still a religion that works better for men than for women, despite the changes of the past thirty years? In looking at the half-full, half-empty glass, I will consider three topics: first, Buddhism's potential for deconstructing gender, second, some reasons why this potential did not come to fruition historically, and third, some of the changing situations in the contemporary Buddhist world, both Asian and Western. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A self-help group of mothers with children having a mental handicap, living in a poor area of South Delhi, India, met regularly with the author to discuss the role played by their different religious faiths, beliefs and practices in coping with the diagnosis of their children's impairments, and raising the children amidst social stigma or indifference. Together they wrestled with the question of whether God was responsible for their predicament, their own actions had deserved some penalty, they could get any help by increased prayers and religious rituals, or whether they should just accept their destiny and expect nothing. The women reported receiving no practical help from organized religion. They had benefited more by participation in the Self-Help Group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Buddhist texts authored in Indian and Tibetan traditions of scholasticism, one is regularly directed to check one's understanding against "scripture and reasoning." To date, however, comparatively little attention has been given to the usage of the latter term of this pair (Skt. yukti, Tib. rigs pa) in Indian Buddhist texts. Building on the work of Scherrer-Schaub, Kapstein and others, this paper discusses divergent glosses of the term yukti as found in Indian Buddhist texts. By highlighting continuities and discontinuities in these accounts, the paper aims to stimulate reflection on the ways in which our assumptions regarding reasoning--and, by extension, what is to count as "Buddhist philosophy"--are represented in, and perhaps contested by, thematizations offered within the tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to stimulate discussion about relationships between the lives of professionals and of service users. The idea is that when parallels are explored and developed, power dynamics between professionals and social workers are reduced, the quality of interaction and work with service users can be improved, and professionals can also be helped in overcoming difficulties in their own lives. I start with an outline of my own personal background and highlight my development throughout, including my emerging identity as a Buddhist. I discuss a case study involving 'Sally' and her family and our work together while I was a social work assistant in a Children and Family's team. I try to show the interconnections between the different difficulties that we faced and how that informed my work. I look at some of the benefits, pitfalls and boundaries of working from the point of view that service user and professional are both working to overcome their problems. I also interweave interactions I had at the time with Carlos, a drug user friend in a crisis and the impact he had on me. Because I include my own situation I have called this article a 'case experience'. Throughout I refer to Buddhist and psychoanalytic thinking and particularly to agreement between the two around ideas that inner-resistance is the main barrier to personal evolution. I argue that faith is the key to unlocking resistance, and that faith should be understood as the development of a belief within people that they are able to progress rather than be destroyed in the face of inevitable problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lay practitioners of Buddhism, especially lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender/queer persons, are given little guidance by the traditional Dharmology (Buddhist theology) of sex. The most extensive discussions are the detailed prohibitions in the monastic rule, which focus on the mechanics of sex rather than on love and relationships. What advice there is on sex for lay persons is either vague or over-determined by its cultural context. Christianity, despite being homophobic and mistrustful of sex, has developed a positive attitude towards sex within heterosexual marriage. An investigation of this suggests a Dharmology of sex as relationship, based on central Buddhist doctrines such as interdependent arising. This Dharmology can be strengthened by queering it with reference to Harry Hay's notion that gay subject- subject consciousness is more compatible with Buddhist non-duality than the hetero subject-object consciousness. It can be claimed, therefore, that Buddha Nature, and Buddhism itself, is queer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ninth-century world-heritage Buddhist monument of Borobudur (Java, Indonesia) stands above the floor of a dried-out palaeolake, but it remains uncertain as to whether it was ever constructed on a lake shore. Here we reveal through new chronological and palaeoenvironmental data on the extant sediment record of the area that Borobudur intentionally stood by an existing lake. For the first time, evidence of this conjunction validates quite literally the debated cosmological interpretation of the edifice as an aquatic lotus symbol upon which Buddha is seated. The fluctuating life history of the lake spanned at least 20000 years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Written from the Jodo shinshu tradition founded by Shinram (1173-1262) perspective, this article offers insights into Buddhist memorial observances. Memorial services are critical to the grieving process upon the death of a loved one. For the Japanese American Buddhist community in Hawai'i and in North America, these services ritualize the sentiments of reverence, appreciation, and respect for elders. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper reviews common uses of disability models and terminology, then sketches a few social responses in historical Zoroastrian, Jaina and Daoist philosophies. In a discussion of the 'merits of uselessness', Chuang-tzu's holistic social model is reconstructed. A Buddhist tale of 'hunchback Khujjutara' suggests that karma may be seen as an educational rather than retributive force. Contested histories of blind Japanese and Chinese people, and the dramatic enactment of contradictory behaviours towards them, support the view that Asian meanings of disablement should not be forced into modern European categories but may challenge and refresh them. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]