Universal Liberation
Taixu ๅคช่ was one of the most influential thinkers of modern East-Asian Buddhism. In 1904, at the age of 14, he became a monk at Xiวo Jiวhuรก temple ๅฐไน่ฏๅฏบ in Suzhou, China. Soon after, he developed an interest in modern science, left-wing politics, and Buddhist reform. A decade later (partially due to changing political circumstances) he had himself sealed in a cell in a monastery to study Buddhist scripture and philosophy. After he left his cell in 1917, he revived a Maitreya Pure Land cult, but also continued working for the modernization and revival of Buddhism in China under the...
Western Buddhism and the New Age
Western Buddhism has been heavily influenced by the New Age movement. In online forums it is common to encounter nominal Buddhists proclaiming New Age beliefs that are alien or even antithetical to Buddhism. Adherents of such ideas rarely seem to be aware of those ideasโ origins, however; nor of their problematic nature from a Buddhist point of view. And even less rarely will they self-identify as followers of the New Age. The latter is typical, however. As Margrethe Lรธรธv remarks in a recent book about the New Age movement, โvery few people actually denote themselves New Age โ the preferred...
“Protestant Buddhism”
The term โProtestant Buddhismโ was introduced in 1970 by Gananath Obeyesekere to describe a development in Ceylonese Buddhism that started with Anagarika Dharmapฤla almost a century earlier. The notion was further developed in a 1988 book he co-authered with Richard Gombrich, but variants of the term have also been used outside the Ceylonese (Sri Lankan) context โ in reference to certain trends in Western Buddhism, for example, as well as to the switch from โself-powerโ ่ชๅ jiriki to โother-powerโ ไปๅ tariki in Japanese Pure Land Buddhism. The term is also sometimes used in a more general sense in reference to...