Search Results (29)

The expansion of empires and colonial rule significantly shaped the movement of religious communities, practices, and institutions across borders. This article examines the intersections of empire, colonialism, and religious mobility with a view to exploring how colonial administrations facilitated, restricted, or co-opted religious movements for governance and control. Religious actors—such as missionaries, clerics, traders, and diasporic communities—played roles in transnational exchanges, carrying faith traditions across imperial networks while simultaneously influencing local spiritual landscapes. The study situates religious mobility within the broader framework of colonial power structures and analyzes how missionary enterprises, religious conversions, and state-sponsored religious policies were used to consolidate imperial control. It also considers how indigenous religious movements navigated, resisted, or transformed under colonial rule. The case studies include Christian missionary networks in British and French colonies, the movement of Islamic scholars across the Ottoman and Mughal empires, and the role of Buddhism in colonial southeast Asia. These examples highlight the role of religion not just as a tool of empire but as a vehicle for indigenous agency, resistance, and syncretic transformation. This article explores the transnational mobility of religious artifacts, sacred texts, and pilgrimage networks, demonstrating how colonial expansion altered religious landscapes beyond political boundaries. The study critically engages with postcolonial perspectives to interrogate how colonial legacies continue to shape contemporary religious diasporas and global faith-based movements. Full article

Adopting a transdisciplinary approach, with specific emphasis on the post-Jungian transpersonal psychological theories on the ‘Spectrum of Human Consciousness’, this paper introduces a transpersonal psychological thread of understanding of ‘Mystical Consciousness’ through an interreligious field of comparative religious approaches to action, contemplation and non-action. This paper draws on Merton’s interreligious contemplative thinking in relation to three major world religious mystical traditions of Buddhism, Hinduism and mystical Islam/Sufism and elucidates comparative insights with the Christian mystical–contemplative tradition, akin to the ‘mystical contemplation’ of Evelyn Underhill. This paper introduces and applies the transpersonal perspective to the scholarly field of mysticism. The reader is invited to consider how Merton may have responded or written about interreligious contemplative depth mysticism in terms of his own writings on ‘pure consciousness’, had he had the benefit of the language of the transpersonal models of consciousness. Finally, the reader is left with a contemplative question at the ‘heart’ of mysticism—does the ancient sculpture of the Sleeping Hermaphrodite helpfully represent an art–theological symbolic analogy for the inner repose of an illumined soul, one with God’s Unity, in whose awakened consciousness through depth mystical contemplation, action occurs as an extended manifestation, a total gestalt of contemplative solitudinous action? Full article

We analyze the Google matrix of directed networks of Wikipedia articles related to eight recent Wikipedia language editions representing different cultures (English, Arabic, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Russian, Chinese). Using the reduced Google matrix algorithm, we determine relations and interactions of 23 society concepts and 17 religions represented by their respective articles for each of the eight editions. The effective Markov transitions are found to be more intense inside the two blocks of society concepts and religions while transitions between the blocks are significantly reduced. We establish five poles of influence for society concepts (Law, Society, Communism, Liberalism, Capitalism) as well as five poles for religions (Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Chinese folk religion) and determine how they affect other entries. We compute inter-edition correlations for different key quantities providing a quantitative analysis of the differences or the proximity of views of the eight cultures with respect to the selected society concepts and religions. Full article

With regard to the assertion of the nature of the world, primitive Buddhism advocates “all phenomena that arise from causes” and opposes the existence of “God” or “Creator”, who created everything in the universe, which is significantly different from monotheistic beliefs such as Brahmanism, Christianity, and Islam and is therefore often called “atheism”. This paper introduces the Buddhist cosmology of Mount Sumeru and the tri-sahasra mahā-sahasra lokadhātu under the perspective of comparative religions and the first human beings who came to this world from the ābhāsvara-deva as recorded in the Buddhist scriptures and explores the question of whether Buddhism is atheistic. It is believed that the key to the debate between Chinese and Western scholars on whether Buddhism is atheistic is the difference in understanding the concept of “God”. Buddhism does not deny the supernatural power of “ghosts and gods”, so its essence is still theism. Full article

Music has played a central role in Indian religious experience for millennia. The origins of Indian music include the recitation of the sacred syllable OM and Sanskrit Mantras in ancient Vedic fire sacrifices. The notion of Sound Absolute, first in the Upanishads as Śabda-Brahman and later as Nāda-Brahman, formed the theological background for music, Sangīta, designed as a vehicle of liberation founded upon the worship of Hindu deities expressed in rāgas, or specific melodic formulas. Nearly all genres of music in India, classical or devotional, share this theoretical and practical understanding, extending to other Indic religions like Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism. What is less documented is how rāga music has been adopted by non-Indic communities in South Asia: Judaism (Bene Israel), Christianity (Catholic), and Islam (Chishti Sufi). After briefly outlining the relation between religion and the arts, the Indian aesthetics of Rasa, and the basic notions of sacred sound and music in Hinduism, this essay reveals the presence of rāga music, specifically the structure or melodic pattern of the morning rāga known as Bhairava, in compositions praising the divinity of each non-Indic tradition: Adonai, Jesus, and Allah. As similar tone patterns appear in the religious experiences of these communities, they reveal the phenomenon of “shared religious soundscapes” relevant to the comparative study of religion and music, or Musicology of Religion. Full article

The COVID-19 crisis truly challenged social interaction, the use of space and objects, as well as our sense of purpose and meaning in life. In this context, religious communities faced sudden interruption of their usual activities, lack of access to communal spaces and a global epidemic that summoned ancient “medieval plague” anxieties to work with. This article focuses on the vast repertoire of adaptations and reactions to the crisis that several religious communities developed in Spain. Our research is based on 40 conversations with members of Protestant and Evangelical denominations, Sunni Islam, Orthodox churches, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Church of Scientology, Baha’i, Seventh-day Adventist Church, Christian Science and Paganism, all of them minorities in the traditionally Catholic country. To analyze this repertoire of adaptations we focus on three aspects: the general context of changes and challenges, the ritual adaptations and the subjective experience of the adaptations. Grace Q. Zhang’s theories on linguistic elasticity will be applied to understand the elasticity of ritual adaptations in COVID times. Full article

Recent cognitive science research indicates that humans possess numerous biologically rooted religious and moral intuitions. The present article draws on this research to compare forms of religious morality in the Abrahamic traditions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) and the Indic traditions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism). Special attention is given to moral teachings on kindness, peace, and love, as well as related teachings on justice, violence, and hate. The article considers how moral intuitions shape Abrahamic/Indic moral teachings, which, in turn, impact: (1) Abrahamic/Indic doctrines concerning politics, law, and war; (2) Abrahamic/Indic doctrines concerning individual ethics, and moral behavior proper to monastics and laypersons; and (3) Abrahamic/Indic doctrines concerning theological matters, such as the nature of the universe, souls, and deities. Full article

Relationship-oriented questions have always been at the crossroads of ethnoreligious identity, religious freedom, religious conversion, religious prejudice, and religious pluralism throughout Muslim-Buddhist co-existence in the sixth century within the Malay Archipelago. Other faiths could be freely practised except for propagation towards Muslim communities with Islam being the religion of the federation. This study aimed to explore Muslim-Buddhist relation types and the issues underpinning the following themes: history, identity, and concerns. Content and thematic analysis as well discourse analysis were utilised as the study method for data collection and evaluation. The data were thematically analysed with ATLAS.ti, a qualitative analysis software. Resultantly, the Muslim-Buddhist interaction pattern in Malaysia has occurred (culturally and religiously) from the early establishment of both religious communities. This relation, which has shifted in ethnoreligious orientation at every interaction level, opens more avenues and complexities requiring holistic management. Full article

Most of the literature on religion’s relationship with populism is Eurocentric and has so far focused on European populist party discourses and, to a degree, on the United States, in particular, on the Christian identity populism of the Tea Party and the Trump movement within the Republican Party. However, across the Asia-Pacific region, religion has become an important component of populist discourses. It has been instrumentalised by populists in many nations in the region, including some of the most populous countries in the world, India, Indonesia, and Pakistan. Moreover, the relationship between religions other than Christianity and populism has all too rarely been studied, except for Turkey. This paper therefore surveys the Asia-Pacific region to comprehend how populists in the region incorporate religion into their discourses and the impact religious populism has on Asia-Pacific societies. It asks two questions: “What role does religion play in populist discourses?” and “How has religion’s incorporation into populist discourse impacted society?” To answer these questions, the paper examines four nations which have recently been ruled by governments espousing, to different degrees and in different ways, religious populism: India, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Sri Lanka. By choosing these nations, we can examine the relationship between populism and Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, and between religion and populism within a variety of religious, ethnic, and political contexts. The paper argues that religion is instrumentalised in populist discourses across the Asia-Pacific region in a variety of ways. First, religion is used to construct ingroups and outgroups, which serve a populist narrative in which the religion of the ingroup is superior yet threatened by the religion(s) of the outgroup(s). Second, religion is used to empower religious authorities, which support populist parties and movements. Third, religion is instrumentalised by populists in order to frame themselves, and in particular their leader, as a sacred or holy figure. The paper also argues that religion’s incorporation into populist discourse has impacted society by legitimising authoritarianism, increasing religious divisions, and justifying the oppression of religious minorities. The paper concludes by noting some differences between populists in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region. Full article

This paper introduces the otherwise unstudied Arabic treatise on knowledge, the Book of Giving, penned by the influential Muslim mystic, Ibn al-ʿArabī (d. 1240). It presents a critical edition, English translation, and initial analysis of this short yet original work. It authenticates this work, situates it in Ibn al-ʿArabī’s career, and analyzes its content. Combining textual scholarship and intellectual history with a comparative perspective, it discusses some outstanding features of the Book of Giving in light of Buddhism in order to provide an initial philosophical bridge between the two intellectual traditions. It argues that knowledge is presented in the Book of Giving as a causal relationship constructed in the mind. Ibn al-ʿArabī’s approach to causality is one of philosophical idealism, and it contains significant parallels with the notion of dependent origination in Buddhism. Full article

From the Yuan to the mid-Ming period, the people of Huihui (回回人) in mainland China gradually Sinicized in terms of their languages, family names, marriages, costumes, and ethical values. There was close interaction between these Muslims and Confucian scholars in China. Most of the mosque inscriptions in this period were written by Confucian scholars, who were the first to try to interpret Islam in Confucian terms. Around the mid-Ming period, the Chinese language became the lingua franca of Muslims in mainland China, and the teaching of Arabic and Persian classics in Chinese became an urgent need at this time. It was at this time that the Confucian academies were revived with the government’s permission. Thereupon, the Muslim scholar Hu Dengzhou (胡登洲) founded a rejuvenated educational system known as Jingtang education (經堂教育), which produced a group of Muslim scholars who wrote in Chinese. Islam thus entered the historical arena of interaction with traditional Chinese religions. During the middle and late Ming period, changes in political and economic structures led to changes in the general mood of society. The rise of Wang Yangming’s Mind Study (心學) brought a lively academic atmosphere and a relaxed cultural environment to intellectual circles. The concept of “The same mind and the same principle of the sages in the East and the West” advocated by Lu Jiuyuan (陸九淵) and Wang Yangming (王陽明) was taken seriously by Muslim scholars and became a crucial theoretical reference in their writing process. In the late Ming and early Qing periods, the classical learning of the Shandong school and the Jinling school of Jingtang education focused on the study of Xingli (性理學). The theory of Sufism shared many common ideas with the Three Teachings (Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism) which showed a tendency towards confluence in the Song, Yuan, and Ming periods. Chinese Muslim scholars, known as Huiru (回儒), drew intellectual resources from all of these traditions to construct their study of Xingli. Full article

We consider the peculiarity of unique events, such as those of a natural, evolutionary, and social nature. In particular, we consider unique social events that have had either the claim or the vocation of being salvific for humanity, such as the introduction over time of the Torah, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. We question how the claimed, general salvific vocation contrasts, or is inconsistent with, the non-retroactive temporality and locality of such events, which could not have happened otherwise. This undeclared and philosophically unsolved inconsistency then reappears in subsequent cultural contradictions and inadequacies, political and social allowances such as, for instance, homo-centrism and a pathological relation with Nature. In the case of Christianity, this inconsistency is represented by the painting reproduced in the article, a work in which the excluded humans and other living beings are represented as astonished by the occurrence in this moment, and in such an unnatural context. Furthermore, we consider the original understanding as related to concepts of classical physics, or of such concepts naively adopted within the texts considered sacred. However, in some religions, such as Christianity, the inconsistency is theologically solved. We stress the need to update the ancient original elementary, naïve, pre-classic philosophical and conceptual frameworks used so that these alleged inconsistencies and contradictions may be not only theologically solved, but also conceptually solved in more complex understandings of the world, for example, considering relativistic time, long-range interdependence, quantum entanglement, and theories of the universe. Without this update, the unique saving events can affect only religiously, that is, optionally, on the scientific and philosophical conceptions used. Without this adjustment, homo-centrist illusion and egoism prevail as the natural, linear consequential attitude without raising these questions. It rather assumes that the intervention is for involved human beings, and moreover for those who have had and are lucky enough to receive and practice it, ignoring the enormous inconsistency within the message itself, and its presumed general and available salvific nature. This requires theological, philosophical, and scientific interdisciplinarity. The theme concerns inconsistencies within and superficiality of the narratives and their treatment of the unique, salvific events, without any reference to possible general and retroactive effects of how these events are represented in the painting. We conclude that the subject should be debated by taking into account contemporary understandings, such as relativistic space and time, quantum physics, and of the universe, with new philosophical and anthropological approaches. This should be a matter of responsible philosophical and theological interdisciplinary debate involving science, suitable to establish new understandings. Full article

In this article, two great world religions, Islam and Buddhism, are compared. The purpose is to highlight similarities and differences between the two religions. Additionally, this article aims to project elements and teachings that are deemed important by their followers. A neutral stance on their beliefs is especially important in a multicultural society. The study was conducted to promote the harmony and betterment of Malaysian society, and the nation at large; a value process of understanding of each religion is recommended, which can then lead to acceptance, respect and tolerance among the population, and form the basis for developing a paradigmatic Malaysian society that has unity in diversity. This study adopted document analysis as the research method for data collection and data analysis. The conclusions drawn are that, although the two religions appear rather different in terms of principles and practices, the core values of avoiding evil and doing good are similar. In addition, the study proposes that without prejudice and pride, the basics of all commonly practiced religions in Malaysia should be introduced to all Malaysians, with the objective of all understanding, but not necessarily embracing, each other’s religion. Full article

Buddhist protectionism in contemporary Myanmar revolves around fears of the decline of Buddhism and deracination of the amyo (group/“race”). Buddhist protectionists and Burmese nationalists have declared Islam and Muslims the greatest threat to race and religion, and Myanmar has witnessed widespread distribution of anti-Islamic and anti-Muslim content, as well as massive violence against Muslim minority communities, the Rohingya in particular. The Indian neologism “Love Jihad” has scarce reference in contemporary Burmese Buddhist discourses, but, importantly, the tropes of aggressive male Muslim sexuality and (forced) conversion through marriage (“love jihad”) have been one of the core issues in Buddhist protectionism in Myanmar. The article shows that such tropes of the threatening foreign male have strong historical legacies in Myanmar, going back to colonial Burma when Burmese concerns over Indian male immigrant workers resulted in both anti-Indian violence and anti-miscegenation laws. Importantly, however, compared to colonial Indophobia and military era xenophobic nationalism, contemporary constructions are informed by new political realities and global forces, which have changed Buddhist protectionist imaginaries of gender and sexuality in important ways. Building on Sara R. Farris’ concept of “femonationalism”, and Rogers Brubaker’s concept of civilizationism, the article shows how Global Islamophobia, as well as global discourses on women’s rights and religious freedom, have informed Buddhist protectionism beyond ethnonationalism in the traditional sense. Full article

This article serves to introduce a special issue of Religions, titled Music in World Religions. A 2015 article by religion scholar Isabel Laack claimed that the study of music and religion has been neglected by Laack’s peers in the field of religions. Responding to Laack, I argue that scholars of music have been making important contributions to the study of music and religion and, indeed, have been addressing the twelve specific topics she highlights for decades. After summarizing academic works which respond to Laack’s twelve categories of inquiry, I introduce each of the articles in this special issue, showing that each of these also address the gap in the literature that Laack perceived. Ultimately, I argue that transdisciplinarity in the study of music and religion is alive and well, and is exemplified both by historic writings and by those contained in Music in World Religions. Full article