Buddhism
21 findings, grouped by tradition.
Vajrayana Buddhism5
- The VajraIndra's smashing weapon in Ṛgveda 1.32 became, in tantras of the late seventh century on, the emblem of what cannot be smashed. The oldest five-pronged pieces cited here are Tang and Heian, not Tibetan.
- TummoHerbert Benson's Harvard-led team tested three practitioners at Upper Dharamsala in February 1981; in Nature (1982) they reported finger and toe temperatures rising by up to 8.3°C.
- Chögyam TrungpaTrungpa named the American Thomas Rich, as Ösel Tendzin, his Vajra Regent and successor. In February 1989 the New York Times reported allegations that Tendzin, leading the community after 1987, knew he had AIDS and infected partners.
- The TulpaDavid-Néel introduced the tulpa in 1929. Mikles and Laycock (2015) traced the modern idea and found it "more indebted to Theosophy than to Tibetan Buddhism".
- The MandalaIn his 1929 commentary on the Chinese Golden Flower text, Jung named a palaeolithic sunwheel from Rhodesia as the oldest mandala he knew.
Zen Buddhism5
- Nishida Kitaro and the Kyoto School'Kyoto School' began as a critic's label: in 1932 Tosaka Jun coined Kyōto-gakuha to attack the school as 'bourgeois philosophy in Japan'.
- Wabi-SabiIn 2024 Paul Atkins found "wabi-sabi" in English print only from about 1980, and noted that it is absent from standard Japanese dictionaries.
- The Way of ZenIn the book's own preface Watts called his first Zen book, The Spirit of Zen (1936), a popularisation of Suzuki and 'in many respects out of date and misleading'.
- Zen in the Art of ArcheryYamada Shōji (1999) found no evidence that Awa Kenzō ever trained in Zen, and backed Feliks Hoff's view that 'It shoots' rendered Awa's plain 'That's it'.
- Zen Mind, Beginner's MindMarian Derby taped the talks and drafted the book; Trudy Dixon edited it but died of cancer at thirty, so Richard Baker completed it, his 1970 introduction records.
Buddhism3
- DharmachakraIndia's flag, adopted on 22 July 1947, copies the 24-spoked wheels on Ashoka's Sarnath capital. The dharma wheel that crowned it, restored from fragments found in 1904–05, had 32 spokes.
- Siddhārtha GautamaThe 563–483 BCE dates printed in most handbooks are a modern reckoning off the Sinhalese chronicles rather than a Buddhist tradition or a piece of evidence. Since Heinz Bechert's 1988 Göttingen symposium, scholarship has clustered the death near 400 BCE. Nothing outside the texts attests the Buddha before Ashoka's Lumbinī pillar of the 240s BCE.
- The Bardo Thödol'The Tibetan Book of the Dead' is Evans-Wentz's title of 1927, after the Egyptian; he knew no Tibetan, never visited Tibet, and the translation was Kazi Dawa-Samdup's.
Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism1
Japanese Buddhism1
Madhyamaka Buddhism1
Modern / Tibetan1
Theravada Buddhism1
Tibetan Buddhism1
Vipassana1
Western Buddhism1