Buddhism and Its Religious Others Historical Encounters and Representations

Throughout its history, Buddhism has developed alongside other traditions of religious belief and practice. Forms of Buddhism have in every era, region, and culture been confronted by rival systems that challenged its teachings about the world, how to behave in it, and liberation from it. This volume collects studies of Buddhist literature and art that represent the religious other to their audiences. Contributing authors examine how Buddhists in India, China, and elsewhere across Asia have understood their place in shared religious landscapes, and how they have responded to the presence and influence in the world of traditions other to their own. The studies in this volume consider a variety of 'others' that Buddhists of different times and situations have encountered, and the variety of mechanisms that Buddhists have employed to make sense of them. Chapters of this volume explore the range of attitudes that Buddhists have expressed with respect to other religions, how they have either accommodated the other within their worldview, or pronounced the redundancy of their ideas and activities. These chapters illuminate how over the centuries Buddhists have used and reused stories, symbols, and other strategies to explain religious others and their value, in which every representation of the other is always also a comment on the character and status of Buddhism itself.

1 - Buddhism, Sa?khya and the Brahmanical Avant-Garde
2 - 'The Buddha is a Raft.' On Metaphors, the Language of Liberation, and Religious Others in Early Buddhism
3 - The Buddha as a Warrior: On Some Martial Metaphors in Early (Mula)Sarvastivada Literature
4 - Shepherds in Wolves' Clothing: bodhisattvas, tirthikas and 'bodhisattva-tirthikas'
5 - What do the Shameless Ones Nonsensically Profess? Genealogy of Buddhist-Jain Philosophical Dialogue
6 - Demons, Wicked Ones and Those who Violate the Samayas: Dharma against the Enemy in Tantric Buddhism
7 - The Demonisation of the Other through the Narrative of Mara's Defeat (maravijaya)
8 - The Origins of the Origin Debates: Buddhist Responses to Daoist Accounts of the Origins of Buddhism (5th-6th Centuries)
9 - Outside the Way? Framing Non-Buddhist Practices in Heian Japan
10 - Posthumous Conversions of Confucians: A Zen Case Study from Song China to Modern Japan

Christopher V. Jones is a research associate and affiliated lecturer at the Faculty of Divinity, and a Bye-Fellow of Selwyn College, University of Cambridge. He has trained and taught at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and his research focuses on aspects of primarily Mah?y?na Buddhist literature across Sanskrit, Chinese and Tibetan sources. He is the author of The Buddhist Self: On Tath?gatagarbha and ?tman (2021).