For the Love of Dogs: Finding Compassion in a Time of Famine in Pali Buddhist Stories

This paper focuses on stories from the 13th century Rasavāhinī in which feeding a starving dog is described as an act of great merit, equal even to the care of a monk or the Buddha. It begins with a reevaluation of passages from Buddhist texts that have been taken by scholars as evidence of pan- Bud...

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Главный автор: Granoff, Phyllis Emily 1947- (Автор)
Формат: Электронный ресурс Статья
Язык:Английский
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Interlibrary Loan:Interlibrary Loan for the Fachinformationsdienste (Specialized Information Services in Germany)
Опубликовано: [2019]
В: Religions
Год: 2019, Том: 10, Выпуск: 3, Страницы: 1-21
Другие ключевые слова:B Buddhism
B Famine
B Dogs
B Merit
Online-ссылка: Volltext (doi)
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Итог:This paper focuses on stories from the 13th century Rasavāhinī in which feeding a starving dog is described as an act of great merit, equal even to the care of a monk or the Buddha. It begins with a reevaluation of passages from Buddhist texts that have been taken by scholars as evidence of pan- Buddhist concern for taking care of animals. It argues that they have been over-read and that the Rasavāhinī stories are distinctive. The setting in which these acts occur, a catastrophic famine, helps us to understand the transformation of the despised dog into an object of compassion. In such dire circumstances, when humans themselves behave like animals, compassion for a starving dog is both a new recognition of a fundamental shared kinship between human and animal and a gesture of recovering lost humanity.
ISSN:2077-1444
Второстепенные работы:Enthalten in: Religions
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.3390/rel10030183