The moral problem attendant on many deployments of the concept of karma is that it has been used to “blame…
The karma of this place
Buddhism
Karma as active resistance
Karma is one of the most well-known concepts associated with Buddhism in the West. In many Asian countries where Buddhism…
Algorithmic karma in digital samsara
I stand in line at the grocery store, my jittery trigger-thumb summoning successive apparitions of image, sound, and text that…
Karmic historiography
A lawyer friend explained it to me this way: Since the 1980s, lawyers with specialized expertise and exclusive relationships—especially those…
Virūpa, meet Fichte: Uncanny resonances in comparative philosophy
Comparative approaches, especially those couched as “East/West” philosophy, are beset with simplification, projections, and biases, often resulting in narrowness and…
Asian American religions: Transforming our religious ecology
Jumping across time and space and traversing religious practices, the essays in this forum present glimpses into the diversity and…
Asian American Buddhists: To heathenry and beyond
As a demographic that continues to be marked with the scarlet letter of heathenry, Asian American Buddhists demonstrate the nuanced…
The corporate nature of “alternative” practices
Ioannis Gaitanidis and Aike P. Rots, scholars of contemporary Asian religion, discuss commercial spirituality and corporate myth-making with examples from…
Overlooking official responses: Thai Buddhist institutions and Covid-19
It is striking to me that most of the discussions of Buddhist responses to Covid particularly in Southeast Asia .…
Circulating publicness and public circulation
How is publicness—the realization of publicity—itself mediated, circulated, and received?