This thesis considers whether a Buddhist statue in a museum context can be both aesthetic and devotional. By reexamining the relationship between a devotional object, its surrounding space, and its viewer, this thesis will suggest how a museum gallery, though not a consecrated ritual space, can still potentially be a place for spiritual engagement akin to a religious sanctuary. Through a comparison of Gallery 16 of the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco and Mengjia Longshan Temple, Taipei, Taiwan as a case study in terms of their spaces and the movement of people within the space in relation to the objects, this thesis will consider how Buddhist statues may continue to exist as spiritual objects and works of aesthetic appreciation without losing their past as devotional icons, and I will do this by applying Victor Turner’s concepts of liminality and the liminoid.

An assertion that psychotherapy is an independent science and a self-authority on human mind and behaviour has uprooted its connection with philosophy and religion. In practice, the scientist-practitioner model of psychotherapy, a seemingly dualistic model, prefers determinism of science to free will of choice in humans. In particular, the model does not see reason and emotion as co-conditioning causes of human behaviour and suffering within the interdependent aggregates of self, other, and environment. Instead, it argues for wrong reasoning as the cause of emotional suffering. In Western thought, such narrative began at the arrival of scripted language and abstract thought in Greek antiquity that has led psychotherapy to think ignorantly that emotions are un-reasonable therefore they are irrational. Only rational thinking can effectively remove un-reasonable emotions. This belief creates confusion between rational theory and rational method of studying change in emotion because of the belief that science cannot objectively measure emotions. As a result, rational epistemologies that are ignorant of moral and metaphysical issues in human experience have multiplied. These epistemologies not only construct an unchanging rational identity, but also uphold the status of permanent self-authority. Fortunately, recent developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscience research have quashed such ideas of permanent self-identity and authority. Buddhist theory of Interdependent Arising and Conditional Relations sees such identity and authority as arisen together with deluded emotional desires of greed and hatred. These desires co-condition interdependent states of personal feeling and perception (metaphysics), conceptual thinking and consciousness (epistemology) and formation of (moral) emotion and action within the context of self other-environment matrix. Moral choices particularly highlight the intentional or the Aristotelian final cause of action derived from healthy desires by valued meaning makings and interpretations. Theravada formulation aims to end unhealthy desires and develop the healthy ones within the matrix including the client-clinician-therapeutic environment contexts. Theravada treatment guides a tripartite approach of practicing empathic ethics, penetrating focus and reflective understanding, which integrates ecologically with Western rational analysis. It also allows scientific method of studying change in emotion by applying the theory of defective desires. In addition, interdependent dimensions of thinking and feeling understood from Theravada perspective present a framework for developing theory and treatment of self disorders. Thus, Theravada treatment not only allows scientific method of studying change in emotion and provides an interdependent theory and treatment but also ecologically integrates with Western rational analysis. Moreover, Theravada approach offers an open framework for further development of theoretical and treatment models of psychopathology classified under Western nomenclature.

Thesis--New York University, 1973. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 379-388).

Thesis--Princeton. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 440-454).

Thesis (doctoral)--University of London, 1970.

published_or_final_version / Buddhist Studies / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

This dissertation undertakes a comprehensive analysis of the arguments for and against an ontology of momentary temporal parts advanced by a long tradition of Buddhist philosophers in Sanskrit. Drawing on the latest authors in Indian Buddhist schools and using contemporary tools and theories, I defend the Buddhist ontology against the best objections of its Naiyāyika critics, who favor an ontology of enduring substances. The dissertation has six chapters. In the first, I provide an overview of epistemology and ontology in the classical period of Indian civilization. In the second, I discuss how the competing considerations of change and endurance shape the early arguments for and against momentariness. The relationship of properties to property-bearers and of parts to wholes emerges as the central point of contention. In the third chapter, I consider the Buddhist argument that destruction is uncaused. Here the ontological status of absences becomes the crucial issue, and I explain the complex exchanges on this score. In the fourth chapter, I examine the most sophisticated of the Buddhist arguments, an inference based on the thesis that anything that exists has causal efficiency. Causal relations also play a key role in the Buddhist account of the persistence of things as presupposed in everyday discourse. The topic of the unity of a series is continued in the fifth chapter, where I apply Buddhist ideas to the problem of personal identity. Here so-called recognition, our identifying an object as in some sense the same as one previously perceived or cognized, is seen to be the key consideration according to my reconstruction of the classical debate. Especially cross-sensory recognition, seeing now something that one has previously touched, for instance, becomes the central issue. I defend the Buddhist view by giving an account of cross-sensory recognition that countenances no non-momentary entities. In the sixth chapter, I put the Indian dispute into the context of contemporary debates over temporal parts theories. A partial translation of the previously untranslated text, the Kṣaṇabhaṅgasiddhi of Ratnakīrti (an eleventh-century author who may be counted the last of the great Indian Buddhist philosophers), forms an appendix. / text

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Thesis (Ph. D.) - University of Washington. / Vita. Bibliography: L.[324]-336.