Buddhism

The mythical characters with the names of God or angels with multiple hands are seen in different cultures. In a number of religious buildings of Gilan and Mazandaran, there is an iconographic image with upright hands, depicted with inscription, Angel of Rain. In the Iranian mythology, Anahita is a special angel of water, and Tishtar, is the angel of rain. The purpose of this study is to examine the function of multi-handed humanoid characters and motifs in Iranian, Hindu and Buddhist cultures. In all of these cultures, numerous hands indicate helping and hands rising to signify prayer for divine mercy. The purpose of this study is to investigate the function of multi-faceted human characters and motifs in Iranian, Hindu and Buddhist cultures.

The study of civilizations of South and Southeast Asia seem meaningless without an insight on Hinduism and Buddhism that exerted an enormous influence in the region before the arrival of Islam. The two beliefs, though originated in India, but contributed greatly to the development of socio-cultural relations among countries as far as Afghanistan in the west and China, Japan, and Indonesia in the east. About the beginning of the Common Era, Indian merchants may have settled there, bringing Hindu and Buddhist priests with them. These religious men were patronized by rulers who converted to Hinduism or Buddhism. The earliest material evidence of Hinduism in Southeast Asia comes from Borneo, where late 4th-century Sanskrit inscriptions testify to the performance of Vedic sacrifices at the behest of local chiefs. Chinese chronicles attest an Indianized kingdom in Vietnam two centuries earlier. The dominant form of Hinduism exported to Southeast Asia was Shaivism, though some Vaishnavism was also known there. The current study tries to explain how Hinduism and Buddhism could influence Socio-Cultural Relations between Pre-Islamic India and Afghanistan taking into account of historical records and inscriptions.

Will human sexuality survive the passage to Artificial Intelligence? To answer this question properly, we should first analyze the paradoxical inner structure of sexuality itself, which is never simply binary: it always involves a third element that gives body to the deadlock of sexual difference – this is what Lacan meant by “there is no sexual difference.” This is why sexuality is in itself excessive and perverse. For this reason, all attempts to “normalize” sexuality by way of keeping it within the limits of moderation miserably fail: today, we find on the market products deprived of their dangerous element (coffee without caffeine, chocolate without sugar…), and the moderate sexuality is sexuality without sex. The Buddhist attempts to contain the excess sexuality miss the point of sexuality: intense sexuality is in itself the greatest sacrifice (the sacrifice of peaceful moderate life) – in sexuality, we enjoy the pain, the renunciation itself. However, today, in our world pervaded by commodification and technological inventions, real human partners are more and more replaced by what Lacan called lathouses, artificial objects aimed at satisfying our sexual desire without another human being (plastic phalluses, digitalized pornography). The result is that we are thrown into a space of limitless pleasures where, although “everything is permitted,” our intense sexual desire gets anaestheticized. 

Robert Pippin was for decades among the most outspoken American Hegelians, defending Hegel’s idealist legacy not only against the post-Hegelian turn towards non-discursive or non-notional reality but also rejecting Heidegger’s treatment of Hegel. So it comes as a shock when,in his new book The Culmination (Pippin, 2024), he endorses Heidegger’s characterization of Hegel’s thought as the culmination of Western metaphysics, as the full deployment of its basic premise that being equals logos, i.e., that the truth of everything that exists (or that can exist) can be articulated in the form of discursive judgments, so that the full system of logic is at the same time a full ontology, the description of conditions that everything that exists should meet. In all probability, Heidegger’s answer would have been that capitalism is just one among ontic organizations of the technological disclosure of Being – as he put it, Soviet Union and the US are “metaphysically the same.” To this we should insist that capitalism is not simply an ontic phenomenon, one of the possible versions of technological attunement: capitalism is not just a social phenomenon, it also has a transcendental-ontological status. It is not modern science and technology as such which push us to continuous domination over and exploitation of nature – they function like this only within the frame of capitalism with its permanent propensity towards expanded self-reproduction. So, Pippin is right here: it is not enough to mention technological disponibility as the source of the disappearance of Meaningfulness – one should add the word “capitalism” never used by Heidegger. Here Marx surprisingly meets radical conservatives: Patrick Buisson, the French ultra-conservative, was right in claiming that “le grand deconstructeur, c’est le capitalisme.”