Profiling the Sangha. Institutional and Non-Institutional Tendencies in Early Buddhist Teachings

Students of Buddhism use to discover early on in their studies that it is misleading to speak of a 'church' in early Buddhism. Christian ecclesiastical phenomena like priests, Sunday services, sermons, parishes and communal prayers, let alone a centrally organized institution like the Roman catholic church, did not exist in what we know of early Buddhism. Instead of a church, one is tempted to say, early Buddhism possessed the sangha, the monastic community. Basic religious functions the church fulfils in Christianity seem to be fulfilled by the sangha: as a member of this group, one follows the ideal path to salvation, and it is the task of the community to preserve and hand over the teaching of the Buddha (the dhamma) to following generations. It seems obvious that the sangha constitutes the central, if not the only religious institution of early Buddhism

Resurrection from the Dead? The Brāhmaṇical Rite of Renunciation and its Irreversibility

Asian Studie

Elements of a Comparative Methodology in the Study of Religion

While comparison has been the subject of much theoretical debate in the study of religion, it has rarely been discussed in methodological terms. A large number of comparative studies have been produced in the course of the discipline’s history, but the question of how comparison works as a method has rarely been addressed. This essay proposes, in the form of an outline, a methodological frame of comparison that addresses both the general configuration of a comparative study—its goal, mode, scale, and scope—and the comparative process, distinguishing operations of selection, description, juxtaposition, redescription, as well as rectification and theory formation. It argues that identifying and analyzing such elements of a comparative methodology helps, on the one hand, in evaluating existing comparative studies and, on the other, in producing new ones. While the article attempts to present the methodological frame in a concise form and thus offers limited illustrative material, the authors of the other essays in this collection discuss rich historical-empirical cases as they test the frame on their own comparative studies

Zur Interpretation der Brahmadaṇḍa-Strafe im buddhistischen Ordensrecht

Asian Studie