In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Mahāyāna Interpretation of Christianity:A Case Study of Zhang Chunyi (1871–1955)Lai Pan-chiu and So Yuen-taiMahāyāna Buddhism is one of the most popular religions in East Asia. It reflects the characteristics of the culture of East Asia and has had a tremendous impact on the culture(s) of the region. When Christianity was introduced into East Asia, it did not enter a religious vacuum. Because the people of East Asia have their (...) own culture, including their worldviews, values, and preunderstandings of religion, it is expected that they may interpret the Christian religion in a way significantly different from the Western interpretation of Christianity. One of these possible ways of reinterpreting Christianity is facilitated by the Mahāyāna Buddhist framework.This paper consists of an analysis of the Mahāyāna interpretation of Christianity made by Zhang Chunyi (1871–1955).1 Zhang was a rather well-known Sinologist who published several commentaries on Chinese classics, including Mozi, Laozi, and Zhuangzi. Though he had been well trained in Chinese classics, he was attracted to Christianity, with the hope that Christianity might contribute to the social reform of China. He even received baptism in an Anglican church in 1905. However, because of his in-depth study of Buddhism and his disappointment with the actual practices of the Christian churches at that time, he eventually converted to Buddhism during the 1920s. From that point, he formally promoted the slogan "Buddhicizing Christianity" (Fohua Jidujiao). His proposal for Buddhicizing Christianity includes a severe criticism of the "foreign" form of Christianity being "imported" to China mainly by the Western Protestant missionaries who, according to Zhang, preached a simplistic and even distorted "gospel" for they lacked the spiritual training (nei xue, lit., "inner learning") as well as the intellectual ability to understand sophisticated Chinese philosophy and genuine Christianity. Partially under his influence, some of his contemporary Chinese Christians were converted to Buddhism. In fact, he published at least eight books on interpreting and reforming Christian doctrines from the perspectives of Buddhism, Confucianism, and so on.2 He was probably the most prolific writer on the subject of his generation and one of the pioneers [End Page 67] in what is now called Mahāyāna theology. This brief outline of his rather unusual religious journey might have indicated the importance of the study of his Buddhist interpretation of Christianity. However, owing to mainly sociopolitical turmoil as well as the religious atmosphere at that time and in the subsequent decades, his Buddhist interpretation of Christianity has not been formally studied for decades.In recent years, more and more studies of Buddhist-Christian dialogue take place in the Chinese context.3 It is important to study previous cases of Buddhist-Christian dialogue, Mahāyāna theology, and so on. Some of these cases, including Zhang's, have been studied.4 This paper aims to examine Zhang's thought critically and to show that although Zhang advocated a Mahāyāna interpretation of Christianity before and after his conversion to Buddhism, his interpretations before and after his conversion to Buddhism are significantly different. It is proposed that whereas his interpretation before his conversion aimed at the indigenization of Christianity and thus, the evangelization of the Chinese, his interpretation after conversion was made with a view to converting the Christians to Buddhism, even though both aimed at the reformulation, or even reform, of Christianity.Zhang's Proposal of "Buddhicizing christianity"Zhang was a scholar of classical Chinese literature, active during the Republican era. He was knowledgeable in Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism, and Moism. His study of Moism remains highly regarded.5 Zhang became a Christian and worked for the Christian Literature Society for China (Guan xue hui) in Shanghai for some years. He published several books with a view to indigenizing Christian theology by interpreting it through Chinese philosophical and religious concepts. Zhang's attempt aimed at reinterpreting Christian doctrines within the Buddhist framework in order to make Christianity more acceptable to the Chinese. However, in the 1920s, he himself converted to Buddhism and began to promote his proposal of "Buddhicizing Christianity" (Fohua Jidujiao),6 aiming to convert Christians to Buddhism.Because Zhang had... (shrink)

Corporate social responsibility has generally been recognized as corporate pro-social behavior aimed at remediating social issues external to organizations, while political CSR has acknowledged the political nature of such activity beyond social aims. Despite the growth of this literature, there is still little attention given to gender as the starting point for a conversation on CSR, ethics, and the Global South. Deploying critical insights from feminist work in postcolonial traditions, I outline how MNCs replicate gendered neocolonialist discourses and perpetuate exploitative (...) material dependences between Global North/south through CSR activities. Specifically, I address issues of neocolonial relations, subaltern agency, and ethics in the context of gendered global division of labor through the exemplar of Rana Plaza and its aftermath. In all, I offer new directions for CSR scholarship by attending to the intersections of gender, ethics, and responsibility as they relate to corporate actions in the Global South. (shrink)

This study conducted a cross-sectional investigation of facial appearance dissatisfaction between patients before undergoing orthognathic surgery and a non-surgical sample to evaluate the potential influencing factors of facial appearance dissatisfaction. A sample of 354 participants completed a set of questionnaires concerning facial appearance dissatisfaction, interpersonal pressure, media pressure, and fear of negative appearance evaluation (112 patients, 242 controls). The patients reported higher facial appearance dissatisfaction, more media pressure, more interpersonal pressure, and a greater fear of negative appearance evaluation among others (...) than the control group. Moreover, regression analyses identified interpersonal pressure and fear of negative appearance evaluation as the main influencing factors on facial appearance dissatisfaction whether in the orthognathic patients or in the control groups. The associations between the perceptions of interpersonal pressure, fear of negative appearance evaluation, and facial appearance dissatisfaction support the possible utility of strengthening social experiences and psychological intervention in preventing and treating these appearance-concerns, especially for the orthognathic patients. (shrink)

This study extended the research on the relationship between youth elite athletes’ satisfaction and coaches’ paternalistic leadership by identifying athletes’ resilience as a moderator. A total of 221 youth elite football players aged 13–19 years old who are students of a Chinese professional football boarding school participated in a questionnaire survey. The study found no correlation between the three dimensions of coaches’ paternalistic leadership and the youth athletes’ satisfaction. The results also showed that the interaction of resilience and moral leadership (...) affects the youth elite athletes’ satisfaction, whereas resilience does not play a moderating role in the relationship between authoritative leadership or benevolent leadership and satisfaction. As the results of the study are different from those of other scholars, they may reveal the uniqueness of youth elite football players in boarding schools. This study further analyzed the possible reasons for this result and prospected the theoretical and practical implications of these findings. Based on the conclusion, the study recommended that youth elite football schools should pay attention to the results of scientific research in leadership styles and apply them to practice in the future. (shrink)

This paper provides an experimental test of stochastic choice models of decisions. Models that admit Fechnerian structure are tested through the repeated pairwise choice problems. Results refute the Fechner hypothesis that characterizing the probability of selecting a given prospect increases in how strongly it is preferred to alternative choices. However, the experimental data lend support to characterizing an individual’s binary choice probability as some scalable functions of the von Neumann–Morgenstern utilities in the risky context.

InDialectic of Enlightenment Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno argue that reason, which claims to lead to truth, is always instrumental reason—a form of domination based on violence. Enlightenment, which aspired to emancipate society from the violence of myth, ends by reenacting this violence and turning back into myth.2 Jürgen Habermas attacks this argument for falling prey to an unbridled scepticism that fails to appreciate the achievements of modernity.3 For him, Horkheimer's and Adorno's radical critique of reason is analogous to Nietzsche's (...) critique of science and morals in On the Genealogy of Morality to the extent that a claim to truth…. (shrink)

Interpretative study of Lokāyata philosophy.

ExcerptOne of the most disappointing human rights debacles in the last few years was the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan. For those who still take an interest,1 the human rights situation there has become horrendous, with Human Rights Watch documenting the denial of schooling and employment to women, extrajudicial killings, and torture.2 Moreover, in a severe rebuttal to those who supported the withdrawal, Taliban rule has created the conditions for a renewal of terrorist groups that can now develop and (...) train in Afghanistan with impunity.3 There is also a good case to be made that the U.S. withdrawal there emboldened Putin to invade Ukraine, calculating that the United States and its allies no longer have the stomach for protracted conflicts in order to prevent human rights abuses. It may be that we have traded a low-grade conflict in Afghanistan for a high-intensity one in Ukraine.4 The lesson here is that the struggle for human rights, while beginning as a moral problem about our common responsibilities, can only be taken seriously when we consider its political ramifications. What do we owe to our fellow humans, and what sacrifices should we make in order to fulfill those responsibilities? (shrink)

本书包括:综论篇、朱子学篇、阳明学篇、实学篇、专论篇五篇,文章包括《中国儒学与韩国、日本儒学》、《韩国、日本朱子学比较》、《中国阳明学与韩国、日本阳明学》、《中国与韩国实学》等。.

Medical argumentation in non-Western societies has attracted little attention. In line with the pragma-dialectical approach to the study of argumentation, this article identifies a prototypical argumentative pattern in Chinese medical consultations. In addition to institutional preconditions, whose relevance to the argumentative pattern has been well cited, a factor that may be equally important has remained unnoticed: the preference for certain drugs, treatments or therapeutic measurements on the basis of folk interpretations of medical phenomena in individual ethnic groups. These preferences may (...) be seen as cultural preferences in the medical domain. In this paper, a prototypical argumentative pattern of Chinese medical consultations is provided. Two levels of the pattern are distinguished and discussed: a basic argumentative pattern as presented in the pragmatic-dialectical approach and its extensions due to cultural preferences as well as institutional constraints. Illustrated by an exemplary analysis on the basis of empirical data collected from Chinese consulting rooms, the impact of cultural preferences on physicians’ strategic maneuvering in argumentation is identified and recognized. It is argued that the existence and impact of cultural preferences require attention in medical argumentation. (shrink)

Writings on Hindu cosmology and science.

This paper studies the fixed-time trajectory tracking control problem of robot manipulators in the presence of uncertain dynamics and external disturbances. First, a novel nonsingular fixed-time sliding mode surface is presented, which can ensure that the convergence time of the suggested surface is bounded regardless of the initial states. Subsequently, a novel fast nonsingular fixed-time sliding mode control is developed so that the closed-loop system is fixed-time convergent to the equilibrium. By applying the proposed NFNFSMC method and the adaptive technique, (...) a novel adaptive nonsingular fixed-time control scheme is proposed, which can guarantee fast fixed-time convergence of the tracking errors to small regions around the origin. With the proposed control method, the lumped disturbance is compensated by the adaptive technique, whose prior information about the upper bound is not needed. The fixed-time stability of the trajectory tracking control under the proposed controller is proved by the Lyapunov stability theory. Finally, corresponding simulations are given to illustrate the validity and superiority of the proposed control approach. (shrink)

Considering three monetary policy rules, together with two endogenous macroprudential policies that are credit constraints for households and counter-cyclical capital for bankers, this paper establishes a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model. Based on the welfare analysis of different combinations of macroprudential rules and monetary policy rules, this paper identifies the optimal policy combinations and analyzes the coordination effects between macroprudential policies and monetary policies. The results show that no matter what kind of monetary policy rules is implemented, the introduction of (...) macroprudential rules has improved the level of total social welfare. In the optimal “two pillars” framework of monetary policies and macroprudential rules, the main objective of monetary policy is to stabilize price inflation, and the macroprudential policy to be implemented is the CRR macroprudential policy. This combination can effectively promote the stability of the real estate market, financial market, and macroeconomy, while maximizing the improvement of total social welfare. (shrink)