TY - JOUR

T1 - The network paradigm in buddhist studies

AU - Alekseev-Apraksin, Anatoliy

AU - Erokhin, Boris

N1 - Funding Information: 1 The reported study was funded by Russian Foundation for Basic Research (RFBR) according to the research project № 18-011-00977. Publisher Copyright: © 2018 Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, University of Latvia. All rights reserved. Copyright: Copyright 2020 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.

PY - 2018

Y1 - 2018

N2 - Expansion of Buddhism in modern societies tends to take forms the researchers often define as global transnational networks. It opens the way to studying Buddhism from the standpoint of network analytics. The novelty of the network paradigm is shifting the focus from studying objects to analyzing their connections and relationships using the 'graph theory' as the mode of description. The network approach successfully develops in many modern fields of science (mathematics, physics, biology, sociology, psychology) and even pretends to be a new interdisciplinary paradigm. Many parallels between the network theory and Buddhist ideas call for the investigation of the respective fields. Buddhism regards the phenomenal world in terms of coherence and interdependence. In the Buddhist texts and exegetical literature, the network narrative is found pervading the whole teaching by concepts of dependent origination, karma patterns, logical methods and constructions along with enumerating manner of presentation, the concepts of illusory character of the so-called reality, mandala, personalized way of transmission, and nonlinear dynamics. Contemporary research of social networks allows to study the topology of religious organizations, to identify their structure, interconnection, and scope, to conduct comparative studies of various communities, to ascertain the density of connections and the level of clustering, to estimate the life cycle of a network, its dynamics and specifics that induces its quality changes. Such an approach that may alter many established ideas opens up new perspectives for religious studies and beyond.

AB - Expansion of Buddhism in modern societies tends to take forms the researchers often define as global transnational networks. It opens the way to studying Buddhism from the standpoint of network analytics. The novelty of the network paradigm is shifting the focus from studying objects to analyzing their connections and relationships using the 'graph theory' as the mode of description. The network approach successfully develops in many modern fields of science (mathematics, physics, biology, sociology, psychology) and even pretends to be a new interdisciplinary paradigm. Many parallels between the network theory and Buddhist ideas call for the investigation of the respective fields. Buddhism regards the phenomenal world in terms of coherence and interdependence. In the Buddhist texts and exegetical literature, the network narrative is found pervading the whole teaching by concepts of dependent origination, karma patterns, logical methods and constructions along with enumerating manner of presentation, the concepts of illusory character of the so-called reality, mandala, personalized way of transmission, and nonlinear dynamics. Contemporary research of social networks allows to study the topology of religious organizations, to identify their structure, interconnection, and scope, to conduct comparative studies of various communities, to ascertain the density of connections and the level of clustering, to estimate the life cycle of a network, its dynamics and specifics that induces its quality changes. Such an approach that may alter many established ideas opens up new perspectives for religious studies and beyond.

KW - Buddhism

KW - Cluster

KW - Connectivity

KW - Dependent origination

KW - Diamond Way

KW - Emptiness

KW - Global transnational networks

KW - Graph

KW - Illusion

KW - Interdisciplinary paradigm

KW - Mandala

KW - Nets

KW - Nods

KW - Rhizome

KW - Tantra

KW - Vajrayana

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85092079411&partnerID=8YFLogxK

M3 - Review article

AN - SCOPUS:85092079411

VL - 25

SP - 305

EP - 319

JO - Religiski-Filozofiski Raksti

JF - Religiski-Filozofiski Raksti

SN - 1407-1908

ER -