Dimensions of Buddhist Education by Chandra B Varma (Hard Bound)

Description

The Dimensions of Buddhist Education is a ‘pioneering’ work for its portrayal of the multicultural, secular, humanitarian, and the political outlook of the Buddhists. Also, the book deals with their language policy recommending mother tongue as the medium of instruction. Besides, it affirms their Anthropological standpoint to demolish the racist or casteist ideologies by scientific arguments. Further, the book echoes the serious ecological concern of the Buddhists underlying the human greed, hate and delusive understanding which they identify as the three roots of all immoral actions.

Furthermore, the book deals with the topics on Buddhist Linguistics by the exposition of their six-fold syntactic and semantic postulations; sixteen modes of communications (hāra); and five guiding principles for making judgments (naya). It also makes a brief survey of the growth of the indigenous Indian scripts, which in turn has played a crucial role to the growth of the modern Indian vernaculars.

Philosophically, the book affirms the epistemological stance of the Buddhists and the cognitive theory to explicate their ontological position by a comprehensive analysis of mind (nāma), matter (rūpa) and Nibbāna, which they reckon as the ultimate realities, and discuss in light of seventy-two intrinsic characteristics (vatthu dhammā) represented in the seventy-two stūpas of the world’s largest Buddhist temple at Borobudur in Indonesia.

The book is also a window on India’s ancient cultural linkages with other countries with special reference to the two ancient Indian trade routes that intersected in Vadanagar – the birth place of the Indian Prime Minister Sri Narendra Modi.