Dr Pierce Salguero sits down with Venerable Soorākkulame Pemaratana, chief abbot at the Pittsburgh Buddhist Center and a scholar of modern Buddhism in Sri Lanka. We talk about his role in adapting Buddhist practices to address social and mental health needs during the Covid-19 pandemic. We also compare Buddhist responses to Covid in Pittsburgh and Sri Lanka. Along the way, we talk about how he became a monk, the health benefits of drinking boiled coriander water, and the dire situation in his home country.
Enjoy the conversation! And, if you want to hear from more experts on Buddhist medicine and related topics, subscribe to Blue Beryl for monthly episodes here.
Resources:

Pittsburgh Buddhist Center

Donate to PBC's efforts to Help Sri Lanka

PBC Recordings of Chanting

PBC Livestream

Other Resources on Buddhist Responses to Covid-19


Pierce Salguero is a transdisciplinary scholar of health humanities who is fascinated by historical and contemporary intersections between Buddhism, medicine, and crosscultural exchange. He has a Ph.D. in History of Medicine from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (2010), and teaches Asian history, medicine, and religion at Penn State University’s Abington College, located near Philadelphia. He is also the host (with Lan Li) of the Blue Beryl podcast. Subscribe to Blue Beryl here.
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Buddhist Responses to COVID: A Discussion with Venerable Soorākkulame Pemaratana

Interviews with Scholars of Buddhism about their New Books
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During the Republican period (1912–1949) and after, many Chinese Buddhists sought inspiration from non-Chinese Buddhist traditions, showing a particular interest in esoteric teachings. What made these Buddhists dissatisfied with Chinese Buddhism, and what did they think other Buddhist traditions could offer? Which elements did they choose to follow, and which ones did they disregard? And how do their experiences recast the wider story of twentieth-century pan-Asian Buddhist reform movements?
Based on a wide range of previously unexplored Chinese sources, Esoteric Buddhism in China: Engaging Japanese and Tibetan Traditions, 1912–1949 (Columbia UP, 2023) explores how esoteric Buddhist traditions have shaped the Chinese religious landscape. Wei Wu examines cross-cultural religious transmission of ideas from Japanese and Tibetan traditions, considering the various esoteric currents within Chinese Buddhist communities and how Chinese individuals and groups engaged with newly translated ideas and practices. She argues that Chinese Buddhists’ assimilation of doctrinal, ritual, and institutional elements of Tibetan and Japanese esoteric Buddhism was not a simple replication but an active process of creating new meanings. Their visions of Buddhism in the modern world, as well as early twentieth-century discourses of nation building and religious reform, shaped the reception of esoteric traditions. By analyzing the Chinese interpretation and strategic adaptations of esoteric Buddhism, this book sheds new light on the intellectual development, ritual performances, and institutional formations of Chinese Buddhism in the twentieth century.
To understand the broader forces that shaped the debates about esoteric Buddhism in modern China, please also check Wu Wei's article, "Buddhism and Superstition: Buddhist Apologetics in the Anti-Superstition Campaigns in Modern China," which is open access and can be found here.
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Wei Wu, "Esoteric Buddhism in China:  Engaging Japanese and Tibetan Traditions, 1912–1949" (Columbia UP, 2023)

Though fascinated with the land of their tradition’s birth, virtually no Japanese Buddhists visited the Indian subcontinent before the nineteenth century. In the richly illustrated Seeking Śākyamuni: South Asia in the Formation of Modern Japanese Buddhism (U Chicago Press, 2019), Richard M. Jaffe reveals the experiences of the first Japanese Buddhists who traveled to South Asia in search of Buddhist knowledge beginning in 1873. Analyzing the impact of these voyages on Japanese conceptions of Buddhism, he argues that South Asia developed into a pivotal nexus for the development of twentieth-century Japanese Buddhism. Jaffe shows that Japan’s growing economic ties to the subcontinent following World War I fostered even more Japanese pilgrimage and study at Buddhism’s foundational sites. Tracking the Japanese travelers who returned home, as well as South Asians who visited Japan, Jaffe describes how the resulting flows of knowledge, personal connections, linguistic expertise, and material artifacts of South and Southeast Asian Buddhism instantiated the growing popular consciousness of Buddhism as a pan-Asian tradition—in the heart of Japan.
Dr. Richard M Jaffe is a Religious Studies Professor at Duke University focusing on Japanese Buddhism. He is also the director of the Asian/Pacific Studies Institute at Duke.
Samee Siddiqui is a former journalist who is currently a PhD Candidate at the Department of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His dissertation explores discussions relating to religion, race, and empire between South Asian and Japanese figures in Tokyo from 1905 until 1945. You can find him on twitter @ssiddiqui83
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Richard M. Jaffe, "Seeking Sakyamuni: South Asia in the Formation of Modern Japanese Buddhism" (U Chicago Press, 2019)

Dr Pierce Salguero sits down with Justin B. Stein, a specialist in modern Japanese religion and the preeminent historian of Reiki. We discuss Justin’s new book, Alternate Currents: Reiki’s Circulation in the Twentieth-Century North Pacific (U Hawaii Press, 2023), about the transnational origins of Reiki, and also get into his perspective as a both a scholar and a Reiki practitioner. Along the way, we ask what Reiki has to do with Buddhism, what subtle energy feels like up close, and what kinds of extraordinary experiences might occur when you open up to energy of the universe.
Remember, if you want to hear from more experts on Buddhism, Asian medicine, and embodied spirituality, subscribe to Blue Beryl for monthly episodes. Please enjoy!
Resources mentioned in the episode:


C. Pierce Salguero, Buddhism and Medicine: An Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Sources (2020). Justin’s translation is Chapter 5, “Psychosomatic Buddhist Medicine at the Dawn of Modern Japan”

Justin B. Stein, Alternate Currents: Reiki’s Circulation in the Twentieth-Century North Pacific (2023).

BBP interview with Nathan Michon

Dr. Pierce Salguero is a transdisciplinary scholar of health humanities who is fascinated by historical and contemporary intersections between Buddhism, medicine, and crosscultural exchange. He has a Ph.D. in History of Medicine from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (2010), and teaches Asian history, medicine, and religion at Penn State University’s Abington College, located near Philadelphia. www.piercesalguero.com.
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Reiki and the Subtle Body, with Justin B. Stein

The concept of the puruṣa, or person, is implicated in a wide range of ancient texts throughout the Indian subcontinent. In Puruṣa: Personhood in Ancient India, published in 2024 by Oxford University Press, Matthew I. Robertson traces the development of this concept from 1500 BCE to 400 CE: in the Ṛg Veda, the Brāhmaṇas, the Upaniṣads, Buddhist Pāli suttas, the Caraka and Suśruta Saṃhitā, and the Mahābhārata. Pushing back against the interpretation of personhood as a cosmological microcosm, Robertson argues instead that, in these texts, personhood and the “world” (loka) are interrelated concepts. He investigates how persons were understood to expand to the fill the horizons of their world, attending to ritual-political, aesthetic, yogic, and medicinal techniques deployed for this purpose.
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Matthew Robertson, "Puruṣa: Personhood in Ancient India" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Through engaging, contemporary examples, Making Sense of Mind Only: Why Yogacara Buddhism Matters (Wisdom Publications, 2023) reveals the Yogacara school of Indian Buddhism as a coherent system of ideas and practices for the path to liberation, contextualizing its key texts and rendering them accessible and relevant. The Yogacara, or Yoga Practice, school is one of the two schools of Mahayana Buddhism that developed in the early centuries of the common era. Though it arose in India, Mahayana Buddhism now flourishes in China, Tibet, Korea, Vietnam, and Japan. While the other major Mahayana tradition, the Madhyamaka (Middle Way), focuses on the concept of emptiness—that all phenomena lack an intrinsic essence—the Yogacara school focuses on the cognitive processes whereby we impute such essences. Through everyday examples and analogues in cognitive science, author William Waldron makes Yogacara’s core teachings—on the three turnings of the Dharma wheel, the three natures, the storehouse consciousness, and mere perception—accessible to a broad audience. In contrast to the common characterization of Yogacara as philosophical idealism, Waldron presents Yogacara Buddhism on its own terms, as a coherent system of ideas and practices, with dependent arising its guiding principle. 
The first half of Making Sense of Mind Only explores the historical context for Yogacara’s development. Waldron examines early Buddhist texts that show how our affective and cognitive processes shape the way objects and worlds appear to us, and how we erroneously grasp onto them as essentially real—perpetuating the habits that bind us to samsara. He then analyzes the early Madhyamaka critique of essences. 
This context sets the stage for the book’s second half, an examination of how Yogacara texts such as the Samdhinirmocana Sutra and Asanga’s Stages of Yogic Practice (Yogacarabhumi) build upon these earlier ideas by arguing that our constructive processes also occur unconsciously. Not only do we collectively, yet mostly unknowingly, construct shared realities or cultures, our shared worlds are also mediated through the storehouse consciousness (alayavijñana) functioning as a cultural unconscious. Vasubandhu’s Twenty Verses argues that we can learn to recognize such objects and worlds as “mere perceptions” (vijñaptimatra) and thereby abandon our enchantment with the products of our own cognitive processes. Finally, Maitreya’s Distinguishing Phenomena from Their Ultimate Nature (Dharmadharmatavibhaga) elegantly lays out the Mahayana path to this transformation. In Waldron’s hands, Yogacara is no mere view but a practical system of transformation. His presentation of its key texts and ideas illuminates how religion can remain urgent and vital in our scientific and pluralistic age.
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Buddhist Responses to COVID: A Discussion with Venerable Soorākkulame Pemaratana

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