What does astrology, palm-reading and fortune telling have to do with politics in Thailand, and how can we make sense of these divination practices and their use in Thai politics? Listen to Edoardo Siani and Petra Alderman in this episode of the Nordic Asia Podcast to learn more about divination and the way it was used during the recent student-led protests in Thailand.
Edoardo Siani is an Assistant Professor of Southeast Asian Studies at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. Edoardo’s research concerns the relationship between Buddhist cosmology and politics in Thailand, focusing on divination, kingship, and spirit mediumship. To learn more about his research, read his article ‘Co-opting the stars: Divination and the politics of resistance in Buddhist Thailand.’
The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, the University of Helsinki, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo.
We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.
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Reading the Stars: When Divination Meets Politics in Thailand

Interviews with Scholars of Buddhism about their New Books
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Religion & Spirituality

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Spirituality

Christianity

Buddhism

Hinduism

Judaism

Islam

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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William S. Waldron, "Making Sense of Mind Only: Why Yogacara Buddhism Matters" (Wisdom Publications, 2023)

Jundo Cohen is a Zen Buddhist teacher and founder of Treeleaf Zendo, a digital Zen community with members in over 50 countries. He writes on the intersection of Buddhism, ethics, science, and the future of the planet. He resides in Tsukuba, Japan’s “Science City”. He is the author of The Zen Master’s Dance: A Guide to Understanding Dogen and Who You Are in the Universe (Wisdom, 2020), and is co-host of The Zen of Everything podcast.
In this episode I speak to Jundo about his new book, Building the Future Buddha: The Zen of AI, Genes, Saving the World, and Travel to the Stars (Treeleaf, 2024). The conversation covers a wide range of topics related to the future and Buddhism with some fun utopian thought on the way and some disagreement that makes for an interesting exploration.
Jundho claims that tomorrow’s technologies will change Buddhism. AI and robotics, bio-engineering and physical enhancements, genetics and nano-implants, virtual reality and new media, medical miracles and manufacturing marvels, extended lifespans and expanded minds will make many of Buddhism’s most fabulous ideals potentially realizable.
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Building the Future Buddha: A Discussion with Jundho Cohen

Professor William Waldron teaches courses on the South Asian religious traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism, Tibetan religion and history, comparative psychologies and philosophies of mind, and theory and method in the study of religion at Middlebury College. His publications focus on the Yogacara school of Indian Buddhism and its dialogue with modern thought. He is the author of Making Sense of Mind Only: Why Yogacara Buddhism Matters (Wisdom Publications, 2023).
In this conversation, we look at Yogacara thought, idealism, constructivism and the impact on the practitioner and tackle the following;

Why thinking of Yogacara as Mind Only is deeply problematic

Why seeing Yogacara as essentially constructivist is more accurate

Why seeing constructivism in dualistic terms is to miss the point

Why interdependence is central to Yogacara rather than the doctrine of emptiness

Why the signature concepts of; the three natures, the storehouse consciousness, and mere perception are liberational and key to understanding Yogacara’s ethics

Why Madhyamaka became dominant and a mistaken view of Yogacara developed as a consequence

How the insights of Yogacara can help us to understand concepts of liberation today


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Reading the Stars: When Divination Meets Politics in Thailand

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