India is the emerging country with the world’s greatest social banking program, so Indian banks are required to finance the weaker sectors of society that are excluded from the traditional financial system, while also providing mainstream banking services to non-priority sectors. For social banks to promote the ethical–social management of their dual mission and to be successful in today’s business environment, they must be as efficient as possible in both dimensions of their banking activity. Whereas the efficiency of Indian banks (...) in the financial dimension is well understood, to date there has been no research evaluating their double bottom-line of achieving social and financial goals. Our study applies an innovative Network Slack-Based DEA model to evaluate how efficient Indian public banks are when providing credit to priority and non-priority sectors. We also explore the main factors influencing bank efficiency. Results suggest that Indian public banks have performed relatively well in both activities, although social efficiency has been slightly greater than financial efficiency. Moreover, their commitment to priority sector lending has not come into conflict with the profit-seeking objectives of mainstream banking services. As regards determinants of social and financial efficiency, there are countervailing forces played by regional wealth, bank size, branch networks, and rural location. Our findings are therefore useful for stakeholders of Indian public banks as they indicate if these entities have adequately managed their double bottom-line, and hence if they are critical for poverty alleviation and development in India. (shrink)

Buddhist connections in Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy; a study.

And the Bactrian King, a possible convert to Buddhism, responds at this point, " Well said, Nagasena! So it is, and as such I accept it." Conclusion Between the times of these two apparently contradictory texts about nirvana, the Mahavagga and ...

Articles on metaphysics, based on the discourses of Rērukānē Candavimala, Buddhist monk.

Pali Buddhism. Edited by Frank J. Hoffman and Deegalle Mahinda. Curzon Press, Richmond 1996. 233 pp. £40. ISBN 0-7007-0359-4.

Buddhism, Conflict and Violence in Modern Sri Lanka, edited by Mahinda Deegalle, pp. xv + 277, £75.00. ISBN 0 415 35920 1.

The paper opens by recounting the beginnings of Buddhism in Dawei as preserved in local chronicles and sustained in stupas marking the episodes of the chronicle narrative. The chronicles start with a visit of the Buddha whose arrival triggers a series of events bringing together pre-existing tutelary figures, weiza, a hermit and offspring born of a golden fish, culminating in the establishment of the first Buddhist kingdom circa the eighth to tenth century CE. The enshrinement of sacred hairs gifted by (...) the Buddha also includes patronage by a king of the ‘Suvaṇṇabhūmi’ lineage. Associated with the monks Sona and Uttara from Sri Lanka sent by King Asoka's son Mahinda, ‘Suvaṇṇabhūmi’ literally can refer to the archaeology of Thaton, a walled site in the present day Mon State, or, as is the case here, more widely to the missionary tradition associated with Asoka (Sao Saimong Mengrai 1976). The third story in the establishment of the Buddhist king at Thagara is the longest of the chronicle, the tale of a royal hunter who failed to capture a golden peacock for the queen. The hunter became a hermit living by a pond with a golden fish and as he urinated in the pond, two children were born from the fish. The boy becomes the first Buddhist king of Thagara, 11 km north of Dawei, where artefacts from survey and excavation confirm the chronology of the chronicle, with the closest archaeological parallels found not at the ancient sites of the Mon State but to the first millennium CE Buddhist ‘Pyu’ heritage of Upper Myanmar which is notably absent in the chronicle compilation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Contrasting Images of the BuddhaTaitetsu UnnoAll the Christian writers express a deep and sympathetic appreciation for the historical Sakyamuni Buddha, demonstrating some of the positive fruits of interreligious dialogue. But—speaking as a practicing Buddhist—their views appear to be focused on the human face of the Buddha and scant attention is paid to what might be called the numinous. It is this dimension of his enlightenment experience that constitutes his (...) very being and the reason for his appeal far beyond the borders of India. This sense of the sacred, the transhistorical, inspired the great civilizations of Asia and today attracts worldwide attention to the Buddhist path of liberation and freedom.Terry Muck makes an ironic allusion to the respective lives of the Buddha and of the Christ. He states that “Official Christian dogma teaches that Jesus was divine, a part of the Trinity, three gods in one: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Buddhist teachings dogmatize a different understanding of the Buddha—that he was human through and through,” but a reversal occurs in later history: “The popular Buddhist [End Page 133] approach to the Buddha tends to produce a ‘godlike’ Buddha in a religious tradition that insists on his humanity, and the popular Christian approach to Jesus tends to produce a very human Jesus in a religious tradition that insists on Jesus’ divinity. It is almost as if the populace has decided to emphasize what the buddhologians and theologians have decreed secondary. The evidence for this reversal is everywhere” (Muck, p. 107).This may be a valid observation, but the truth of the matter might not be so simple. That is, both religious figures may combine the practical and the spiritual in different, complex ways and, depending on the historical lens, a person may see one aspect and not the other. At any rate, in this paper I wish to note that Sakyamuni Buddha is more than simply “human, through and through.”Rudolph Otto was the first to use “numinous” as a religious category to describe Christian and Hindu experience, but it also can be applied to the Buddhist case. This is so if we subscribe to one of its basic characteristics: the quality of the inexpressible—“in the sense that it completely eludes apprehension in terms of concepts.” 1 In Buddhist literature we have an abundance of words suggesting this fact: the unconditioned, formless, ineffable, inconceivable, unthinkable, unattainable, indefinable, immeasurable, and so on.In order to understand the numinous fully, Otto writes that a person “must be guided and led on by consideration and discussion of the matter through the ways of his own mind, until he reaches the point at which ‘the numinous’ in him perforce begins to stir, to start into life and into consciousness.” 2 He continues: “The arising of the numinous from beyond discursive consciousness is central to the Buddha’s enlightenment experience. This point has been overlooked and has caused misunderstanding, as noted by John Ross Carter: ‘One is told repeatedly that one has to work out one’s own salvation—this is treated as a corollary to there being no savior or savior god. This has been pounded into the English-reading audience to such an extent that one has failed to discern what Theravada Buddhism has long known—one does not work out one’s own salvation or liberation or release.’” 3In the Theravada classic, Visudhimagga, the ultimate awakening does not result from human calculation. According to Mahinda Palihawadana, it comes from the “arising of magga.” Magga is the “path” in the eightfold scheme (ariya attahangika magga), but it has a further connotation: “the moment of spiritual change as well as the event and the content of the mind at the moment.” 4 He sums up this process by enumerating the fourfold goal of Theravada life. The first three are well known—sila, samadhi, and lokiya panna. There is also the fourth, which is crucial but often overlooked: supramundane or lokuttara panna. The first three are preliminaries to the fourth realization: “Personal effort is only the ‘setting’ for the realization of the highest religious truth, that the highest realization can take place only when effort ceases to be... (shrink)