Francisca Cho
Biographic Data
| ID | 1608002 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Francisca Cho |
| GIVEN NAMES | Francisca |
| FAMILY NAME | Cho |
| SIGNATURE | CHO F |
| AFFILIATIONS | Georgetown University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 10 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 12 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 10 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Cinematic Space and Time in the Huayan jing/Hwaŏm kyŏng
The Buddhist text that originated as the Avataṃsaka-sūtra in India describes a universe that transcends our bounded experience of space and time and which enables instant access to Buddhahood. This reverses the ordinary understanding of enlightenment as both temporally and spatially distant. The premise of instantaneous Buddhahood is a ritual practice that has utilized both literary and visual strategies. When these practices are examined, it is …
The Funny Thing about Secularism
This article delineates a Christian and a Buddhist basis for secularism in order to demonstrate that secularism can take very different forms. The primary difference is the presence or absence of a cosmological discourse that strives for ontological verity. Although Christian secularism rejects belief in God, it maintains a parallel concern with cosmological knowledge in the form of scientific naturalism. Buddhist secularism accepts references to…
The Play of Shadows in Japanese Cinema
The medieval Japanese Buddhist-inspired aesthetic concept of yūgen emphasizes the absence of light, movement, and form in order to create a sense of deep but non-discursive meaning. This pre-modern concept can be applied to the film Rashomon to appreciate how the movie uses light and shadow to point to the necessity of abandoning intellectual knowledge in order to move towards moral action. The yūgen concept is also instantiated in the way the fi…
The Transnational Buddhism of Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring
Kim Kiduk's Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter . . . and Spring is a Buddhist film from Korea that reflects both traditional Asian and modern western-influenced impulses. A close reading of the film reveals how it replicates long-standing ritual practices such as seeing and being seen by the Buddha, and literary themes such as the cycle of karma. It also exhibits fidelity to canonical accounts of contemplative practices, reflecting a mainstream interes…
Buddhism, Science, and the Truth About Karma
Buddhism's reputation as a 'scientific religion' has led contemporary Buddhists to advocate eliminating the doctrine of karma and its metaphysical concept of rebirth. This movement to modernize Buddhism evinces little understanding of how the karma concept actually functions in Buddhist societies. This article argues that traditional Buddhists invoke karma performatively in order to orient their personal experiences rather than to make metaphysic…
Buddhist Mind and Matter
Classic Buddhist thought understands the mind as arising in dependence on the body. This causal dependence may be fashioned as a kind of "Buddhist materialism". However, this should not be confused with any variety of scientific materialism, in which ontological and/or causal reductions of mind to brain affirm matter as the fundamental entity or property. Buddhist materialism, in contrast, is a purely phenomenological description that rejects bot…
Unnatural comparisons
Robert McCauley's basic point about science is that it is hard to practice. It entails “procuring cognitive skills that human beings find difficult to acquire, onerous to retain, challenging to exe
Religion as a Complex and Dynamic System
The turn to historical methods and suspicion of universal theories of religion has led to an ethos of particularism in which the increasing data of religions are treated like atomistic and self-sufficient units of knowledge. But as complex systems, religions exhibit patterns that are visible only when we look beyond the most particulate scale of analysis, similar to phenomena examined in the natural and social sciences. To see religions as comple…
He Blinded Me With Science
A number of recent publications in the study of religion address the continuing question about the legitimacy and coherence of the concept of “religion.” This essay examines three particular critiques—(1) that “religion” is a Christian theological construct with questionable applications to non-Christian cultures, (2) that “religion” lacks coherence and empirical warrant as an analytical category, and (3) that the study of religion needs to be re…
Sharing the Light
Religion as a Complex and Dynamic System
The turn to historical methods and suspicion of universal theories of religion has led to an ethos of particularism in which the increasing data of religions are treated like atomistic and self-sufficient units of knowledge. But as complex systems, religions exhibit patterns that are visible only when we look beyond the most particulate scale of analysis, similar to phenomena examined in the natural and social sciences. To see religions as comple…
He Blinded Me With Science
A number of recent publications in the study of religion address the continuing question about the legitimacy and coherence of the concept of “religion.” This essay examines three particular critiques—(1) that “religion” is a Christian theological construct with questionable applications to non-Christian cultures, (2) that “religion” lacks coherence and empirical warrant as an analytical category, and (3) that the study of religion needs to be re…
Buddhist Mind and Matter
Classic Buddhist thought understands the mind as arising in dependence on the body. This causal dependence may be fashioned as a kind of "Buddhist materialism". However, this should not be confused with any variety of scientific materialism, in which ontological and/or causal reductions of mind to brain affirm matter as the fundamental entity or property. Buddhist materialism, in contrast, is a purely phenomenological description that rejects bot…
Sharing the Light
He Blinded Me With Science
A number of recent publications in the study of religion address the continuing question about the legitimacy and coherence of the concept of “religion.” This essay examines three particular critiques—(1) that “religion” is a Christian theological construct with questionable applications to non-Christian cultures, (2) that “religion” lacks coherence and empirical warrant as an analytical category, and (3) that the study of religion needs to be re…
Unnatural comparisons
Robert McCauley's basic point about science is that it is hard to practice. It entails “procuring cognitive skills that human beings find difficult to acquire, onerous to retain, challenging to exe
Religion as a Complex and Dynamic System
The turn to historical methods and suspicion of universal theories of religion has led to an ethos of particularism in which the increasing data of religions are treated like atomistic and self-sufficient units of knowledge. But as complex systems, religions exhibit patterns that are visible only when we look beyond the most particulate scale of analysis, similar to phenomena examined in the natural and social sciences. To see religions as comple…
The Transnational Buddhism of Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring
Kim Kiduk's Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter . . . and Spring is a Buddhist film from Korea that reflects both traditional Asian and modern western-influenced impulses. A close reading of the film reveals how it replicates long-standing ritual practices such as seeing and being seen by the Buddha, and literary themes such as the cycle of karma. It also exhibits fidelity to canonical accounts of contemplative practices, reflecting a mainstream interes…
Buddhism, Science, and the Truth About Karma
Buddhism's reputation as a 'scientific religion' has led contemporary Buddhists to advocate eliminating the doctrine of karma and its metaphysical concept of rebirth. This movement to modernize Buddhism evinces little understanding of how the karma concept actually functions in Buddhist societies. This article argues that traditional Buddhists invoke karma performatively in order to orient their personal experiences rather than to make metaphysic…
Buddhist Mind and Matter
Classic Buddhist thought understands the mind as arising in dependence on the body. This causal dependence may be fashioned as a kind of "Buddhist materialism". However, this should not be confused with any variety of scientific materialism, in which ontological and/or causal reductions of mind to brain affirm matter as the fundamental entity or property. Buddhist materialism, in contrast, is a purely phenomenological description that rejects bot…
The Play of Shadows in Japanese Cinema
The medieval Japanese Buddhist-inspired aesthetic concept of yūgen emphasizes the absence of light, movement, and form in order to create a sense of deep but non-discursive meaning. This pre-modern concept can be applied to the film Rashomon to appreciate how the movie uses light and shadow to point to the necessity of abandoning intellectual knowledge in order to move towards moral action. The yūgen concept is also instantiated in the way the fi…
The Funny Thing about Secularism
This article delineates a Christian and a Buddhist basis for secularism in order to demonstrate that secularism can take very different forms. The primary difference is the presence or absence of a cosmological discourse that strives for ontological verity. Although Christian secularism rejects belief in God, it maintains a parallel concern with cosmological knowledge in the form of scientific naturalism. Buddhist secularism accepts references to…
Cinematic Space and Time in the Huayan jing/Hwaŏm kyŏng
The Buddhist text that originated as the Avataṃsaka-sūtra in India describes a universe that transcends our bounded experience of space and time and which enables instant access to Buddhahood. This reverses the ordinary understanding of enlightenment as both temporally and spatially distant. The premise of instantaneous Buddhahood is a ritual practice that has utilized both literary and visual strategies. When these practices are examined, it is …
Philosophy (8 works) · Sociology (6 works) · Art (5 works) · Buddhism (5 works) · Chinese history and philosophy (5 works) · Epistemology (4 works) · History (4 works) · Psychology (4 works) · Theology (4 works) · Aesthetics (3 works)