RELG 252 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Syrian Arab News Agency, Henry Steel Olcott, Great White Brotherhood
11 Sep 2019
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Def: not a word that even existed till westerners turned their gaze on practices and decided it was religious and named it buddhism. Word is a combination of the sanskrit word for buddha (the awakened one) + suffix "ism". Sana or s sana = order, discipline, doctrine, message, teaching. Difference between how buddhist refer to their religion as sana and buddhism: the term buddhism focuses on a person instead of the message/way the community is organized. Taking a diverse set of practices/beliefs and deciding it is a religion and giving it a name according to the name of the founder is the way of making other people"s religions legible. The whole idea of taking various aspects of peoples lives and carving it out from the rest of our lives as a separate part of our lives makes religion distinct from other parts of our lives.
