Enlightenment: Did you mean...?

Mystery cults, or mystery religions, were ancient religious associations characterized by secrecy and initiation rites. They typically surrounded one primary deity, but some mystery cults venerated multiple deities in their rites...

Utilitarianism is a philosophy founded by Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and then extended by other thinkers, notably John Stuart Mill (1806-1873). Utilitarianism involves the greatest happiness principle, which holds that a law or...

The Tibetan Book of the Dead is the English translation of the Tibetan texts known as bar-do thos-grol (Bardo Thodol) – “Liberation Through Hearing During the Intermediate State” – and serves as a guide for the soul of...

Kapilavastu (“Place of Kapila”) is the name of the city where Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha, l. c. 563-483 BCE) grew up and lived for the first 29 years of his life before leaving to pursue the spiritual path which led to his enlightenment...

Mount Koya (aka Koyasan), located in the Wakayama Prefecture, south of Osaka, Japan, is the site of a temple complex founded in 819 CE by the scholar monk Kukai as the headquarters for Shingon Buddhism. There are temples and sacred...

The game of chess has a particularly long and fascinating history of more than 1500 years. Over the centuries, there have also been hundreds of different chess variants, all of which incorporate the...

Buddhism, in Korean Bulgyo, was introduced by monks who visited and studied in China and then brought back various Buddhist sects during the Three Kingdoms period. It became the official state religion in all Three Kingdoms...

Cats in the Middle Ages were generally disapproved of, regarded as, at best, useful pests and, at worst, agents of Satan, owing to the medieval Church and its association of the cat with evil. Prior to the widespread acceptance...

The English historian Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) wrote and published his seminal work History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire between 1776 and 1788. The dominant theme of Gibbon's six-volume work...

Buddhist monasteries have been part of the Japanese cultural landscape ever since the 7th century CE, and they remained both powerful and socially important institutions right through the medieval period. Today...