Introduction to Agama Sutra: The First Buddhist Scripture

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The Mahayana school of Buddhism in China often emphasized the role of altruism and disparaged self-salvation. Its sutras were considered to be the first sermons by the Buddha whose profound ideas were too difficult for the ordinary people to understand. To cater to their level, it was said that Buddha then delivered the Agama Sutra for the less intellectually endowed. For more than 1500 years after it was translated into Chinese, Agama Sutra has been ignored by Chinese Buddhists mainly because of this prejudice.

In the 19th Century, a revival of interest was kindled among Japanese Buddhists by the rediscovery of the Agama Sutra by British and German scholars in Sri Lanka. Based on Japanese writings, Lu Jing shocked the Chinese Buddhist society by demonstrating that the Agama Sutra was indeed the scripture collected immediately after the death of Buddha. The great Chinese scholar, Liang Chi Tsao supported the study of the Agama Sutra because of its proximity to Buddha’s time, and its description of life in India more than 2500 years ago which, because of the paucity of written history in India, made the sutra extremely valuable in understanding life in ancient India.

More recently, Master Yin Shun has vastly expanded the research started by Lu Jing, and has written many volumes of texts to clarify the origins of Buddhism. This lecture will be based mostly on writings by him and his disciples.

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Online Notes

Distinguished Professor Rohit Parikh commented that the name of Buddha's disciple, Ananda, meant pleasure in Sanskrit.
Distinguished Professor Rohit Parikh commented that the name
of Buddha’s disciple, Ananda, meant pleasure in Sanskrit.

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Author Bio

Presented By:

Dr. Thomas Tam was born on April 15, 1946 in Fujian, China, during the Chinese Civil War. He spent his childhood in Hong Kong where his parents had to rebuild their home from the ground up. Dr. Tam and his family immigrated to New York in 1964. He received BA in physics from City College of New York (1968), M.A. in film-making from Montclair State University (1978), M.P.H. from Columbia University School of Public Health (1980); and Ph.D. in SocioMedical Sciences from Columbia University (1983). He is Chairman of the Asian American Higher Education Council, and Executive Director of Asian American/Asian Research Institute, as well as the President of Oishi Movies, Inc. which produced a feature: Sunrise on Mulberry Street.

After graduating from City College of New York, Tam developed an active interest in community improvement in Chinatown, when he initiated a ten-day health fair which screened two thousand five hundred residents, leading to the establishment of Chinatown Health Clinic, now known as the Charles B. Wang Health Center. Tam’s career in community health continued when he became administrators of various City-wide health agencies. He taught at Columbia University, Herbert Lehman College, and St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia.

In 1989, he was appointed to the Board of Trustees of the City University of New York as the first Chinese American member. Dr. Tam worked with a group of faculty members to establish the Asian American Higher Education Council, an organization which addresses critical issues concerning higher education in the Asian American community. Under Tam’s leadership, this organization has successfully organized numerous conferences and the creation of the Asian American / Asian Research Institute (AAARI), where he served as Executive Director from 2001 to 2006.

In addition to his contribution to the fields of community health and higher education, Dr. Tam also has an abiding interest in movie making, an avocation which he has nurtured since college. He has produced many short movies which have been exhibited at various institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art. Tam has also founded the Asian American Film Festival in 1972, which became Asian Cine Vision, an organization with international recognition for showcasing movies from Asian/Asian American artists. Dr. Tam is a recent convert to Buddhism and has completed a documentary video, En Route to Lhasa.

Dr. Tam is survived by his wife Margaret, his daughter Anika, and step-children Emily and Victor.