Religion as Perceived in Pui Saengchai's The 500 Lives of Lord Buddha in Nibata Jataka: A Comprehensive Edition
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Abstract
This article aimed to study the characteristics of religion as perceived in The 500 Lives of Lord Buddha in Nibata Jataka: A Comprehensive Edition by Pui Saengchai. The study employed the analytical framework concerning the characteristics of religion. The findings revealed three characteristics of religion. The first characteristic was primitive religion featuring animism, the worship of the spirits of ancestors and the worship of nature. The second characteristic was theism in the form of polytheism. The most frequently seen deities in Nibata Jataka were Indra, Indra’s attendants and guardian angels. The belief that the world was created by divine power, however, could not be found. The third characteristic was atheism in its early days when humans started to seek out truth in order to set themselves free and to use their intellect rather than pure faith to give reasonable explanations to surrounding events.
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