My purpose is twofold. We are to conjecture (a) how a preaching technique employed by St Paul comes to resonate with the Mahāyāna, and (b) that a conundrum in the solemn Mahānibbāna-sutta is Jewish, whence it reappears comically in Europe. Struck by these new oddities we ask at long last what can emerge from so many diverse parallels between Buddhist texts and their non-Buddhist counterparts. It is time those many threads were drawn together.

Bodily mutilations, such as nose-cutting, are recorded worldwide from different cultural settings. Hence the custom is not solely an example of “Oriental violence and cruelty” (at times quoted in Orientalist sources from the colonial period). I want to emphasise that I am not arguing from the vantage point of a colonial discourse with its criticism of “degenerate and barbaric” social customs. Instead, this paper deals with the human body as a symbol of society. It is particularly focused on the symbolic significance of nose-cutting and on understanding this violent impulse as a social practice. The underlying notion is that cultural categories, such as “honour” and “shame”, are encoded in body morphology and affect behaviour.

One of the most popular modern Korean folktales is Choi Tale Type 500, ‘The People Who Saw a Mirror for the First Time’. This tale however is neither a uniquely Korean nor East Asian tale, but an example of a general class of folktales found throughout the world. In the Aarne-Thompson Index it is classified as tale type 1336A, ‘Man does not Recognize his own Reflection in the Water (Mirror)’. The origins of the modern Korean tale may be traced back to the early years of the transmission and establishment of Buddhism in East Asia. The initial use of this tale in a Buddhist context, as a means to illustrate the illusionary nature of all things, had by the beginning of the twentieth century in Korea changed into providing a strong critique of certain features of contemporary society.

“Fifty years ago, the name of Chin Peng was feared almost as much as Osama bin Laden is today”. So wrote the Hong Kong-based journalist, Philip Bowring, in 2003. Fifty years ago the British empire, in the view of Field Marshal Montgomery, was locked in a struggle “between the East and West, between Communism and Democracy, between evil and Christianity”. It was a time when Chin Peng was Britain's enemy number one in Southeast Asia. A measure of his importance is the size of the reward offered in May 1952 for his capture: M$250,000 was equivalent to first prize in the Social Welfare Lottery and a huge sum compared with the wage rates of Malayan workers. Chin Peng is Malaya's Ho Chi Minh, but a Ho Chih Minh manqué. Like Ho Chi Minh, Chin Peng was a communist who, having played a key part in local resistance to the Japanese occupation, led the struggle against the post-war restoration of European colonialism. Yet, whereas Ho Chi Minh established the independent Democratic Republic of Vietnam, Chin Peng was thwarted in his attempt to create a socialist state in Malaya. Consequently, while the one became a national hero, the other has been cast out from the land of his birth and until recently has been without a voice in its history. The publication of his memoirs in 2003, however, enables us to reappraise Chin Peng's part in the achievement of Malayan independence.

The Religious Life of Palmyra, By Ted Kaizer. (Oriens et Occidens 4), pp. 305, 7 pls. Stuttgart, Franz Steiner Verlag, 2002.

Palmyra (ancient Tadmor) is undoubtedly one of the most glamorous of Graeco-Roman cities in the Near East and probably the most visited of all historical sites in the modern Republic of Syria. It has long been recognised as a major centre of Semitic religious cults which flourished particularly when the city was politically within the orbis Romanus. Its semi-independent political status and its retention of Aramaic as a major day-to-day language of commerce and administration certainly helped to guarantee the continuation of its Semitic cultural traditions and religious life.