Link colours: external dictionaries in green, internal website links in light blue, external website links in dark blue
H
≫ havan (Sanskrit: हवन, IAST: havana) = fire offering; ritual rooted in the Vedic tradition, in which offerings of food etc. are burned in order to create merit or bring good luck on a special occasion; ritual in which making offerings into a consecrated fire is the primary action.
• external links: wiktionary
≫ Heart Sutra = redirects to Prajñaparamitahridayasutra (Sanskrit ≫ main entry).
≫ hijra (Hindustani: Nastaliq: ﮩيجرَا, Devanagari: हिजड़ा, hijra; Bengali: হিজড়া, hijra; hīj’ṛā) = eunuchs, intersex people, and transgender people, officially recognised as third gender in countries in the Indian subcontinent. The hijra community in India prefer to call themselves Kinnar or Kinner, referring to the mythological beings that excel at song and dance.
• external links: wiktionary / wikipedia / Hindustani dictionary
≫ hikikomori (Japanese: ひきこもり, or 引きこもり, literally “pulling inward, being confined”) = recluse from society, shut-in, stay-at-home, person who has withdrawn from society. A Japanese phenomenon whereby a person becomes a recluse from society, typically remaining isolated in a single room at home for a very long period. Characterised negatively as “severe social withdrawal” and “loners” or more positively as “modern-day hermits” or “post-modern hermits” whose solitude stems from ancestral desires for withdrawal.
• see also: fo xi (Buddha-like mindset), tang ping (lying flat)
• appears in: DJKR teaching “Lying Flat Buddha”, Taipei 2023-04-03 [SI#4011]
• external: wiktionary / wikipedia
≫ Hinayana (Sanskrit: हीनयान, IAST: hīnayāna, Tibetan: (1) ཐེག་ཆུང་, tekchung; Wylie: theg chung, literally “small vehicle”; also: (2) ཐེག་དམན་, tekmen; Wylie: theg dman, literally “inferior vehicle”) = the “simpler/lesser vehicle” (also “small/deficient vehicle”), a pejorative term used in some Mahayana texts (and also in the past widely used by Western scholars) to refer to the earliest system of Buddhist doctrine based on the Pali Canon (in contrast to the later Mahayana as the “great vehicle”).
• note (on usage): In 1950 the World Fellowship of Buddhists declared that the term “Hinayana” should not be used when referring to any form of Buddhism existing today, and modern Buddhist scholarship uses the term “Nikaya Buddhism” to refer to early Buddhist schools. Many contemporary Buddhist teachers (including DJKR) prefer to use the term “Shravakayana”; DJKR: “Hinayana is a Mahayana chauvinist term, so we don’t want to use this term”.
• see also: Ekayana (the Single Vehicle); Mahayana (the Great Vehicle); Shravakayana (the Vehicle of the Shravakas); Theravada (the School of the Elders); Vajrayana (the Diamond Vehicle); yana (vehicle or method)
• external links: wiktionary / wikipedia / rigpawiki
≫ huatou (Chinese: 話頭 ; pinyin: huàtóu “keyword”; Japanese: 話頭, wato “topic, subject”) = critical phrase or principal theme of a larger gong’an/koan exchange. The classic example (無門關 T 2005.48.292c23) is the longer gong’an, “A monk asked Zhaozhou 趙州, ‘Does a dog have buddha-nature 佛性, or not?’ Zhaozhou answered, ‘It doesn’t have it (Chinese: 無 ; pinyin: wú “nonexistent, nonbeing”; Japanese: 無, mu “nothing, nothingness, nil; un-, non-“; corresponds to Sanskrit: asat, Tibetan: med pa; in the koan, Zhaozhou’s answer is more commonly but also more misleadingly translated into English as “no”, which is related to the common nihilistic misinterpretation of “emptiness” to mean “nothingness”). In this example, the 公案 gong’an/koan is the whole exchange, and the 話頭 huatou/wato is the word 無 wu/mu. The huatou is the focus of a sustained investigation (e.g. “What is mu?”, as favoured by Master Sheng Yen).
• see also: koan
• external links: wikipedia / Digital Dictionary of Buddhism
≫ hundun (Chinese: 混沌 ; pinyin: hùndùn, literally “muddled confusion”) = primordial chaos; both the “primordial and central chaos” in Chinese cosmogony and a “legendary faceless being” in Chinese mythology.
• external links: wiktionary / wikipedia