The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions (181 page)

BOOK: The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions
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Anahana
(Jap., from Skt.,
n
p
na
). Awareness of
breathing
in
Zen Buddhism
, as a natural rhythm.
An
hata-
abda
(Skt., ‘not-struck sound’). Awareness of pure sound beneath audible sounds (as of
Brahman
underlying appearances).
Analects
.
Accepted English rendering of
Lun Yü
, the
Dialogues
or
Conversations
of
Confucius
and his personal disciples. It is one of the
Confucian Classics
, considered by scholars to be the most nearly contemporary, verbatim transcription of some of the Master's sayings. The
Analects
is not only the cornerstone of the Confucian School, but has been one of the most influential books in all human history, studied and revered as much in other E. Asian civilizations as in China itself.
Analogy
.
A proportional similarity. Most theological discussion of analogy has been concerned with analogical predication, a mode of predication in which terms familiar in one context are used in an extended sense elsewhere. Thus it is claimed that terms like ‘love’, ‘wisdom’, and ‘living’, which are learnt in everyday contexts, are applied to God by analogy because of some relationship (e.g. likeness, exemplarity, participation, and causation) between God's perfections and these human attributes.
According to Thomas
Aquinas
, such a mode of predication is midway between univocity and equivocation (
Summa Theologiae
, 1a, xiii. 5). Terms like ‘family resemblance’, ‘open texture’, and ‘systematic equivocation’, used in 20th-cent. analytic philosophy, may be regarded as akin to analogy. See also
TANZ
H
;
NY
YA
(for
upamana
).

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