Here are 100 books that The Way of Nature fans have personally recommended if you like
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I’m a world historian with a special interest in religion. In particular, I’m excited by the possibility that traditional religious ideas and practices can be useful in our modern, often secular, society and in our individual lives. So often, I read books about religion that make their subject accessible to readers today, but at the cost of turning religion into a modern thing and removing its transformative potential as an alternative way to think about life. I keep these five books close by on my shelves because their creators use sympathy, grace, and sharp analysis to make religion accessible even while also keeping it true to itself.
Ñāṇamoli’s anthology invites us into the world of the Pali Canon, the oldest sizable source for early Buddhism and my favourite collection of ancient texts. Although full of transcendent yet practical wisdom, with smatterings of an earthy humour, sometimes it gives me a headache—thousands of pages, endless repetition, words that have no real English equivalent.
Through genius-level editing, Bhikkhu Ñāṇamoli has woven together translated excerpts from the Canon to make something like a modern biography of the Buddha. Reading The Life of the Buddha, I know I’m immersed in the authentic texts, and yet I still want to turn the page to see what will happen next.
Composed entirely of texts from the Pali canon, this unique biography presents the oldest authentic record of the Buddha’s life and revolutionary philosophy. The ancient texts are rendered here in a language marked by lucidity and dignity. A framework of narrators and voices connect the canonical texts. Vivid recollections of his personal attendant Ananda and other disciples bring the reader into the Buddha’s presence, where his example offers profound inspiration and guidance on the path to freedom.
I’m a world historian with a special interest in religion. In particular, I’m excited by the possibility that traditional religious ideas and practices can be useful in our modern, often secular, society and in our individual lives. So often, I read books about religion that make their subject accessible to readers today, but at the cost of turning religion into a modern thing and removing its transformative potential as an alternative way to think about life. I keep these five books close by on my shelves because their creators use sympathy, grace, and sharp analysis to make religion accessible even while also keeping it true to itself.
Did you know that today’s “mindfulness” movement—which promises everything from greater corporate productivity to more passion in the bedroom—originated in nineteenth-century resistance to the British Empire?
After the conquest of Burma, meditation—previously something mostly the domain of wilderness hermits—became a technique everyone could use to strengthen Buddhist Burmese society against cultural imperialism. Burmese teachers brought this practice to America, and Americans came to Burma to learn it directly.
It was fascinating to follow meditation’s journey in these pages from a tool of resistance against globalization to a technique brought around the world by globalization today. This book helped me appreciate the strange history of mindfulness meditation.
Insight meditation, which claims to offer practitioners a chance to escape all suffering by perceiving the true nature of reality, is one of the most popular forms of meditation today. The Theravada Buddhist cultures of South and Southeast Asia often see it as the Buddha's most important gift to humanity. In the first book to examine how this practice came to play such a dominant and relatively recent role in Buddhism, Erik Braun takes readers to Burma, revealing that Burmese Buddhists in the colonial period were pioneers in making insight meditation indispensable to modern Buddhism. Braun focuses on the Burmese…
I’m a world historian with a special interest in religion. In particular, I’m excited by the possibility that traditional religious ideas and practices can be useful in our modern, often secular, society and in our individual lives. So often, I read books about religion that make their subject accessible to readers today, but at the cost of turning religion into a modern thing and removing its transformative potential as an alternative way to think about life. I keep these five books close by on my shelves because their creators use sympathy, grace, and sharp analysis to make religion accessible even while also keeping it true to itself.
Today, so many works on Indigenous history celebrate their subjects as heroes who appeal to our modern sensibilities, but Jackson lets the Mizo people of over a hundred years ago be themselves—not as ciphers for theory, but as actual humans with their own outlooks.
This is the first book that made an Indigenous worldview come alive for me... and still be Indigenous. I found myself fully immersed in a truly human world that makes sense on its own terms, thanks to the author’s careful research, engaging humour, and inspired and sympathetic interpretations. Discovery offered me an opportunity to confront my own assumptions.
High in the eastern Himalayan foothills, people had a unique vantage point on the British Empire. The Mizo Discovery of the British Raj presents a history of Mizoram in Northeast India told from historical Indigenous perspectives of encounters with empire from the 1890s to the 1920s. Based on a wide range of research and enriched by sources newly digitised by the author through the British Library's Endangered Archives Programme, Kyle Jackson sheds new light on the complex and violent processes of how and why diverse populations of highland clans in the Indo-Burmese borderlands came to redefine themselves as Christian Mizos.…
I’m a world historian with a special interest in religion. In particular, I’m excited by the possibility that traditional religious ideas and practices can be useful in our modern, often secular, society and in our individual lives. So often, I read books about religion that make their subject accessible to readers today, but at the cost of turning religion into a modern thing and removing its transformative potential as an alternative way to think about life. I keep these five books close by on my shelves because their creators use sympathy, grace, and sharp analysis to make religion accessible even while also keeping it true to itself.
The only work of fiction on this list, Motel of the Mysteries set me laughing, first at the book itself, then at historians more generally, and finally at myself.
Macaulay invites us to join a fictitious archaeological team from the future excavating a twentieth-century American motel that had been buried under a tsunami of junk mail. If this team is misunderstanding American culture so ridiculously and profoundly, how far have real historians missed the mark when writing about their subjects and their religions? If the Christians and Muslims of the fifteenth century read my Jesus book, would they be laughing at me?
This book makes me more cautious, more reflective, and more creative when I'm doing my own excavations of past religious cultures.
It is the year 4022; all of the ancient country of Usa has been buried under many feet of detritus from a catastrophe that occurred back in 1985. Imagine, then, the excitement that Howard Carson, an amateur archeologist at best, experienced when in crossing the perimeter of an abandoned excavation site he felt the ground give way beneath him and found himself at the bottom of a shaft, which, judging from the DO NOT DISTURB sign hanging from an archaic doorknob, was clearly the entrance to a still-sealed burial chamber. Carson's incredible discoveries, including the remains of two bodies, one…
What I love about philosophy (I’ve been a philosophy professor at the University of California, Riverside, since 1997) is not its ability to deliver the one correct answer to the nature of the world and how to live but rather its power to open our mind to new possibilities that we hadn’t previously considered; its power to blow apart our presuppositions, our culturally given “common sense” understandings, and our habitual patterns of thinking, casting us into doubt and wonder. The science writing, fiction, and personal essays I love best have that same power.
The ancient Chinese text Zhuangzi/Chuang Tzu has been translated many times, but Burton Watson’s 1968 version is still my favorite, best capturing the wit and humor of this playful Daoist.
Chuang Tzu constantly pokes at our philosophical and moral presumptions. Reading him, I feel my smugness and arrogance melting away in favor of joyful doubt and wonder. Chuang Tzu dreams he is a butterfly, flitting about, doing just as he pleases, and then he wakes up, solid and unmistakable Chuang. But is he a human who has just dreamed he was a butterfly or a butterfly now dreaming he’s a human?
Instead of rushing about busily, thinking we understand things, maybe we should doze beneath a giant, useless tree in the field of the bright and boundless.
The basic writings of Chuang Tzu have been savored by Chinese readers for over two thousand years. And Burton Watson's lucid and beautiful translation has been loved by generations of readers. Chuang Tzu (369?-286? B.C.) was a leading philosopher representing the Taoist strain in Chinese thought. Using parable and anecdote, allegory and paradox, he set forth, in the book that bears his name, the early ideas of what was to become the Taoist school. Central to these is the belief that only by understanding Tao (the Way of Nature) and dwelling in its unity can man achieve true happiness and…
I’ve been reading and making comics since I was a young kid. I’m very interested in the history of comics, and I love to see new combinations of content and form. My own graphic novels, such as Constitution Illustrated and Masterpiece Comics, use parody and pastiche to comment on and reinterpret historical and contemporary texts. I’m charmed by the earnest retelling of literature in old comic book series like Classics Illustrated, but I’m much more excited to see graphic novels that dig deep into texts and reinvent them in idiosyncratic ways.
This is a great introduction to the Taoist philosophy of Zhuangzi, as rendered by Taiwanese cartoonist Tsai. These short comic strips are instantly inviting, and rendered in an animated, funny style that feels effortless. Tsai emphasizes the humor and subversive qualities of the original text, but his approach is reverent, too, as he lays out Zhuangzi’s deep lessons on each page.
During a period of political and social upheaval in China, the unconventional insights of the great Daoist Zhuangzi (369?-286? B.C.) pointed to a way of living naturally. Inspired by his fascination with the wisdom of this sage, the immensely popular Taiwanese cartoonist Tsai Chih Chung created a bestselling Chinese comic book. Tsai had his cartoon characters enact the key parables of Zhuangzi (pronounced jwawngdz), and he rendered Zhuangzi's most enlightening sayings into modern Chinese. Through Tsai's enthusiasm and skill, the earliest and core parts of the Zhuangzi were thus made accessible to millions of Chinese-speaking people with no other real…
I was born to privilege in Manhattan. A seeker from the get-go, I perpetually yearned to see below the surface of the pond and understand what lay beneath and how the world really works. Not connecting with Western philosophy, religion, or culture, I turned to the wisdom of the East at a young age. I stayed the course through decades of training in Chinese martial arts, eventually reached some understanding of them, and realized my spiritual ambitions when I was ordained a Daoist monk in China in an official government ceremony. I write about China then and now and teach meditation and tai chi around the world.
This novelized biography of a poet some consider China’s greatest pleases me over and over again. Rendering Li Po (sometimes Li Bai) as a libertine living on a barge, drinking too much and partaking with gusto in the pleasures of the flesh at the red-candle district near which he moors, really helps bring alive the great man’s life and work. There’s also a bit about his relationship with Du Fu, more of a straight arrow. Those two, along with Wang Wei really offer a picture of the Daoist life I so adore and the feeling of watching the world spin out of control in war but also the peace and solitude of a mountain retreat.
I am a Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Riverside. I was brought up in the family of a Chinese poetry scholar. Arriving in the States for my graduate studies at Harvard in 1982, I have engaged myself in academia here ever since. Acutely aware of, and deeply fascinated by, the cultural similarities and differences of China and the West, I have continued my learning experience, in my thirty years of college teaching, often from direct exchanges with my students. The books on my list of recommendations include both required texts chosen for my courses, and those I want to share with what Virginia Woolf called the Common Reader.
Enriched by more than 200 pictures, mostly in color, as well as maps and line drawings, it is an illuminating and succinct account of Chines civilization from prehistoric times through the rise of the “Three Teachings” (Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism) to the modern communist state. As someone who taught a popular undergraduate college course on Chinese civilization for many years, I can testify that the overall length (384 pages) of the book and its structure of 12 chapters plus an epilogue make it a perfect choice of required texts.
More populous than any other country on earth, China also occupies a unique place in our modern world for the continuity of its history and culture. In this sumptuously illustrated single-volume history, now in its second edition, noted historian Patricia Buckley Ebrey traces the origins of Chinese culture from prehistoric times to the present. She follows its development from the rise of Confucianism, Buddhism, and the great imperial dynasties to the Mongol, Manchu, and Western intrusions and the modern communist state. Her scope is phenomenal - embracing Chinese arts, culture, economics, society and its treatment of women, foreign policy, emigration,…
I studied modern Chinese history so, when Qu Leilei told me the story of the Stars Art Movement, I couldn’t understand why I hadn't heard their courageous story. I spent three years interviewing Qu Leilei, researching and visiting China with him before writing the Stars story as a historical novel. I am a freelance writer, author, and speaker.
I was reviewing Qu Leilei’s Everyone’s life is an Epic at the Ashmolean when a chance encounter changed my life. While writing Qu's profile, I learned about the first contemporary art movement in China - the Stars in Beijing in 1979 - and spent three years interviewing him for the background to Brushstrokes in Time.
Leilei’s art is imbued with deep humanity but he is also a fine teacher- hence my recommending The Tao of Sketching. Daoism influenced traditional Chinese art and is a focus for meditation. The empty space is important. If you want to get into that cultural mindset, try Leilei’s books.
Award-winning artist Qu Lei Lei offers an inspirational view of art from the Chinese perspective. Instead of looking at the sketch as an end in itself, he focuses on the work as personal fulfillment for the artist and as a valued meditation. All the essential techniques are here?from choosing and using materials to mixing the ink to mastering brushstrokes. With the natural world as his subject, Lei Lei pulls out key features?water, trees, landscapes?and focuses on practical ways of depicting their different varieties. A master class covers techniques for capturing pets at play, and for conveying the spirit of all…
I was first exposed to Western literature when working as a teenage farm worker in the jungle of south Yunnan decades ago and have kept my interest alive ever since. As an undergraduate at Peking University, I majored in English and American language and literature before I switched to the study of Chinese archaeology and history at the graduate level. Over the last three decades and more, I have been teaching Chinese and World history and doing research on Chinese history at a US university. In addition to dozens of articles, I have published several books both in English and Chinese, all on premodern China with a focus on the Sui-Tang period.
One of the most popular books in the history of East Asia, this classic sixteenth century novel is a combination of adventure fiction and folk epic that mixes satire, allegory, and history into a rollicking tale. The epic journey is the one undertaken by the monk Xuanzang under the escort of the roguish Monkey, who has many encounters along the way with major and minor spirits, gods, demigods, demons, ogres, monsters, and fairies.
The monk Xuanzang was active during the reign of Tang Taizong, the protagonist of my book. Monk and emperor have many interactions in that novel.
The novel is an extended account of the legendary pilgrimage of the Tang dynasty Buddhist monk Xuanzang who traveled to the "Western Regions", that is, India, to obtain sacred texts (sūtras) and returned after many trials and much suffering. It retains the broad outline of Xuanzang's own account, Great Tang Records on the Western Regions, but the Ming dynasty novel adds elements from folk tales and the author's invention, that is, that the Buddha gave this task to the monk and provided him with three protectors who agree to help him as an atonement for their sins. These disciples are…
