I began studying philosophy, both western and Asian, as a college freshman, and I never stopped. Much of my career in philosophy was devoted to building bridges between western and Buddhist traditions. The best philosophers try to make their ideas as clear as possible. But standards of clarity can differ across traditions, and this sometimes makes it difficult to present the theories and arguments of one philosophical tradition to those who think in terms of another. I have struggled with this in my own efforts at bridge-building, and I am always appreciative when I see other scholars of Buddhism achieve the sort of clarity I aim for.
Buddhist philosophers try to construct rational defenses of those claims about the nature of ourselves and the world that are central to the Buddhist project. So clarity about how we obtain knowledge is important to Buddhist thinkers. In this book Stoltz presents some of the fruits of their efforts, the epistemological theories of the tradition. What I most like about this book is the clarity with which Stoltz connects Buddhist theorizing about knowledge with trends in more recent western epistemology, bringing out both important overlaps and significant discontinuities.
Illuminating the Mind puts the field of Buddhist epistemology in conversation with contemporary debates in philosophy. Jonathan Stoltz provides readers with an introduction to epistemology within the Buddhist intellectual tradition in a manner that is accessible to those whose primary background is in the "Western" tradition of philosophy. The book examines many of the most important topics in the field of epistemology, topics that are central both to contemporary discussions of epistemology and to the classical Buddhist tradition of epistemology in India and Tibet. Among the topics discussed are Buddhist accounts of the nature of knowledge episodes, the defining conditions…
Initially trained as a mathematician, I have
now been an academic philosopher for well over four decades—in the UK,
Australia, and currently at the Graduate Center of the City University of
New York. About halfway through this time I was shocked to discover that
I knew nothing of half of the world’s philosophy: that developed in the
Eastern traditions. I set about educating myself—reading, travelling to India
and Japan to teach and study, working with those who were specialists in
the relevant areas. Nowadays in my philosophical writing and research I
am able to draw on a much richer and deeper understanding of philosophy.
There are a number of distinct forms of Chinese (Mahāyāna) Buddhism. Huayan (華嚴, Skt: Avataṃsaka) Buddhism is usually reckoned to be the most theoretically sophisticated. It flourished for only a few hundred years in the middle of the first millennium of the Common Era (though it still has a small presence in Japan, where it is called Kegon). However, it had a major impact on the thought of the other Chinese schools of Buddhism (and on Neo-Confucianism). Cook’s book is old and a bit dated now, but it is still the best introduction to this form of Buddhist philosophy.
Hua-yen is regarded as the highest form of Buddhism by most modern Japanese and Chinese scholars. This book is a description and analysis of the Chinese form of Buddhism called Hua-yen (or Hwa-yea), Flower Ornament, based largely on one of the more systematic treatises of its third patriarch. Hua-yen Buddhism strongly resembles Whitehead's process philosophy, and has strong implications for modern philosophy and religion. Hua-yen Buddhism explores the philosophical system of Hua-yen in greater detail than does Garma C.C. Chang's The Buddhist Teaching of Totality (Penn State, 1971). An additional value is the development of the questions of ethics and…
I’m a lifelong interiors obsessive, which I’ve managed to turn into a multi-stranded career: I style commercial photoshoots and set up events for brands, write about interiors trends for magazines and a trend forecasting agency, have authored several interiors books of my own, and recently I’ve begun teaching my own blend of authentic yet actionable interior design tips to others, through courses, workshops, and creative consultancy. I am always interested in the why behind what makes us feel a certain way when it comes to design, and believe that creating a home that reflects and supports our emotional needs will ultimately support us in all aspects of life.
Interiors expert and host of Interior Design Masters (BBC), Michelle has a fascinating view on interiors, honed through her many years working on magazines alongside her personal interests in Buddhist philosophy, sustainable design, and ‘clean’ living within the home. She goes deep into her research within this title, examining potential pathogens that might be lurking in a typical household (and advising on what to do to mitigate them), alongside thoughtful prose on how you can identify both your aesthetic and wellbeing needs and decorate accordingly.
'I love this book. Strong, clever, intelligent advice with soul.' Mary Portas
'A wonderful look at how to transform our homes to be more mindfully aligned with our true nature and a reflection of who we are.' Fearne Cotton
'A happy home is a fundamental building block of happiness, and Michelle's book is an essential, step-by-step guide to creating a home we love.' Arianna Huffington, Founder & CEO, Thrive Global
'A must-have read for anyone looking to improve not just their home but also their quality of life within it.' Matthew Williamson
Be happier, healthier and more empowered with Michelle…
Bertrand Jouvenot is a French marketing influencer and prominent writer on business, management, marketing, branding, and digital. He has spent over twenty years in a variety of senior marketing roles. He now teaches at several business and fashion schools for Chinese and European students as well as consulting to various businesses. Bertrand lives in Paris, France, and writes for Le Monde, The Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Mediapart, Stratégies, le Journal du Net, Les Echos, and Influencia, the prestigious French quarterly print magazine spotting trends in marketing, communication, and creation.
The author is a world-renowned Buddhist teacher. Using the basic meditation practices the author provides, the reader can discover paths through his problems, transforming obstacles into opportunities to recognize the unlimited potential of his own minds. The monk invites us to join him in unlocking the secrets to finding joy and contentment in the everyday life. The book offers an illuminating perspective on the art of meditation and is a handbook for transforming our minds, bodies, and lives.
For millennia, Buddhists have enjoyed the limitless benefits of meditation. But how does it work? And why? The principles behind this ancient practice have long eluded some of the best minds in modern science. Until now.
This groundbreaking work, with a foreword by bestselling author Daniel Goleman, invites us to join in unlocking the secrets behind the practice of meditation. Working with neuroscientists, the author provides clear insights into modern research, which indicates that systematic training in meditation can enhance activity in areas of the brain associated with happiness and compassion.
With an infectious joy and insatiable curiosity, Yongey Mingyur…
I began studying philosophy, both western and Asian, as a college freshman, and I never stopped. Much of my career in philosophy was devoted to building bridges between western and Buddhist traditions. The best philosophers try to make their ideas as clear as possible. But standards of clarity can differ across traditions, and this sometimes makes it difficult to present the theories and arguments of one philosophical tradition to those who think in terms of another. I have struggled with this in my own efforts at bridge-building, and I am always appreciative when I see other scholars of Buddhism achieve the sort of clarity I aim for.
Buddhist philosophers had much to say about how we should live our lives and how we should treat others. Modern scholars of Buddhist moral thinking have presented these ideas in a number of different ways. Gowans’ book is a fair and balanced discussion of what Indian Buddhist moral philosophers had to say about ethics and the different ways in which recent scholars have interpreted their claims.
The first book of its kind, Buddhist Moral Philosophy: An Introduction introduces the reader to contemporary philosophical interpretations and analyses of Buddhist ethics. It begins with a survey of traditional Buddhist ethical thought and practice, mainly in the Pali Canon and early Mahayana schools, and an account of the emergence of Buddhist moral philosophy as a distinct discipline in the modern world. It then examines recent debates about karma, rebirth and nirvana, well-being, normative ethics, moral objectivity, moral psychology, and the issue of freedom, responsibility and determinism. The book also introduces the reader to philosophical discussions of topics in socially…
I began studying philosophy, both western and Asian, as a college freshman, and I never stopped. Much of my career in philosophy was devoted to building bridges between western and Buddhist traditions. The best philosophers try to make their ideas as clear as possible. But standards of clarity can differ across traditions, and this sometimes makes it difficult to present the theories and arguments of one philosophical tradition to those who think in terms of another. I have struggled with this in my own efforts at bridge-building, and I am always appreciative when I see other scholars of Buddhism achieve the sort of clarity I aim for.
Dharmakīrti is among the most important of the Indian Buddhist philosophers, but he is also one of the most challenging. These two eminent scholars of his tradition bring their expertise to bear in making a central aspect of his thought accessible to non-experts. The Buddhist quest for enlightenment is organized around the task of overcoming the sense of self, the sense of a ‘me’ that is the owner of this life. Eltschinger and Ratié clearly and carefully explain how Dharmakīrti uses philosophical rationality to help us in the task of dissolving that sense.
From very early times, Buddhist intellectuals have made the notion of a self-existing over and above the bodily and mental constituent’s one of their main targets. Their critique first culminates in Vasubandhu’s treatise against the Buddhist personalists (5th century CE).The eighth-century philosophers Santaraksita and Kamalasila provide another milestone in the history of the mainstream Buddhists’ critique of the self and the person: their Tattvasangraha (pañjika) contains the most learned and elaborate treatment of the subject. But how have Dignaga and Dharmakirti contributed to this debate? The present study attempts to answer at least in part this question by offering an…
My areas of expertise are museum management and arts administration. More specifically, I study structures of arts organizations and how they are connected or disconnected to their communities and larger societies using the systems theory and concept of mutual causality. In the process, I point out where the systems (i.e., museums) become stagnant and find a leverage point to address that stagnation by bringing in new input and different ways of thinking about the culture and structure of the organization. In most of my research, I try to find blindspots of following or doing “what was just there (i.e., status quo)” instead of evaluating what it did and how it can be improved.
This book spoke to me as a scholar of systems theory and due to my upbringing in Buddhist culture. Macy discusses how core teachings of interdependence in Buddhism and the mutual causation concept of general systems theory are similar. This book emphasizes the interdependent relationships among different people, things, societies, and ecosystems as mutually affecting and not unidirectional, leading to and encouraging collective action toward mutual benefits. I also love this book because it can introduce readers to philosophical thoughts that are other than Western, which we tend to be bombarded with in academic publications and education in the US.
This book brings important new dimensions to the interface between contemporary Western science and ancient Eastern wisdom. Here for the first time the concepts and insights of general systems theory are presented in tandem with those of the Buddha. Remarkable convergences appear between core Buddhist teachings and the systems view of reality, arising in our century from biology and extending into the social and cognitive sciences. Giving a cogent introduction to both bodies of thought, and a fresh interpretation of the Buddha’s core teaching of dependent co-arising, this book shows how their common perspective on causality can inform our lives.…
Bertrand Jouvenot is a French marketing influencer and prominent writer on business, management, marketing, branding, and digital. He has spent over twenty years in a variety of senior marketing roles. He now teaches at several business and fashion schools for Chinese and European students as well as consulting to various businesses. Bertrand lives in Paris, France, and writes for Le Monde, The Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Mediapart, Stratégies, le Journal du Net, Les Echos, and Influencia, the prestigious French quarterly print magazine spotting trends in marketing, communication, and creation.
This book is told to be the offering of no mind, born of compassion for all suffering beings. The diamond Sūtra takes the form of a dialogue between the Buddha and his disciple Subhūti. The central theme of emptiness is a pillar in Buddhism. It relates to the non-existence of the bodhisattva's self (buddha‘s self), the merits, stages of spiritual progression, marks, and characteristics of a Buddha in the perspective of universal emptiness. It plays a particularly important role in meditative currents such as Zen.
Zen Buddhism is often said to be a practice of mind-to-mind transmission without reliance on texts --in fact, some great teachers forbid their students to read or write. But Buddhism has also inspired some of the greatest philosophical writings of any religion, and two such works lie at the center of Zen: The Heart Sutra, which monks recite all over the world, and The Diamond Sutra, said to contain answers to all questions of delusion and dualism. This is the Buddhist teaching on the perfection of wisdom and cuts through all obstacles on the path of practice. As Red Pine…
I’ve always been a child of the woods. I preferred to leave my home and wade a creek or explore a hillside. Nothing compared to the sight of a black snake or the feel of a mud puppy. School was a torture until an English teacher introduced me to Richard Brautigan and then read my first serious story to the class. Since then, this dyslexic nature lover has become a dream fisher and history miner with a Ph.D. in English Literature and Cultural Studies. Retired from forty-one years of teaching, I now write and publish cultural fiction.
I’ve heard Gary Snyder speak three times. He can be tersely observational, deadly serious, puckishly whimsical, or well-deep mythic, sometimes all at once. All of this is true of Mountains and Rivers Without End, a volume of poems where Snyder does in poetry what Japanese artists did in their landscapes.
Here you will find a series of varied Zen-inspired meditations and Native-American-inspired folktales that draw from his Beat friends, his “Dharma teachers,” and “hosts of poets and writers, scientists, scholars, craftspersons, river-and-mountains people, fields-and-orchards people, and streets-and-buildings people.”
If you care about imagination and nature and freedom, then this book is a must read, one I return to periodically.
In simple, striking verse, legendary poet Gary Snyder weaves an epic discourse on the topics of geology, prehistory, and mythology. First published in 1996, this landmark work encompasses Asian artistic traditions, as well as Native American storytelling and Zen Buddhist philosophy, and celebrates the disparate elements of the Earth sky, rock, water while exploring the human connection to nature with stunning wisdom. Winner of the Bollingen Poetry Prize, the Robert Kirsch Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Orion Society's John Hay Award, among others, Gary Snyder finds his quiet brilliance celebrated in this new edition of one of his…
I fell in love with the characters, their foibles, and their search for answers. I feel lost at times, not seeing the forest for the trees, but this book showed the path of the protagonist who goes through many phases in his life, coming out the other end renewed, content, and with a revealing of his own spirit and accumulation of experience and knowledge which I found to be profound.
He deals with contemporary issues in a myth-like setting. I do not know much about Buddhism, but this book has those elements. It’s a wonderful read. Something I would pick up again.
Here the spirituality of the East and the West have met in a novel that enfigures deep human wisdom with a rich and colorful imagination.
Written in a prose of almost biblical simplicity and beauty, it is the story of a soul's long quest in search of he ultimate answer to the enigma of man's role on this earth. As a youth, the young Indian Siddhartha meets the Buddha but cannot be content with a disciple's role: he must work out his own destiny and solve his own doubt-a tortuous road that carries him through the sensuality of a love…
