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Books > Humanities > Religion & beliefs > Non-Christian sacred works & liturgy > Sacred texts > General
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 explains: "The Diamond Sutra may look like a book,
but it's really the body of the Buddha. It's also your body, my
body, all possible bodies. But it's a body with nothing inside and
nothing outside. It doesn't exist in space or time. Nor is it a
construct of the mind. It's no mind. And yet because it's no mind,
it has room for compassion. This book is the offering of no mind,
born of compassion for all suffering beings. Of all the sutras that
teach this teaching, this is the diamond."
Jewish Bible Translations is the first book to examine Jewish Bible
translations from the third century BCE to our day. It is an
overdue corrective of an important story that has been regularly
omitted or downgraded in other histories of Bible translation.
Examining a wide range of translations over twenty-four centuries,
Leonard Greenspoon delves into the historical, cultural,
linguistic, and religious contexts of versions in eleven languages:
Arabic, Aramaic, English, French, German, Greek, Hungarian,
Italian, Russian, Spanish, and Yiddish. He profiles many Jewish
translators, among them Buber, Hirsch, Kaplan, Leeser, Luzzatto,
Mendelssohn, Orlinsky, and Saadiah Gaon, framing their aspirations
within the Jewish and larger milieus in which they worked.
Greenspoon differentiates their principles, styles, and
techniques-for example, their choice to emphasize either literal
reflections of the Hebrew or distinctive elements of the vernacular
language-and their underlying rationales. As he highlights
distinctive features of Jewish Bible translations, he offers new
insights regarding their shared characteristics and their limits.
Additionally, Greenspoon shows how profoundly Jewish translators
and interpreters influenced the style and diction of the King James
Bible. Accessible and authoritative for all from beginners to
scholars, Jewish Bible Translations enables readers to make their
own informed evaluations of individual translations and to
holistically assess Bible translation within Judaism.
Making the rich narrative world of Talmud tales fully accessible to
modern readers, renowned Talmud scholar Jeffrey L. Rubenstein turns
his spotlight on both famous and little-known stories, analyzing
the tales in their original contexts, exploring their cultural
meanings and literary artistry, and illuminating their relevance.
Delving into both rabbinic life (the academy, master-disciple
relationships) and Jewish life under Roman and Persian rule
(persecution, taxation, marketplaces), Rubenstein explains how
storytellers used irony, wordplay, figurative language, and other
art forms to communicate their intended messages. Each close
reading demonstrates the story's continuing relevance through the
generations into modernity. For example, the story "Showdown in
Court," a confrontation between King Yannai and the Rabbinic
judges, provides insights into controversial struggles in U.S.
history to balance governmental power; the story of Honi's
seventy-year sleep becomes a window into the indignities of aging.
Through the prism of Talmud tales, Rubenstein also offers timeless
insights into suffering, beauty, disgust, heroism, humor, love,
sex, truth, and falsehood. By connecting twenty-first-century
readers to past generations, The Land of Truth helps to bridge the
divide between modern Jews and the traditional narrative worlds of
their ancestors.
Since its appearance in China in the third century, "The Lotus
Sutra" has been regarded as one of the most illustrious scriptures
in the Mahayana Buddhist canon. The object of intense veneration
among generations of Buddhists in China, Korea, Japan, and other
parts of the world, it has had a profound impact on the great works
of Japanese and Chinese literature, attracting more commentary than
any other Buddhist scripture.
As Watson notes in the introduction to his remarkable
translation, " "The Lotus Sutra" is not so much an integral work as
a collection of religious texts, an anthology of sermons, stories,
and devotional manuals, some speaking with particular force to
persons of one type or in one set of circumstances, some to those
of another type or in other circumstances. This is no doubt why it
has had such broad and lasting appeal over the ages and has
permeated so deeply into the cultures that have been exposed to
it."
WINNER OF THE 2019 DUFF COOPER PRIZE A SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
'With emotional and psychological insight, Barton unlocks this
sleeping giant of our culture. In the process, he has produced a
masterpiece.' Sunday Times The Bible is the central book of Western
culture. For the two faiths which hold it sacred, it is the bedrock
of their religion, a singular authority on what to believe and how
to live. For non-believers too, it has a commanding status: it is
one of the great works of world literature, woven to an
unparalleled degree into our language and thought. This book tells
the story of the Bible, explaining how it came to be constructed
and how it has been understood, from its remote beginnings down to
the present. John Barton describes how the narratives, laws,
proverbs, prophecies, poems and letters which comprise the Bible
were written and when, what we know - and what we cannot know -
about their authors and what they might have meant, as well as how
these extraordinarily disparate writings relate to each other. His
incisive readings shed new light on even the most familiar
passages, exposing not only the sources and traditions behind them,
but also the busy hands of the scribes and editors who assembled
and reshaped them. Untangling the process by which some texts which
were regarded as holy, became canonical and were included, and
others didn't, Barton demonstrates that the Bible is not the fixed
text it is often perceived to be, but the result of a long and
intriguing evolution. Tracing its dissemination, translation and
interpretation in Judaism and Christianity from Antiquity to the
rise of modern biblical scholarship, Barton elucidates how meaning
has both been drawn from the Bible and imposed upon it. Part of the
book's originality is to illuminate the gap between religion and
scripture, the ways in which neither maps exactly onto the other,
and how religious thinkers from Augustine to Luther and Spinoza
have reckoned with this. Barton shows that if we are to regard the
Bible as 'authoritative', it cannot be as believers have so often
done in the past.
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