Originally published in 1976, Leon Hurvitz's monumental translation of the "Lotus Sutra" is the work scholars have preferred for decades. Hailed by critics as an "extraordinary" and "magnificent" achievement, Hurvitz's translation is based on the best known Chinese version of the text and includes passages of the original Sanskrit that were omitted from the Chinese.

Beloved for its mythology and literary artistry, the "Lotus Sutra" is one of the most popular and influential texts of Mahayana Buddhism, asserting that there is only one path to enlightenment, the bodhisattva path, and that all followers without exception can achieve supreme awakening. The text argues that the Buddha cannot be delimited by time and space and that a common intent underlies the diversity of Buddhist teachings. Through parables of the burning house, the wayward son, and other tales that have come to be known throughout East Asia, the sutra skillfully concretizes abstract religious concepts and clarifies bold claims about the Buddhist tradition. Urging devotees to revivify doctrine through recitation and interpretation, the sutra powered an organic process of remaking that not only kept its content alive in the poetry and art of premodern Asia but also introduced new forms of practice and scriptural study into contemporary Buddhism. Stephen F. Teiser's foreword addresses this vital quality of the sutra, discusses its background, and reflects on the enduring relevance of Hurvitz's critical work.

A compelling book that casts the Qur'anic encounter with Jews in an entirely new light In this panoramic and multifaceted book, Meir Bar-Asher examines how Jews and Judaism are depicted in the Qur'an and later Islamic literature, providing needed context to those passages critical of Jews that are most often invoked to divide Muslims and Jews or to promote Islamophobia. He traces the Qur'anic origins of the protection of Jews and other minorities living under the rule of Islam, and shows how attitudes toward Jews in Shi'i Islam are substantially different from those in Sunni Islam. Bar-Asher sheds light on the extraordinary contribution of Jewish tradition to the Muslim exegesis of the Qur'an, and draws important parallels between Jewish religious law, or halakha, and shari'a law. An illuminating work on a topic of vital relevance today, Jews and the Qur'an offers a nuanced understanding of Islam's engagement with Judaism in the time of Muhammad and his followers, and serves as a needed corrective to common misperceptions about Islam.

This is the first major commentary in English on Pesher Habakkuk for forty years. It elucidates the nature of 1QpHab as the earliest commentary on the prophecy of Habakkuk by a detailed study of the biblical quotation and sectarian interpretation. This commentary provides a new edition of the scroll, including new readings, and detailed palaeographical, philological, exegetical and historical notes and discussion. It shows that the pesherist imitates the allusive style of the oracles of Habakkuk and also draws on lexemes, phrases, and themes from other biblical texts and Jewish sources. It shows that the pesherist identified the Kittim with the Romans who conquered Judaea in 63 BCE, and suggests that the scroll refers to several righteous and wicked figures, including the last Hasmonean high priests.

No Hindu god is closer to the soul of poetry than Krishna, and in North India no poet ever sang of Krishna more famously than S=urdD=as-or S=ur, for short. He lived in the sixteenth century and became so influential that for centuries afterward aspiring Krishna poets signed their compositions orally with his name.
This book takes us back to the source, offering a selection of S=urd=as's poems that were known and sung in the sixteenth century itself. Here we have poems of war, poems to the great rivers, poems of wit and rage, poems where the poet spills out his disappointments. Most of all, though, we have thememory of love-poems that adopt the voices of the women of Krishna's natal Braj country and evoke the power of being pulled into his irresistible orbit. Following the lead of several old manuscripts, Jack Hawley arranges these poems in such a way that they tell us Krishna's life story from birth to full maturity.
These lyrics from S=ur's Ocean (the S=urs=agar) were composed in the very tongue Hindus believe Krishna himself must have spoken: Brajbh=as=a, the language of Braj, a variety of Hindi. Hawley prepares the way for his verse translations with an introduction that explains what we know of S=urd=as and describes the basic structure of his poems. For readers new to Krishna's world or to the subtleties of a poet like S=urd=as, Hawley also provides a substantial set of analytical notes. "S=ur is the sun," as a familiar saying has it, and we feel the warmth of his light in these pages.

Scriptural Exegesis gathers voices from an international community of scholars to consider the many facets of the history of biblical interpretation and to question how exegesis shapes spiritual and cultural creativity. Divided into four broadly chronological sections that chart a variety of approaches from ancient to modern times, the essays examine texts and problems rooted in the ancient world yet still of concern today. Nineteen chapters incorporate the expertise of contributors from a diverse range of disciplines, including ancient religion, philosophy, mysticism, and folklore. Each embraces the challenge of explicating complex and often esoteric writings in light of Michael Fishbane's groundbreaking work in exegesis.

Die Darstellung der Begegnungen der ostsyrischen Christen ("Nestorianer") im ehemaligen Perserreich mit dem fruhen Islam ist fur die heutige Auseinandersetzung von Christentum und Islam von groesster Relevanz. Sowohl die Theologie und Gelehrsamkeit der Nestorianer werden in diesem Buch behandelt, als auch ihre erfolgreiche Mission unter den benachbarten arabischen Stammen. Weiter wird die Entwicklung der ostsyrischen Kirche nach dem Siegeszug der Araber herausgearbeitet. Nachdem diese Bagdad im Jahre 762 zu ihrer Hauptstadt gemacht hatten, nahmen die Kontakte zu, weil die Nestorianer hier die christliche Mehrheit bildeten. Die Rekonstruktion dieser Wechselwirkungen zwischen den gelehrten Nestorianern und den neuen arabischen Herrschern, des Sinns und Zwecks ihrer Religionsgesprache und der Rolle der christlichen Araber koennte gerade heute hilfreich sein, die eigene Tradition und die der Nachbarn in einer neuen Perspektive zu sehen.

The Heart Sutra is the most widely read, chanted, and copied text in East Asian Buddhism. Here Frederik L. Schodt explores his lifelong fascination with the sutra: its mesmerizing mantra, its ancient history, the "emptiness theory, and the way it is used around the world as a metaphysical tool to overcome chaos and confusion and reach a new understanding of reality--a perfection of wisdom. Schodt's journey takes him to caves in China, American beats declaiming poetry, speculations into the sutra's true origins, and even a robot Avalokitesvara at a Kyoto temple.

In the West Krishna is primarily known as the speaker of the Bhagavad Gita. But it is the stories of Krishna's childhood and his later exploits that have provided some of the most important and widespread sources of religious narrative in the Hindu religious landscape. This volume brings together new translations of representative samples of Krishna religious literature from a variety of genres -- classical, popular, regional, sectarian, poetic, literary, and philosophical.

Imam Nawawi's commentary on Sahih Muslim is one of the most highly regarded works in Islamic thought and literature. Accepted by every sunni school of thought, and foundational in the Shaafi school, this text, available for the first time in English, is famed throughout the Muslim world. After the Qur'an, the prophetic traditions are the most recognised source of wisdom in Islam. Amongst the collected Hadith, Sahih Muslim is second only to the the collection of Imam Bukhari. With a commentary by Imam Nawawi, whose other works are amongst the most widely-read books on Islam, and translated by Adil Salahi, a modern scholar of great acclaim, this immense work, finally available to English readers, is an essential addition to every Muslim library, and for anybody with an interest in Islamic thought.

In "Conceiving Israel," Gwynn Kessler examines the peculiar fascination of the rabbis of late antiquity with fetuses--their generation, development, nurturance, and even prenatal study habits--as expressed in narrative texts preserved in the Palestinian Talmud and those portions of the Babylonian Talmud attributed to Palestinian sages. For Kessler, this rabbinic speculation on the fetus served to articulate new understandings of Jewishness, gender, and God. Drawing on biblical, Christian, and Greco-Roman traditions, she argues, the rabbis developed views distinctive to late ancient Judaism.Kessler shows how the rabbis of the third through sixth centuries turned to non-Jewish writings on embryology and procreation to explicate the biblical insistence on the primacy of God's role in procreation at the expense of the biological parents (and of the mother in particular). She examines rabbinic views regarding God's care of the fetus, as well as God's part in determining fetal sex. Turning to the fetus as a site for the construction of Jewish identity, she explicates the rabbis' reading of "famous fetuses," or biblical heroes-to-be. If, as they argue, these males were born already circumcised, Jewishness and the covenantal relation of Israel to its God begin in the womb, and the womb becomes the site of the ongoing reenactment of divine creation, exodus, and deliverance. Rabbinic Jewish identity is thus vividly internalized by an emphasis on the prenatal inscription of Jewishness; it is not, and can never be, merely a matter of external practice.

Nagarjuna's Vigrahavyavartani is an essential work of Madhyamaka Buddhist philosophical literature. Written in an accessible question-and-answer style, it contains Nagarjuna's replies to criticisms of his philosophy of the "Middle Way." The Vigrahavyavartani has been widely cited both in canonical literature and in recent scholarship; it has remained a central text in India, Tibet, China, and Japan, and has attracted the interest of greater and greater numbers of Western readers.
In The Dispeller of Disputes, Jan Westerhoff offers a clear new translation of the Vigrahavyavartani, taking current philological research and all available editions into account, and adding his own insightful philosophical commentary on the text. Crucial manuscript material has been discovered since the earlier translations were written, and Westerhoff draws on this material to produce a study reflecting the most up-to-date research on this text. In his nuanced and incisive commentary, he explains Nagarjuna's arguments, grounds them in historical and textual scholarship, and explicitly connects them to contemporary philosophical concerns.

The Vaikhanasas are mentioned in many Vedic texts, and they maintain a close affiliation with the Taittiriya school of the Krsna Yajur Veda. Yet they are Vaisnavas, monotheistic worshipers of Visnu. Generally, Vaisnavism is held to be a post-Vedic development. Thus, the Vaikhanasas bridge two key ages in the history of South Asian religion. This text contains many quotations from ancient Vedic literature, and probably some other older original material, as well as architectural and iconographical data of the later first millennium CE. The Vaikhanasas remain relevant today. They are the chief priests (arcakas) in more than half of the Visnu temples in the South Indian states of Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, and Karnataka-including the renowned Hindu pilgrimage center Tirupati in Andhra Pradesh.

Sefer ha-Zohar (The Book of Radiance) has amazed readers ever since it emerged in medieval Spain over seven hundred years ago. Written in lyrical Aramaic, this masterpiece of Kabbalah exceeds the dimensions of a normal book; it is virtually a body of mystical literature, comprising over twenty discrete sections. The bulk of the Zohar consists of a mystical interpretation of the Torah, from Genesis through Deuteronomy. This seventh volume of The Zohar: Pritzker Edition consists of commentary on more than half the book of Leviticus. How does the Zohar deal with a biblical text devoted largely to animal sacrifices, cereal offerings, and priestly ritual? Here these ancient laws and procedures are spiritualized, transformed into symbols of God's inner life, now that both the Desert Tabernacle and the Temple in Jerusalem no longer exist. For example, the ascent offering, which was totally consumed on the altar, is known in Hebrew as olah (literally, "that which ascends"). In the Zohar, this symbolizes Shekhinah, last of the ten sefirot (divine potencies), who ascends to unite with Her beloved, the blessed Holy One. The biblical narrative describes how two of Aaron's sons, Nadab and Abihu, offered alien fire before YHVH and were immediately consumed in a divine blaze. Rabbinic tradition suggested various reasons why they were killed: they lacked the proper priestly garments, or had not washed their hands and feet, or were drunk, or were not married. For the Zohar, marriage enables one to imitate the divine union of male and female energies, and to stimulate that union above. By not marrying, Nadab and Abihu remained incomplete and unfulfilled. According to a related Zoharic passage, their ritual act failed because in their contemplation of the divine qualities they did not include Shekhinah. Without Her, God is incomplete.

Nine short essays exploring the K'iche' Maya story of creation, the Popol Vuh. Written during the lockdown in Chicago in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, these essays consider the Popol Vuh as a work that was also written during a time of feverish social, political, and epidemiological crisis as Spanish missionaries and colonial military deepened their conquest of indigenous peoples and cultures in Mesoamerica. What separates the Popol Vuh from many other creation texts is the disposition of the gods engaged in creation. Whereas the book of Genesis is declarative in telling the story of the world's creation, the Popol Vuh is interrogative and analytical: the gods, for example, question whether people actually need to be created, given the many perfect animals they have already placed on earth. Emergency uses the historical emergency of the Popol Vuh to frame the ongoing emergencies of colonialism that have surfaced all too clearly in the global health crisis of COVID-19. In doing so, these essays reveal how the authors of the Popol Vuh-while implicated in deep social crisis-nonetheless insisted on transforming emergency into scenes of social, political, and intellectual emergence, translating crisis into creativity and world creation.