Knowledge plays a very significant role in Buddhism, as it is the gateway to enlightenment and nirvana. This volume provides a clear and exhaustive exposition of Buddhist epistemology and logic, based on the works of classical thinkers such as Vasubandhu, Dinnaga, and Dharmakiriti. It traces the historical development of the Buddhist theory of knowledge and analyzes some basic issues like the nature of reality and knowledge, the criteria of truth, and nature of perception and inference, the only two sources of knowledge accepted in Buddhist philosophy. The appendix contains the Sanskrit original and an annotated translation of Nyaya Pravesa, a basic text of Buddhist epistemology, which discusses the nature of perception and inference and their fallacies. This work sheds light on abtruse epistemological topics and will enable readers to gain a clearer appreciation of the depths of Buddhist theory of knowledge.

A New Way of Healing

""Tao of Surfing" is an inspired book and a unique reflection that will have a lasting effect on anyone who reads it."
-Bob Walch, "The Monterey County Herald"

The roads I travel and the waves I search for and ride exemplify the flowing movement and continuous change of life itself. - From the book

"Author Allen.in fine, thoughtful fashion.writes well, informally, and there is haiku in his observations.A delightful book, effortlessly wise."
-The Book Reader

"From the first pages of this remarkable book I was captivated by the gently profound philosophy of riding through life with graceful balance."
-Greg Ambrose, author of "Surfer's Guide to Hawaii" and co-author of "Memories of Duke, the Legend Comes to Life"

Internationally acclaimed and Pulitzer Prize nominated author Michael A. Allen, takes you on a journey into the recesses of your soul and explores the ontological question, "What is our underlying essence?" Mr. Allen uses the metaphor of the sea, and its ebb and flow, to describe the Tao of life's cycle. And he discovers within this unique reflection a new way to comfort and heal the Self from the trauma of death.

His long time interest in film brought him to write the screenplay adaptation with his brother in law Alex Carig in order to make "Tao of Surfing" into a full-length feature motion picture. Mr. Allen was initially inspired to write "Tao of Surfing" after his brother-his surfing partner-died from the complication of AIDS.

Dathorne's approach is basically literary and historical, but he has also developed his argument around politics, popular culture, language, and even landscape architecture. He looks at Europe as a mental construct of philosophies and politics that both the English and European Americans identified with Greece and Rome. Dathorne shows how much of what we think of as European heritage is actually of African and/or Islamic background. He shows the founders of the U.S. to be idealistic Athenian-type elites, unlikely to allow humanity to govern as a citizenship. The book discusses the literary history of the ex-colony of America with its own special lens, showing how again and again the makers of the American myth failed to come to terms with the multicultural realities.

This book is an attempt to explain how, in the face of increasing religious authoritarianism in medieval Islamic civilization, some Muslim thinkers continued to pursue essentially humanistic, rational, and scientific discourses in the quest for knowledge, meaning, and values. Drawing on a wide range of Islamic writings, from love poetry to history to philosophical theology, Goodman shows that medieval Islam was open to individualism, occasional secularism, skepticism, even liberalism.

The Psychology of the Yogas explores the dissonance between the promises of the yogic quest and psychological states of crisis. Western practitioners of yoga and meditation who have embarked upon years-long spiritual quests and who have practiced under the guidance of a guru tell of profound and ongoing experiences of love, compassion and clarity: the peaks of spiritual fulfillment. However, after returning to the West, they reported difficulties and crises in different areas of their lives. Why did these practitioners, who had apparently touched the heights of fulfillment, still suffer from these crises? The author explores the psychological theory of yoga and its concrete yogic psychological methods such as 'cultivating of the opposite' (pratipaksa bhavana), transforming it to 'imagining the opposite', a practice aimed at healing negative habitual tendencies. These methods are extracted from an in-depth study of the Yoga of Patanjali and the Tibetan-Buddhist Ati-Yoga of Longchenpa - the Dzogchen. The works of Patanjali (3rd century) and Longchenpa, (14th century) provide a profound psychological framework for understanding the human psyche. These methods are effective but at times difficult to implement. However, as demonstrated through a case study Western psychology can effectively undo habitual tendencies in a manner which may complement yoga practice, enhancing the integration of one's spirituality and psychology.

Jonardon Ganeri gives an account of language as essentially a means for the reception of knowledge. The semantic power of a word, its ability to stand for a thing, derives from the capacity of understanders to acquire knowledge simply by understanding what is said. Ganeri finds this account in the work of certain Indian philosophers of language, and shows how their analysis can inform and be informed by contemporary philosophical theory.

This book is a sustained analytical exploration of the rich philosophy of self of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) has become many things to many people in the years that have passed since his untimely death. For some he is simply the greatest Portuguese poet of the 20th century. For others he has gradually emerged as a forgotten voice in 20th century modernism. And yet Pessoa was also a philosopher, and it is only very recently that the philosophical importance of his work has begun to attract the attention it deserves. Pessoa composed systematic philosophical essays in his pre-heteronymic period, defending rationalism in epistemology and sensationism in the philosophy of mind. His heteronymic work, decisively breaking with the conventional strictures of systematic philosophical writing, is a profound and exquisite exploration in the philosophy of self. Virtual Subjects, Fugitive Selves pulls together the strands of this philosophy and rearticulates it in a way that does justice to its breathtaking originality. It reveals the extraordinary power of Pessoa's theory by applying it to the analysis of some of the trickiest and most puzzling problems about the self to have appeared in the global history of philosophy.

This book analyzes the concept of " ikmah" in early Islamic texts within a network of multiple conceptual interrelationships in the cross-disciplinary context of Muslim works, roughly up to al-Ghazali's lifetime. The word " ikmah" has a wide spectrum of connotations in these texts, because it basically contains all knowledge within human reach, and accordingly, received a range of diverse scholarly treatments. This work contextualizes " ikmah" in a nuanced fashion in the collective usage of early Muslim authors, mainly by lexicographers, exegetes, philosophers, and Sufis. For the first time in the field of Arabic and Islamic Studies, particularly in Islamic Philosophy and Sufism, this study explores the concept of " ikmah" in an all-embracing capacity. " ikmah" is a central concept of Islamic thinking, related to almost all intellectual disciplines of Muslim scholarly tradition, but it has been insufficiently underlined and treated in earlier western scholarship.

This book uses the mutual interactions between Chinese and Western culture as a point of departure in order to concisely introduce the origins and evolution of Chinese culture at the aspects of constitution, thinking, values and atheistic. This book also analyzes utensil culture, constitution culture and ideology culture, which were perfected by absorbing classic arguments from academia. As such, the book offers an essential guide to understanding the development, civilization and key ideologies in Chinese history, and will thus help to promote Chinese culture and increase cultural awareness.

Since the earliest period of Islamic history, Arab thought has been dominated by a reverence for tradition and textual analysis. In this groundbreaking work, the great contemporary Arab philosopher Mohammed Abed Al-Jabiri seeks to chart a route towards modernity via the proposition that respect for textualism and tradition are not inconsistent with rationalism and that both history and philosophy are key to the evolution of knowledge systems and ways of reasoning in Arab culture. This book has been an enormous influence within the Arab world on the Islam and modernity discourse. It is published here for the first time in English and provides a fascinating insight into the currents of contemporary Arab thought.

The volume contains critical editions of the extant parts of two hitherto unknown theological works by the Buyid vizier al-Sahib b. 'Abbad (d. 385/925), who is well known to have vigorously promoted the teaching of Mu'tazili theology throughout Buyid territories and beyond. The manuscripts on which the edition is based come from Cairo Geniza store rooms. They consist of two manuscripts for each of the two texts-testimony to the impact of al-Sahib's education policy on the contemporaneous Jewish community in Cairo. The longer treatise of al-Sahib of ca. 350/960, possibly his Kitab Nahj al-sabil fi usul al-din, appears to be the earliest Mu'tazili work preserved among the Jewish community. The second, briefer treatise also contains a commentary by 'Abd al-Jabbar al-Hamadani (d. 415/1025).

Philosophers of Nothingness examines the three principal figures of what has come to be known as the "Kyoto school" -- Nishida Kitaro, Tanabe Hajime, and Nishitani Keiji -- and shows how this original current of twentieth-century Japanese thought challenges traditional philosophy to break out of its Western confines and step into a world forum.