Buddhas, gods, prophets and oracles are often depicted as asking questions. But what are we to understand when Jesus asks "Who do you say that I am?", or Mazu, the Classical Zen master asks, "Why do you seek outside?" Is their questioning a power or weakness? Is it something human beings are only capable of due to our finitude? Is there any kind of question that is a power? Focusing on three case studies of questions in divine discourse on the level of story - the god depicted in the Jewish Bible, the master Mazu in his recorded sayings literature, and Jesus as he is depicted in canonized Christian Gospels - Nathan Eric Dickman meditates on human responses to divine questions. He considers the purpose of interreligious dialogue and the provocative kind of questions that seem to purposefully decenter us, drawing on methods from confessionally-oriented hermeneutics and skills from critical thinking. He allows us to see alternative ways of interpreting religious texts through approaches that look beyond reading a text for the improvement of our own religion or for access to some metaphysically transcendent reality. This is the first step in a phenomenology of religions that is inclusive, diverse, relevant and grounded in the world we live in.

Huang's book analyzes the major Neo-Confucian philosophers from the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries. Focusing on metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical philosophical issues, this study presents the historical development of the Neo-Confucian school, an outgrowth of ancient Confucianism, and characterizes its thought, background, and influence. Key concepts—for example ^Utai-ji (supreme ultimate), ^Uxin (mind), and ^Uren (humanity)—as interpreted by each thinker are discussed in detail. Also examined are the two major schools that developed during this period, Cheng-Zhu, School of Principle, and Lu-Wang, School of Mind. These schools, despite different philosophical orientations, were convinced that their common goal, to bring about a harmonious relationships between man and the universe and between man and man, could be achieved through different ways of philosophizing. To understand the Chinese mind, it is necessary to understand Neo-Confucianism as a reformation of early Confucianism. This analytical presentation of major Neo-Confucian philosophers, from the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries, examines Zhou Dun-yi (1017-1073), Shao Yong (1011-1077), Zhang Zai (1020-1077), Cheng Hao (1032-1085), Cheng Yi (1033-1107), Zhu Xi (1130-1200), Lu Xiang-shan (1139-1193), and Wang Yang-ming (1427-1529). With its focus on metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical philosophical issues, Huang's study presents the historical development of the Neo-Confucian school, an outgrowth of ancient Confucianism, and characterizes its thought, background, and influence. Key concepts—for example, ^Utai-ji (supreme ultimate), ^Uxin (mind), and ^Uren (humanity)—as interpreted by each thinker are discussed in detail. The two major schools that developed during these six centuries are examined as well. Lu-Wang, School of Mind, developed in criticism of Cheng-Zhu, School of Principle. The two schools, despite different approaches toward their philosophical pursuits, were convinced that their common goals, to bring about harmonious relationships between man and the universe and between man and man, could be achieved through different ways of philosophizing. To understand the Chinese mind, it is necessary to understand Neo-Confucianism as a reformation of early Confucianism. Scholars of Eastern religions and philosophy will appreciate the objective interpretations of each thinker's philosophy, for which pertinent passages spoken by each man have been selected and translated by the author from the original Chinese, and the comparisons of the Neo-Confucian philosophies with those of the West. An introduction provides the historical background in which to study the rise of Neo-Confucianism. The study is organized ehronologically and includes a glossary of terms and a bibliography which serves as a helpful guide for further research.

Richard Sorabji presents a fascinating study of Gandhi's philosophy in comparison with Christian and Stoic thought. Sorabji shows that Gandhi was a true philosopher. He not only aimed to give a consistent self-critical rationale for his views, but also thought himself obliged to live by what he taught-something that he had in common with the ancient Greek and Christian ethical traditions. Understanding his philosophy helps with re-assessing the consistency of his positions and life. Gandhi was less influenced by the Stoics than by Socrates, Christ, Christian writers, and Indian thought. But whereas he re-interpreted those, he discovered the congeniality of the Stoics too late to re-process them. They could supply even more of the consistency he sought. He could show them the effect of putting their unrealised ideals into actual practice. They from the Cynics, he from the Bhagavadgita, learnt the indifference of most objectives. But both had to square that with their love for all humans and their political engagement. Indifference was to both a source of freedom. Gandhi was converted to non-violence by Tolstoy's picture of Christ. But he addressed the sacrifice it called for, and called even protective killing violent. He was nonetheless not a pacifist, because he recognized the double-bind of rival duties, and the different duties of different individuals, which was a Stoic theme. For both Gandhi and the Stoics it accompanied doubts about universal rules. Sorabji's expert understanding of these ethical traditions allows him to offer illuminating new perspectives on a key intellectual figure of the modern world, and to show the continuing resonance of ancient philosophical ideas.

To rectify the unfortunate neglect in the West of one of India's premier intellectuals, philosopher Innaiah Narisetti has compiled this new collection of Roy's most significant works. Roy conceived of humanism as a scientific, integral, and radically new worldview. For humanists, philosophers, political scientists, and others, M N Roy's unique and still very relevant view of humanism will have great appeal and broad application beyond its original Indian context.

This volume presents a comprehensive analysis of the Confucian thinker Xunzi and his work, which shares the same name. It features a variety of disciplinary perspectives and offers divergent interpretations. The disagreements reveal that, as with any other classic, the Xunzi provides fertile ground for readers. It is a source from which they have drawn-and will continue to draw-different lessons. In more than 15 essays, the contributors examine Xunzi's views on topics such as human nature, ritual, music, ethics, and politics. They also look at his relations with other thinkers in early China and consider his influence in East Asian intellectual history. A number of important Chinese scholars in the Song dynasty (960-1279 CE) sought to censor the Xunzi. They thought that it offered a heretical and impure version of Confuciansim. As a result, they directed study away from the Xunzi. This has diminished the popularity of the work. However, the essays presented here help to change this situation. They open the text's riches to Western students and scholars. The book also highlights the substantial impact the Xunzi has had on thinkers throughout history, even on those who were critical of it. Overall, readers will gain new insights and a deeper understanding of this important, but often neglected, thinker.

D?gen Zenji was a Japanese Zen Buddhist teacher born in Ky?to, and the founder of the S?t? school of Zen in Japan after travelling to China and training under the Chinese Caodong lineage there. D?gen is known for his extensive writing including the Treasury of the Eye of the True Dharma or Sh?b?genz?, a collection of ninety-five fascicles concerning Buddhist practice and enlightenment. The primary concept underlying D?gen's Zen practice is "oneness of practice-enlightenment". In fact, this concept is considered so fundamental to D?gen's variety of Zen-and, consequently, to the S?t? school as a whole-that it formed the basis for the work Shush?-gi, which was compiled in 1890 by Takiya Takush? of Eihei-ji and Azegami Baisen of S?ji-ji as an introductory and prescriptive abstract of D?gen's massive work, the Sh?b?genz? ("Treasury of the Eye of the True Dharma"). Dogen is a profoundly original and difficult 13th century Buddhist thinker whose works have begun attracting increasing attention in the West. Admittedly difficult for even the most advanced and sophisticated scholar of Eastern thought, he is bound, initially, to present an almost insurmountable barrier to the Western mind. Yet the task of penetrating that barrier must be undertaken and, in fact, is being carried out by many gifted scholars toiling in the Dogen vineyard.

This volume focuses on contemporary Confucianism, and collects essays by famous sinologists such as Guy Alitto, John Makeham, Tse-ki Hon and others. The content is divided into three sections - addressing the "theory" and "practice" of contemporary Confucianism, as well as how the two relate to each other - to provide readers a more meaningful understanding of contemporary Confucianism and Chinese culture. In 1921, at the height of the New Culture Movement's iconoclastic attack on Confucius, Liang Shuming ( ) fatefully predicted that in fact the future world culture would be Confucian. Over the nine decades that followed, Liang's reputation and the fortunes of Confucianism in China rose and fell together. So, readers may be interested in the question whether it is possible that a reconstituted "Confucianism" might yet become China's spiritual mainstream and a major constituent of world culture.

This translation captures the terse and enigmatic beauty of the ancient original and resists the tendency toward interpretive paraphrase found in many other editions. Along with the complete translation, Lombardo and Addiss provide one or more key lines from the original Chinese for each of the eighty-one sections, together with a transliteration of the Chinese characters and a glossary commenting on the pronunciation and meaning of each Chinese character displayed. This greatly enhances the reader's appreciation of how the Chinese text works and feels and the different ways it can be translated into English.

An extraordinary Zen teacher and artist, Hakuin (1686-1769) is credited with almost single-handedly reforming and revitalizing Japanese Zen from a state of extreme spiritual decline.
What made Hakuin even more remarkable was that he was not only a religious teacher but also a prolific artist. Using calligraphy and painting to create visual Dharma, he rendered his teachings on paper in portraits and sketches, visually expressing the nature of enlightenment as he imparted it to his students.
The Religious Art of Zen Master Hakuin is a stunning volume containing many of Hakuin's finest calligraphies and paintings, along with commentary by Katsuhiro Yoshizawa, the leading Japanese expert on Hakuin and his work. Yoshizawa shares the story of Hakuin's life and learning, revealing the profound religious meaning embedded in each illustration. At times he closely examines each stroke of a portrait--which include depictions of peddlers, panhandlers, and beggars--and provides a richly detailed documentary of the life and lessons of one of Zen's most respected teachers.

The Sword of Ambition belongs to a genre of religious polemic written for the rulers of Egypt and Syria between the twelfth and the fourteenth centuries. Unlike most medieval Muslim polemic, the concerns of this genre were more social and political than theological. Leaving no rhetorical stone unturned, the book's author, an unemployed Egyptian scholar and former bureaucrat named 'Uthman ibn Ibrahim al-Nabulusi (d. 660/1262), poured his deep knowledge of history, law, and literature into the work. Now edited in full and translated for the first time, The Sword of Ambition opens a new window onto the fascinating culture of elite rivalry in the late-medieval Islamic Middle East. It contains a wealth of little-known historical anecdotes, unusual religious opinions, obscure and witty poetry, and humorous cultural satire. Above all, it reveals that much of the inter-communal animosity of the era was conditioned by fierce competition for scarce resources that were increasingly mediated by an ideologically committed Sunni Muslim state. This insight reminds us that seemingly timeless and inevitable "religious" conflict must be considered in its broader historical perspective. The Sword of Ambition is both the earliest and most eclectic of several independent works composed in medieval Egypt against the employment of Coptic and Jewish officials, and is vivid testimony to the gradual integration of Islamic scholarship and state administration that was well underway in its day. A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

Investigating the impact of Arabic medieval astrological and magical theories on early modern occult philosophy, this book argues that they provided a naturalistic explanation of astral influences and magical efficacy based on Aristotelian notions of causality.

The Ch'ing scholar-thinker Tai Chen (1724-1777) was a passionate explorer. He loved words, and his most important philosophical treatise, the Meng Tzu tzu-I shu-cheng (An evidential study of the meaning of terms in the Mencius), is an exhaustive search for the meaning of the words first uttered by Mencius in the fourth century B.C. This book by Ann-ping Chin and Mansfield Freeman is the first complete and annotated English translation of that treatise. Drawing on scholarship from the eighteenth century to the present, it also includes two essays that reconstruct Tai Chen's life and time and reinterpret his thought. Unlike most of the evidential scholars of his day, Tai Chen was not satisfied merely with providing reason and proof for his reading. He was interested in the life of words as their meaning changes with the vicissitudes of time. Tai Chen felt that the terms in the Mencius, garbled by the Sung and Ming thinkers who had come under the influence of Buddhism and Taoism, would no longer have made sense to Mencius himself. Key Confucian concepts, such as "principle" and "nature," had become "blood-less" moral constructs. Tai Chen preferred their primeval meaning. Intellectual historians of this century have hailed him as a progressive thinker and a social critic, but he saw himself in a simpler role: as a reader striving to understand every word in his text.

I.B.Tauris in association with the Institute of Ismaili Studies This is the first English translation of the final philosophical work of the great eleventh-century Ismaili thinker, poet, and Fatimid emissary, N?sir-i Khusraw. Appointed from Cairo by command of the Fatimid Imam-caliph al-Mustansir to serve first as a d?'?, and then as the hujjat, for the entire region of Khur?s?n, he maintained his allegiance both to his mission and his Imam-caliph for the rest of his life, even when threatened and driven into exile. Written during his exile in Badakhsh?n in the year 1070, N?sir-i Khusraw here develops a powerful presentation of both Aristotelian philosophy and Ismaili exegesis, or ta'w?l, and strives to show that they are ultimately in harmony. The work is presented as a learned commentary on a long philosophical poem, written in the previous century and sent to N?sir by the am?r of Badakhsh?n, 'Al? b. al-Asad, who copied the poem out in his own hand from memory and asked the poet-philosopher to explicate it. In doing so, N?sir ranges over a huge span of topics from logic and language to the nature of the physical world, from the spheres of the highest heavens to the plants and animals of the earthly realm, and, most importantly, hidden spiritual realities: the esoteric (b?tin) as well as the exoteric (z?hir) realms. He thus discusses the nature of God, the creation of human beings, and the mysteries concealed in the physical world, itself a reflection of a higher, transcendent realm. Between Reason and Revelation: Twin Wisdoms Reconciled is an annotated translation of the Persian text prepared by Henry Corbin and Mohammed Mu'?n based on the single surviving manuscript of the work, now in the Suleymaniye Mosque Library in Istanbul. It is a work of great philosophical and spiritual insight, which is also a pioneering attempt to tackle difficult intellectual problems in the Persian language; it is at once lucid and lyrical, precise and speculative. N?sir's influence has been immense as both a poet and a thinker, and the Kit?b-i J?mi' al-hikmatayn is his crowning work.

In imperial China, the Yijing (Book of Changes) was not just read as a Confucian classic for moral cultivation, but also put into practice to solve problems of everyday life. To explain why the Yijing was so widely used in China, this volume examines its multiple textual layers, its divinatory practices, its medical uses, and its role in Chinese modernity. Together, the ten chapters demonstrate that the Yijing is indeed a living text used by both the educated elite and the populace to alleviate their fear and anxiety. Contributors are: Andrea Breard, Chang Chia-Feng, Constance A. Cook, Stephane Feuillas, Tze-ki Hon, Liao Hsien-huei, William Matthews, Tao Yingna, Xing Wang, and Zhao Lu.

Comparing the liberal Jewish ethics of the German-Jewish philosophers Ernst Cassirer and Hannah Arendt, this book argues that both espoused a diasporic, worldly conception of Jewish identity that was anchored in a pluralist and politically engaged interpretation of Jewish history and an abiding interest in the complex lived reality of modern Jews. Arendt's indebtedness to liberal Jewish thinkers such as Moses Mendelssohn, Abraham Geiger, Hermann Cohen, and Ernst Cassirer has been obscured by her modernist posture and caustic critique of the assimilationism of her German-Jewish forebears. By reorienting our conception of Arendt as a profoundly secular thinker anchored in twentieth century political debates, we are led to rethink the philosophical, political, and ethical legacy of liberal Jewish discourse.

Crossing continents and running across centuries, Key Concepts in World Philosophies brings together the 45 core ideas associated with major Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Islamic, African, Ancient Greek, Indigenous and modern European philosophers. The universal theme of self-cultivation and transformation connects each concept. Each one seeks to change our understanding the world or the life we are living. From Chinese xin and karma in Buddhist traditions to okwu in African philosophy, equity in Islamic thought and the good life in Aztec philosophy, an international team of philosophers cover a diverse set of ideas and theories originating from thinkers such as Confucius, Buddha, Dogen, Nezahualcoyotl, Nietzsche and Zhuangzi. Organised around the major themes of knowledge, metaphysics and aesthetics, each short chapter provides an introductory overview supported by a glossary. This is a one-of-a-kind toolkit that allows you to read philosophical texts from all over the world and learn how their ideas can be applied to your own life.

A world ever more extensively interlinked is calling out for serving human interests broader and more compelling than those inspiring our technological welfare. The interface between cultures - at the moment especially between the Occident and Islam - presents challenges to mutual understandings and calls for restoring the resources of our human beings forgotten in the struggle of competition and rivalry at the vital spheres of existence. In the evolutionary progress of the living beings the strictly vital concerns, emotions, attributes become sublimed and elevated to the spiritual sphere at which human beings encounter each other and share. Studies presented here bring forth sublimity, generosity, forgiveness, beauty, and are exalting the quest after ciphers and symbols which lead to our sharing the common deepest stream of fraternal reality.

Writing has come face-to-face with a most crucial juncture: to negotiate with the inescapable presence of violence. From the domains of contemporary Middle Eastern literature, this book stages a powerful conversation on questions of cruelty, evil, rage, vengeance, madness, and deception. Beyond the narrow judgment of violence as a purely tragic reality, these writers (in states of exile, prison, martyrdom, and war) come to wager with the more elusive, inspiring, and even ecstatic dimensions that rest at the heart of a visceral universe of imagination. Covering complex and controversial thematic discussions, Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh forms an extreme record of voices, movements, and thought-experiments drawn from the inner circles of the Middle Eastern region. By exploring the most abrasive writings of this vast cultural front, the book reveals how such captivating outsider texts could potentially redefine our understanding of violence and its now-unstoppable relationship to a dangerous age.

This book examines how Western behavioral science--which has generally focused on negative aspects of human nature--holds up to cross-cultural scrutiny, in particular the Tibetan Buddhist celebration of the human potential for altruism, empathy, and compassion. Resulting from a meeting between the Dalai Lama, leading Western scholars, and a group of Tibetan monks, this volume includes excerpts from these extraordinary dialogues as well as engaging essays exploring points of difference and overlap between the two perspectives.