Following Alan Watts' acclaimed book on Zen Buddhism The Way of Zen, he tackles the Chinese philosophy of Tao. The Tao is the way of man's cooperation with the natural course of the natural world. Alan Watts takes the reader through the history of Tao and its interpretations by key thinkers such as Lao-Tzu, author of the Tao Te Ching. Watts goes on to demonstrate how the ancient and timeless Chinese wisdom of Tao promotes the idea of following a life lived according to the natural world and goes against our goal-oriented ideas by allowing time to quiet our minds and observe the world rather than imposing ourselves on it. By taking in some of the lessons of Tao, we can change our attitude to the way we live. Drawing on ancient and modern sources, Watts treats the Chinese philosophy of Tao in much the same way as he did Zen Buddhism in his classic The Way of Zen. Including an introduction to the Chinese culture that is the foundation of the Tao, this is one of Alan Watts' best-loved works.

This text offers a guide to the philosophy of Confucianism and its impact in the Confucian regions, covering mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macao, Japan, South Korea, North Korea, Vietnam and Singapore. All, except Singapore, employed Confucianism as the state ideology before the west came to East Asia. The differences and similarities between the variety of Confucian schools are examined. The author concludes that the philosophical and ethical principles of Confucianism will assist in the industrialization and democratization of the region.

During the first half of this century the forests of Thailand were home to wandering ascetic monks. They were Buddhists, but their brand of Buddhism did not copy the practices described in ancient doctrinal texts. Their Buddhism found expression in living day-to-day in the forest and in contending with the mental and physical challenges of hunger, pain, fear, and desire. Combining interviews and biographies with an exhaustive knowledge of archival materials and a wide reading of ephemeral popular literature, Kamala Tiyavanich documents the monastic lives of three generations of forest-dwelling ascetics and challenges the stereotype of state-centric Thai Buddhism. Although the tradition of wandering forest ascetics has disappeared, a victim of Thailand's relentless modernization and rampant deforestation, the lives of the monks presented here are a testament to the rich diversity of regional Buddhist traditions. The study of these monastic lineages and practices enriches our understanding of Buddhism in Thailand and elsewhere.

The grammar presents a full decription of Pali, the language used in the Theravada Buddhist canon, which is still alive in Ceylon and South-East Asia. The development of its phonological and morphological systems is traced in detail from Old Indic. Comprehensive references to comparable features and phenomena from other Middle Indic languages mean that this grammar can also be used to study the literature of Jainism.

Exploring the interactions of the Buddhist world with the dominant cultures of Iran in pre- and post-Islamic times, this book demonstrates that the traces and cross-influences of Buddhism have brought the material and spiritual culture of Iran to its present state. Even after the term 'Buddhism' was eradicated from the literary and popular languages of the region, it has continued to have a significant impact on the culture as a whole. In the course of its history, Iranian culture adopted and assimilated a system of Buddhist art, iconography, religious symbolism, literature, and asceticism due to the open border of eastern Iran with the Buddhist regions, and the resultant intermingling of the two worlds.

In the religions of the world, there is strongemphasis on the practice of "purification" for the religious transformation ofmind and body in connection with achieving such ultimate objectives asenlightenment and salvation. The contributors discuss the great diversity offorms and meanings with respect to religious transformation in their respectivefields of research. While invoking earlier debates within the study ofreligions and theology on the topic of "purification" the studies in thisvolume penetrate further into the meaning and structure of religioustransformation of mind and body in the religions of the world and opencomparative perspectives on this topic.

The political influence of temples in pre-modern Japan, most clearly manifested in divine demonstrations, has traditionally been condemned and is poorly understood. In an impressive examination of this intriguing aspect of medieval Japan, Mikael Adolphson employs a wide range of previously neglected sources (court diaries, abbot appointment records, war chronicles, narrative picture scrolls) to argue that religious protest was a symptom of political factionalism in the capital rather than its cause. It is his contention that religious violence can be traced primarily to attempts by secular leaders to re-arrange religious and political hierarchies to their own advantage, thereby leaving disfavored religious institutions to fend for their accustomed rights and status. In this context, divine demonstrations became the preferred negotiating tool for monastic complexes. For almost three centuries, such strategies allowed a handful of elite temples to maintain enough of an equilibrium to sustain and defend the old style of rulership even against the efforts of the Ashikaga Shogunate in the mid-fourteenth century.

By acknowledging temples and monks as legitimate co-rulers, The Gates of Power provides a new synthesis of Japanese rulership from the late Heian (794-1185) to the early Muromachi (1336-1573) eras, offering a unique and comprehensive analysis that brings together the spheres of art, religion, ideas, and politics in medieval Japan.

Takuan Soho's (1573-1645) two works on Zen and swordsmanship are among the most straightforward and lively presentations of Zen ever written and have enjoyed great popularity in both premodern and modern Japan. Although dealing ostensibly with the art of the sword,Record of Immovable Wisdom andOn the Sword Taie are basic guides to Zen-"user's manuals" for Zen mind that show one how to manifest it not only in sword play but from moment to moment in everyday life. Along with translations of Record of Immovable Wisdom and On the Sword Taie (the former, composed in all likelihood for the shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu and his fencing master, Yagyu Munenori), this book includes an introduction to Takuan's distinctive approach to Zen, drawing on excerpts from the master's other writings. It also offers an accessible overview of the actual role of the sword in Takuan's day, a period that witnessed both a bloody age of civil warfare and Japan's final unification under the Tokugawa shoguns. Takuan was arguably the most famous Zen priest of his time, and as a pivotal figure, bridging the Zen of the late medieval and early modern periods, his story (presented in the book's biographical section) offers a rare picture of Japanese Zen in transition. For modern readers, whether practitioners of Zen or the martial arts, Takuan's emphasis on freedom of mind as the crux of his teaching resonates as powerfully as it did with the samurai and swordsmen of Tokugawa Japan. Scholars will welcome this new, annotated translation of Takuan's sword-related works as well as the host of detail it provides, illuminating an obscure period in Zen's history in Japan.

In The Spirit of Contradiction in Christianity and Buddhism, Hugh Nicholson examines the role of social identity processes in the development of two religious concepts: the Christian doctrine of Consubstantiality and the Buddhist doctrine of No-self. Consubstantiality, the claim that the Son is of the same substance as the Father, forms the basis of the doctrine of the Trinity, while No-self, the claim that the personality is reducible to its impersonal physical and psychological constituents, is a defining tenet of Theravada Buddhism. Both doctrines are massively counterintuitive in that they violate our basic assumptions and understandings about the world. While cognitive approaches to the study of religion have explained why these doctrines have difficulty taking root in popular religious thought, they are largely silent on the question of why these concepts have developed in the first place. Nicholson aims to fill this gap by examining the historical development of these two concepts. Nicholson argues that both of these doctrines were the products of hegemonic struggles in which one faction tried to get the upper hand over the other by maximizing the contrast with the dominant subgroup. Thus the "pro-Nicene" theologians of the fourth century developed the concept of Consubstantiality in an effort to maximize, against their "Arian" rivals, the contrast with Christianity's archetypal "other," Judaism. Similarly, the No-self doctrine stemmed from an effort to maximize, against the so-called Personalist schools of Buddhism, the contrast with Brahmanical Hinduism, symbolized by its doctrine of the deathless self. In this way, Nicholson demonstrates how, to the extent that religious traditions are driven by social identity processes, they back themselves into doctrinal positions that they must then retrospectively justify.

What we need to know about meditation and mindfulness to eliminate "stress" in our lives is contained in this book. This book follows and discusses the Satipatthana meditation scheme (pronunciation: sati-PA'-tana), too often neglected in the West. Many additional details about Buddhism are discussed including the very nature of spirituality. This as a mysterious human capacity in the way that electricity or mechanics are for most people -- but more like a puzzle, once understood it becomes useful. Reading this is a way of doing Buddhism as long as the reader continues meditation. The virtue of participating in chanting and other rituals is also explained. This is intended as a thorough, well documented and simply written presentation. Teachings about Purification, Anapanasati, Heart, Precious Bodhicitta, Realization, Enlightenment and many other "technical" Buddhist concepts are described. There is an extensive glossary and bibliography.

This book is a collection of English articles by Pan Guangdan, one of China's most distinguished sociologists and eugenicists and also a renowned expert in education. Pan is a prolific scholar, whose collected works number some fourteen volumes. Pan's daughters Pan Naigu, Pan Naimu and Pan Naihe-all scholars of anthropology and sociology-began editing their father's published works and surviving manuscripts around 1978. The collected articles, written between 1923 and 1945, are representative of Pan's insights on sociobiology, ethnology and eugenics, covering topics such as Christianity, opium, domestic war and China-Japan relations. The title of the book is taken from the fascinating two-part article "Socio-biological Implications in Confucianism", which essentially reworks Confucius as a kind of "forefather" of socio-biological and eugenic thinking, showing Pan's promotion of "traditional" values. These articles, mostly published in Chinese Students' Monthly and The China Critic, offer an excellent point of entry into Pan's ideas on population and eugenics, his polemics on family and marriage, and his intellectual positioning and self-fashioning. This collection is of great reference value, allowing readers to gain an overall and in-depth understanding of the development of Pan's academic thought, and to explore the spiritual world of the scholars brought together by The China Critic who were dedicated to rebuilding the Chinese culture and bridging the West and the East.

On a beautiful spring day in 2002, Lee Carlson's life was transformed forever when he was hit by a careless, speeding driver. Father, husband, writer, son all that was about to change. Several days later he woke up in a hospital with a new identity: Traumatic Brain Injury Survivor. Unfortunately he knew all about Traumatic Brain Injury, or TBI. Just months before, his mother had fallen down a flight of basement stairs, crushing her brain and leaving her unable to walk, speak or feed herself. Passage to Nirvana tells the story of one person's descent into the hell of losing everything: family, home, health, even the ability to think and the slow climb back to a normal life. Told in a unique creative style brought on by the author's brain injury, combining short poems and essays in an interwoven, exuberant narrative, Passage to Nirvana recounts one person s struggle and ultimate joy at building a new life. The story takes the reader through Intensive Care Units, doctors offices and a profusion of therapy centers, eventually winding its way to sunlit oceans, quiet Zen meditation halls, white beaches, azure skies and a sailboat named Nirvana. Passage to Nirvana is a memoir, a treasury of Zen teachings and a sailor s yarn all rolled into one. Passage to Nirvana is an illustrative tale about finding a path to happiness after a traumatic life event, a book that will teach you about the Poetry of Living.

In this third installment of his comprehensive history of "India's religion" and reappraisal of Hindu identity, Professor Jyotirmaya Sharma offers an engaging portrait of Swami Vivekananda and his relationship with his guru, the legendary Ramakrishna. Sharma's work focuses on Vivekananda's reinterpretation and formulation of diverse Indian spiritual and mystical traditions and practices as "Hinduism" and how it served to create, distort, and justify a national self-image. The author examines questions of caste and the primacy of the West in Vivekananda's vision, as well as the systematic marginalization of alternate religions and heterodox beliefs. In doing so, Professor Sharma provides readers with an incisive entryway into nineteenth- and twentieth-century Indian history and the rise of Hindutva, the Hindu nationalist movement. Sharma's illuminating narrative is an excellent reexamination of one of India's most controversial religious figures and a fascinating study of the symbiosis of Indian history, religion, politics, and national identity. It is an essential story for anyone interested in the evolution of one of the world's great religions and its role in shaping contemporary India.

Since the 1970s, the influence of oriental philosophy, in particular the Buddhist tradition, in the field of psychotherapy has been quite profound. Taoism has not had the same impact on modern psychotherapeutic models. Yet, as early as 1936, Alva LaSalle Kitselman who was, at that time, studying oriental languages at Stanford University, with a particular emphasis on Sanskrit, created his own version of the classic text of the Taoist tradition - the book of Lao Tzu entitled the Tao Teh King. His version of this classic was, as he said, a restatement rather than being a new translation from the ancient Chinese. After its publication, and through a chance encounter with one of the librarians at Stanford, he began to realise that Taoism and Taoist philosophy could be used as a form of therapy, specifically in the form he called 'non-directiveness' or 'non-directive therapy.' In the 1950s Kitsleman published an audio lecture on his early experiences using the Tao Teh King entitled 'An Ancient Therapy'. In the lecture he compared and contrasted his application of Taoist philosophy in psychotherapy with the 'client centred therapy' approach of Carl R. Rogers. This new publication of Kitselman's version of the Tao Teh King and the story of his discovery will hopefully ignite a real interest in combining the wisdom of this classic Taoist text with modern psychotherapeutic methodologies. A. L. 'Beau' Kitselman was a remarkable man, a genius whose interests ranged from mathematics, science and computer programming to exploring the potential of the human mind.

Popularly Hinduism is believed to be the world's oldest living religion. This claim is based on a continuous reverence to the oldest strata of religious authority within the Hindu traditions, the Vedic corpus, which began to be composed more than three thousand years ago, around 1750-1200 BCE. The Vedas have been considered by many as the philosophical cornerstone of the Brahmanical traditions (astika); even previous to the colonial construction of the concept of "Hinduism." However, what can be pieced together from the Vedic texts is very different from contemporary Hindu religious practices, beliefs, social norms and political realities. This book presents the results of a study of the traditional education and training of Brahmins through the traditional system of education called gurukula as observed in 25 contemporary Vedic schools across the state of Maharasthra. This system of education aims to teach Brahmin males how to properly recite, memorize and ultimately embody the Veda. This book combines insights from ethnographic and textual analysis to unravel how the recitation of the Vedic texts and the Vedic traditions, as well as the identity of the traditional Brahmin in general, are transmitted from one generation to the next in contemporary India.