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The core teachings and practices of Buddhism are systematically
directed toward developing keen and caring insight into the
relational or interdependent nature of all things. Hershock applies
Buddhist thought to reflect on the challenges to public good,
created by emerging social, economic, and political realities
associated with increasingly complex global interdependence.
In eight chapters, the key arenas for public policy are addressed:
the environment, health, media, trade and development, the
interplay of politics and religion, international relations, terror
and security, and education. Each chapter explains how a specific
issue area has come to be shaped by complex interdependence and
offers specific insights into directing the growing interdependence
toward greater equity, sustainability, and freedom. Thereby, a
sustained meditation on the meaning and means of realizing public
good is put forward, which results in a solid Buddhist conception
of diversity. Hershock argues that concepts of Karma and emptiness
are relevant across the full spectrum of policy domains and that
Buddhist concepts become increasingly forceful as concerns shift
from the local to the global.
A remarkable book on this fascinating religion, Buddhism in the
Public Sphere will be of interest to scholars and students in
Buddhist studies and Asian religion in general.
The core teachings and practices of Buddhism are systematically
directed toward developing keen and caring insight into the
relational or interdependent nature of all things. Hershock applies
Buddhist thought to reflect on the challenges to public good,
created by emerging social, economic, and political realities
associated with increasingly complex global interdependence. In
eight chapters, the key arenas for public policy are addressed: the
environment, health, media, trade and development, the interplay of
politics and religion, international relations, terror and
security, and education. Each chapter explains how a specific issue
area has come to be shaped by complex interdependence and offers
specific insights into directing the growing interdependence toward
greater equity, sustainability, and freedom. Thereby, a sustained
meditation on the meaning and means of realizing public good is put
forward, which results in a solid Buddhist conception of diversity.
Hershock argues that concepts of Karma and emptiness are relevant
across the full spectrum of policy domains and that Buddhist
concepts become increasingly forceful as concerns shift from the
local to the global. A remarkable book on this fascinating
religion, Buddhism in the Public Sphere will be of interest to
scholars and students in Buddhist studies and Asian religion in
general.
This book responds to the growing unease of educators and
non-educators alike about the inadequacy of most current
educational systems and programs to meet sufficiently the demands
of fast changing societies. These systems and programs evolved and
were developed in and for societies that have long been
transformed, and yet no parallel transformation has taken place in
the education systems they spawned. In the last twenty years or so,
other sectors of society, such as transportation and communications
systems, have radically changed the way they operate, but education
has remained essentially the same. There is no doubt: education
needs to change.To those ready to accept this challenge, this book
represents a welcome guide. Unlike most books on educational
policy, this volume does not focus on improving existing
educational systems but on changing them altogether.
Machine learning, big data and AI are reshaping the human
experience and forcing us to develop a new ethical intelligence.
Peter Hershock offers a new way to think about attention, personal
presence, and ethics as intelligent technology shatters previously
foundational certainties and opens entirely new spaces of
opportunity. Rather than turning exclusively to cognitive science
and contemporary ethical theories, Hershock shows how classical
Confucian and Socratic philosophies help to make visible what a
history of choices about remaking ourselves through control biased
technology has rendered invisible. But it is in Buddhist thought
and practice that Hershock finds the tools for valuing and training
our attention, resisting the colonization of consciousness, and
engendering a more equitable and diversity-enhancing
human-technology-world relationship. Focusing on who we need to be
present as to avoid a future in which machines prevent us from
either making or learning from our own mistakes, Hershock offers a
constructive response to the unprecedented perils of intelligent
technology and seamlessly blends ancient and contemporary
philosophies to envision how to realize its equally unprecedented
promises.
Machine learning, big data and AI are reshaping the human
experience and forcing us to develop a new ethical intelligence.
Peter Hershock offers a new way to think about attention, personal
presence, and ethics as intelligent technology shatters previously
foundational certainties and opens entirely new spaces of
opportunity. Rather than turning exclusively to cognitive science
and contemporary ethical theories, Hershock shows how classical
Confucian and Socratic philosophies help to make visible what a
history of choices about remaking ourselves through control biased
technology has rendered invisible. But it is in Buddhist thought
and practice that Hershock finds the tools for valuing and training
our attention, resisting the colonization of consciousness, and
engendering a more equitable and diversity-enhancing
human-technology-world relationship. Focusing on who we need to be
present as to avoid a future in which machines prevent us from
either making or learning from our own mistakes, Hershock offers a
constructive response to the unprecedented perils of intelligent
technology and seamlessly blends ancient and contemporary
philosophies to envision how to realize its equally unprecedented
promises.
Consciousness Mattering presents a contemporary Buddhist theory in
which brains, bodies, environments, and cultures are relational
infrastructures for human consciousness. Drawing on insights from
meditation, neuroscience, physics, and evolutionary theory, it
demonstrates that human consciousness is not something that occurs
only in our heads and consists in coherent differentiation—the
creative elaboration of relations among sensed and sensing
presences, and more fundamentally between matter and what matters.
Hershock argues that without consciousness there would only be
either unordered sameness or nothing at all. Evolution is
consciousness mattering. Shedding new light on the co-emergence of
subjective awareness and culture, the possibility of machine
consciousness, the risks of algorithmic consciousness hacking, and
the potentials of intentionally altered states of consciousness,
Hershock invites us to consider how freely, wisely, and
compassionately consciousness matters.
Chan Buddhism has become paradigmatic of Buddhist spirituality.
Known in Japan as Zen and in Korea as Son, it is one of the most
strikingly iconoclastic spiritual traditions in the world. This
succinct and lively work clearly expresses the meaning of Chan as
it developed in China more than a thousand years ago and provides
useful insights into the distinctive aims and forms of practice
associated with the tradition, including its emphasis on the unity
of wisdom and practice; the reality of "sudden awakening"; the
importance of meditation; the use of "shock tactics"; the
centrality of the teacher-student relationship; and the celebration
of enlightenment narratives, or koans. Unlike many scholarly
studies, which offer detailed perspectives on historical
development, or guides for personal practice written by
contemporary Buddhist teachers, this volume takes a middle path
between these two approaches, weaving together both history and
insight to convey to the general reader the conditions, energy, and
creativity that characterize Chan. Following a survey of the birth
and development of Chan, its practices and spirituality are fleshed
out through stories and teachings drawn from the lives of four
masters: Bodhidharma, Huineng, Mazu, and Linji. Finally, the
meaning of Chan as a living spiritual tradition is addressed
through a philosophical reading of its practice as the realization
of wisdom, attentive mastery, and moral clarity.
Among Buddhist traditions, Zen has been remarkably successful in
garnering and sustaining interest outside the Buddhist homelands of
Asia, and "zen" is now part of the global cultural lexicon. This
deeply informed book explores the history of this enduring Japanese
tradition-from its beginnings as a form of Buddhist thought and
practice imported from China to its reinvention in medieval Japan
as a force for religious, political, and cultural change to its
role in Japan's embrace of modernity. Going deeper, it also
explores Zen through the experiences and teachings of key
individuals who shaped Zen as a tradition committed to the
embodiment of enlightenment by all. By bringing together Zen's
institutional and personal dimensions, Peter D. Hershock offers
readers a nuanced yet accessible introduction to Zen as well as
distinctive insights into issues that remain relevant today,
including the creative tensions between globalization and
localization, the interplay of politics and religion, and the
possibilities for integrating social transformation with personal
liberation. Including an introduction to the basic teachings and
practices of Buddhism and an account of their spread across Asia,
Public Zen, Personal Zen deftly blends historical detail with the
felt experiences of Zen practitioners grappling with the meaning of
human suffering, personal freedom, and the integration of social
and spiritual progress.
This interdisciplinary collection of essays highlights the
relevance of Buddhist doctrine and practice to issues of
globalization. From various philosophical, religious, historical,
and political perspectives, the authors show that Buddhism arguably
the world s first transnational religion is a rich resource for
navigating today's interconnected world. Buddhist Responses to
Globalization addresses globalization as a contemporary phenomenon,
marked by economic, cultural, and political deterritorialization,
and also proposes concrete strategies for improving global
conditions in light of these facts. Topics include Buddhist
analyses of both capitalist and materialist economies; Buddhist
religious syncretism in highly multicultural areas such as
Honolulu; the changing face of Buddhism through the work of public
intellectuals such as Alice Walker; and Buddhist responses to a
range of issues including reparations and restorative justice,
economic inequality, spirituality and political activism, cultural
homogenization and nihilism, and feminist critique. In short, the
book looks to bring Buddhist ideas and practices into direct and
meaningful, yet critical, engagement with both the facts and
theories of globalization."
In the second edition of this groundbreaking text in non-Western
philosophy, fifteen experts introduce some of the great
philosophical traditions in the world. The dozen essays collected
here unveil exciting, sophisticated philosophical traditions that
are too often neglected in the western world. The contributors
include the leading scholars in their fields, but they write for
students coming to these concepts for the first time. Building on
revisions and updates to the original essays on China, India,
Japan, and the Americas, this new edition also considers three
philosophical traditions for the first time Jewish, Buddhist, and
South Pacific (Maori) philosophy."
Humanity takes up space. Human beings, like many other species,
also transform spaces. What is perhaps uniquely human is the
disposition to qualitatively transform spaces into places that are
charged with distinctive kinds of intergenerational significance.
There is a profound, felt difference between a house as domestic
space and a home as familial place or between the summit of a
mountain one has climbed for the first time and the "same" rock
pinnacle celebrated in ancestral narratives. Contemporary
philosophical uses of the word "place" often pivot on the
distinction between "space" and "place" formalized by
geographer-philosopher Yi-fu Tuan, who suggested that places
incorporate the experiences and aspirations of a people over the
course of their moral and aesthetic engagement with sites and
locations. While spaces afford possibilities for different kinds of
presence—physical, emotional, cognitive, dramatic,
spiritual—places emerge as different ways of being present, fuse
over time, and saturate a locale with distinctively collaborative
patterns of significance. This approach to issues of place,
however, is emblematic of what Edward S. Casey has argued are
convictions about the primacy of absolute space and time that
evolved along with the progressive dominance of the scientific
imagination and modern imaginations of the universal. The recent
reappearance of place in Western philosophy represents a turn away
from abstract and a priori reasoning and back toward phenomenal
experience and the primacy of embodied and emplaced intelligence.
Places are enacted through the sustainably shared practices of
mutually-responsive and mutually-vulnerable agents and are as
numerous in kind as we are divergent in the patterns of values and
intentions. The contributors to this volume draw on resources from
Asian, European, and North American traditions of thought to engage
in intercultural reflection on the significance of place in
philosophy and of the place of philosophy itself in the cultural,
social, economic, and political domains of contemporary life. The
conversation of place that results explores the meaning of
intercultural philosophy, the critical interplay of place and
personal identity, the meaning of appropriate emplacement, the
shared place of politics and religion, and the nature of the
emotionally emplaced body.
Over the past generation, the rise of East Asia and especially
China, has brought about a sea change in the economic and political
world order. At the same time, global warming, environmental
degradation, food and water shortages, population explosion, and
income inequities have created a perfect storm that threatens the
very survival of humanity. It is clear now that the Westphalian
model of individual sovereign states seeking their own
self-interest will not be able to respond effectively to this
win-win or lose-lose crisis. In this volume, a cadre of
distinguished scholars comes together to reflect on Confucianism
and Deweyan pragmatism as possible resources for a new geopolitics
that begins from an ontology of interdependence and recognizes the
irreducibly ecological nature of the human experience at every
level. Both Confucian and Deweyan traditions emphasize the primacy
of experience, the importance of vital relationality, and the moral
roots of good governance. The potential benefits of conceptually
blending the two are many. Indeed, the contemporary Chinese
philosopher Tang Junyi provides us with a cosmological
understanding of the "idea" of Confucianism that, in parallel to
Dewey's "idea" of democracy, can enable us to anticipate the core
values, if not the specific contours, of a "Confucian democracy."
Just as Dewey's "idea" of democracy is his vision of the
flourishing communal life made possible by the contributions of the
uniquely distinguished persons that constitute it, Tang Junyi's
Confucianism is a pragmatic naturalism directed at achieving the
most highly integrated cultural, moral, and spiritual growth for
the individual-in-community. In both, we find an affirmation of
communal harmony as a process "starting here and going there"
through which those involved learn together to do ordinary things
in extraordinary ways. Just such a cosmological understanding of
democracy is one way of describing what will be needed to address
the many predicaments characterizing the environmental, cultural,
socioeconomic, and political dynamics of the twenty-first century.
In Confucianism: Its Roots and Global Significance,
English-language readers get a rare opportunity to read in a single
volume the work of one of Taiwan's most distinguished scholars.
Although Ming-huei Lee has published in English before, the corpus
of his non-Chinese writings is in German. Readers of this volume
will soon discover the hard-mindedness and precision of thinking so
associated with German philosophy as they enter into his
discussions of Confucianism. As readers progress through this book,
they will be constantly reminded that all philosophy should be
truly comparative. . . . "The work is divided into three sections:
Classical Confucianism and Its Modern Reinterpretations,
Neo-Confucianism in China and Korea, and Ethics and Politics. These
sections evince just some of the range of Ming-huei Lee's thinking
as well as his inclusive reach of Confucian philosophy to the whole
of East Asia, especially to Korea. In the Ethics and Politics
section, readers will get a taste for the return to his own
tradition through the lens of Kantian philosophy with his analysis
of Confucius and the virtue ethics debate in Confucian
philosophical circles. Lee's thinking through Mou Zongsan's
interpretation of Confucianism, Zhu Xi and the Huxiang scholars'
debate on ren, and the unfolding of the debates over the 'four
buddings' and 'seven feelings' in Korea by Yi Toegye and Gi Gobong
sets up the subsequent chapters of the book: a reconstruction of
Wang Yangming's philosophy and theories of democracy, and a
critique of Jiang Qing's 'political Confucianism.' His work in this
book adds a sizable appendage to Confucian scholarship. Moreover,
the interrelated ideas and arguments presented in this book are a
special contribution to the Confucian project in English-speaking
countries across the world." - from the Editor's Foreword
In Confucianism: Its Roots and Global Significance, English
language readers get a rare opportunity to read the work in a
single volume of one of Taiwan's most distinguished scholars.
Although Lee Ming-huei has published in English before, the corpus
of his non-Chinese writings is in German. Readers of this volume
will discover the hard-mindedness and precision of thinking
associated with German philosophy as they enter into Lee's
discussions of Confucianism. Progressing through the book, they
will be constantly reminded that all philosophy should be truly
comparative.
In a single generation, the rise of Asia has precipitated a
dramatic sea change in the world's economic and political orders.
This reconfiguration is taking place amidst a host of deepening
global predicaments, including climate change, migration,
increasing inequalities of wealth and opportunity, that cannot be
resolved by purely technical means or by seeking recourse in a
liberalism that has of late proven to be less than effective. The
present work critically explores how the pan-Asian phenomenon of
Confucianism offers alternative values and depths of ethical
commitment that cross national and cultural boundaries to provide a
new response to these challenges. When searching for resources to
respond to the world's problems, we tend to look to those that are
most familiar: Single actors pursuing their own self-interests in
competition or collaboration with other players. As is now widely
appreciated, Confucian culture celebrates the relational values of
deference and interdependence-that is, relationally constituted
persons are understood as embedded in and nurtured by unique,
transactional patterns of relations. This is a concept of person
that contrasts starkly with the discrete, self-determining
individual, an artifact of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
Western European approaches to modernization that has become
closely associated with liberal democracy. Examining the meaning
and value of Confucianism in the twenty-first century, the
contributors-leading scholars from universities around the
world-wrestle with several key questions: What are Confucian values
within the context of the disparate cultures of China, Japan,
Korea, and Vietnam? What is their current significance? What are
the limits and historical failings of Confucianism and how are
these to be critically addressed? How must Confucian culture be
reformed if it is to become relevant as an international resource
for positive change? Their answers vary, but all agree that only a
vital and critical Confucianism will have relevance for an emerging
world cultural order.
Recent history makes clear that the quantum leaps being made in
technology are the leading edge of a groundswell of paradigm shifts
taking place in science, politics, economics, social institutions,
and the expression of cultural values. Indeed it is the
simultaneity and interdependence of these changes occurring in
every dimension of human experience and endeavor that makes the
present so historically distinctive. The essays gathered here give
voice to perspectives on the always improvised relationship between
technology and cultural values from Africa, the Americas, Asia,
Australia, Europe, and the Pacific.
This volume examines the values that have historically guided the
negotiation of identity, both practical and ideal, in Chinese
Confucian culture, considers how these values play into the
conception and exercise of authority, and assesses their
contemporary relevance in a rapidly globalizing world. Included are
essays that explore the rule of ritual in classical Confucian
political discourse; parental authority in early medieval tales;
authority in writings on women; authority in the great and
long-beloved folk novel of China Journey to the West; and the
anti-Confucianism of Lu Xun, the twentieth-century writer and
reformer. By examining authority in cultural context, these essays
shed considerable light on the continuities and contentions
underlying the vibrancy of Chinese culture.
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