Malcolm David Eckel takes us on a contemporary quest to discover the essential meaning behind the Buddha's many representations. Eckel's bold thesis proposes that the proper understanding of Buddhist philosophy must be thoroughly religious--an understanding revealed in Eckel's new translation of the philospher Bhavaviveka's major work, "The Flame of Reason." Eckel shows that the dimensions of early Indian Buddhism--popular art, conventional piety, and critical philosophy--all work together to express the same religious yearning for the fullness of emptiness that Buddha conveys.

Investigation of the Percept is a short (eight verses and a three page autocommentary) work that focuses on issues of perception and epistemology. Its author, Dignaga, was one of the most influential figures in the Indian Buddhist epistemological tradition, and his ideas had a profound and wide-ranging impact in India, Tibet, and China. The work inspired more than twenty commentaries throughout East Asia and three in Tibet, the most recent in 2014. This book is the first of its kind in Buddhist studies: a comprehensive history of a text and its commentarial tradition. The volume editors translate the root text and commentary, along with Indian and Tibetan commentaries, providing detailed analyses of the commentarial innovations of each author, as well as critically edited versions of all texts and extant Sanskrit fragments of passages. The team-based approach made it possible to study and translate a corpus of treatises in Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Chinese and to employ the methods of critical philology and cross-cultural philosophy to provide readers with a rich collection of studies and translations, along with detailed philosophical analyses that open up the intriguing implications of Dignaga's thought and demonstrate the diversity of commentarial approaches to his text. This rich text has inspired some of the greatest minds in India and Tibet. It explores some of the key issues of Buddhist epistemology: the relationship between minds and their percepts, the problems of idealism and realism, and error and misperception.

There is no consensus about what someone who has violated society's rules must do in order to be fully restored to the community. Although repentance is a prominent idea in religions ranging from Judaism, Christianity, and Islam to Buddhism and Hinduism, its use in civic culture is vague and inconsistent. For example, is remorse the same as repentance? Drawing from a variety of religious and civic perspectives, the renowned contributors to this book_from the fields of theology, philosophy, and the social sciences_offer a broad understanding of repentance and its many applications. The essays question the legitimacy of repentance as a religious concept for the civic culture, exploring the way in which the religious origins of repentance might both illuminate and facilitate our civic usage of the idea. Excellent for theologians, philosophers, moral ethicists, and anyone asking, ' Who deserves a second chance?'