Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The Weaving of Mantra
The great Buddhist priest Kûkai (774-835) is credited with the introduction and establishment of tantric -or esoteric -Buddhism in early ninth-century Japan. In Ryûichi Abé examines this important religious figure -neglected in modern academic literatu
Heian Japan, Centers and Peripheries
The first three centuries of the Heian period (794-1086) saw some of its most fertile innovations and epochal achievements in Japanese literature and the arts. This work examines the early Heian from a variety of multidisciplinary perspectives.
Great Fool
Taigu Ryokan (1759-1831) remains one of the most popular figures in Japanese Buddhist history. Despite his religious and artistic sophistication, Ryokan referred to himself as "Great Fool" and refused to place himself within the cultural elite of his age. In contrast to the typical Zen master of his time, who presided over a large monastery, trained students, and produced recondite religious treatises, Ryokan followed a life of mendicancy in the countryside. Instead of delivering sermons, he expressed himself through kanshi (poems composed in classical Chinese) and waka and could typically be found playing with the village children in the course of his daily rounds of begging. Great Fool is ...
The Weaving of Mantra
"The Weaving of Mantra embeds Kukai within the fabric of political and social life in ninth-century Japan and explains how esoteric Buddhism played a critical role in many societal changes in Japan - from the growth of monasteries into major feudal powers to the formation of the native phonetic alphabet, kana. As Abe illustrates, Kukai's writings and the new type of discourse they spawned also marked Japan's transition from the ancient order to the medieval world, replacing Confucianism as the ideology of the state."--BOOK JACKET.
Original Enlightenment and the Transformation of Medieval Japanese Buddhism
Original enlightenment thought (hongaku shiso) dominated Buddhist intellectual circles throughout Japan’s medieval period. Enlightenment, this discourse claims, is neither a goal to be achieved nor a potential to be realized but the true status of all things. Every animate and inanimate object manifests the primordially enlightened Buddha just as it is. Seen in its true aspect, every activity of daily life—eating, sleeping, even one’s deluded thinking—is the Buddha’s conduct. Emerging from within the powerful Tendai School, ideas of original enlightenment were appropriated by a number of Buddhist traditions and influenced nascent theories about the kami (local deities) as well as m...
Just This Is It
Teachings on the practice of things-as-they-are, through commentaries on a legendary Chinese Zen figure. The joy of “suchness”—the ultimate and true nature inherent in all appearance—shines through the teachings attributed to Dongshan Liangjie (807–869), the legendary founder of the Caodong lineage of Chan Buddhism (the predecessor of Soto Zen). Taigen Dan Leighton looks at the teachings attributed to Dongshan—in his Recorded Sayings and in the numerous koans in which he is featured as a character—to reveal the subtlety and depth of the teaching on the nature of reality that Dongshan expresses. Included are an analysis of the well-known teaching poem “Jewel Mirror Samadhi,” and of the understanding of particular and universal expressed in the teaching of the Five Degrees. “The teachings embedded in the stories about Dongshan provide a rich legacy that has been sustained in practice traditions,” says Taigen. “Dongshan’s subtle teachings about engagement with suchness remain vital today for Zen people and are available for all those who wish to find meaning amid the challenges to modern lives.”
Miracles of Book and Body
Miracles of Book and Body is the first book to explore the intersection of two key genres of sacred literature in medieval Japan: sutras, or sacred Buddhist texts, and setsuwa, or "explanatory tales," used in sermons and collected in written compilations. For most of East Asia, Buddhist sutras were written in classical Chinese and inaccessible to many devotees. How, then, did such devotees access these texts? Charlotte D. Eubanks argues that the medieval genre of "explanatory tales" illuminates the link between human body (devotee) and sacred text (sutra). Her highly original approach to understanding Buddhist textuality focuses on the sensual aspects of religious experience and also looks beyond Japan to explore pre-modern book history, practices of preaching, miracles of reading, and the Mahayana Buddhist "cult of the book."
The Analects of Confucius
Compiled by disciples of Confucius in the fourth century B.C.E., The Analects of Confucius is a collection of aphorisms and historical anecdotes embodying the basic values of the Cunfucian tradition: learning, morality, ritual, decorum, and filial piety. Reflecting the model eras of Chinese antiquity, the book is valued for its insights into the successful governance of the empire and its ideal organization of society. -- Jacket flap.
The Theory and Practice of Zen Buddhism
This book brings together an impressive group of scholars to critically engage with a wide-ranging and broad perspective on the historical and contemporary phenomenon of Zen. The structure of the work is organized to reflect the root and branches of Zen, with the root referring to important episodes in Chan/Zen history within the Asian context, and the branches referring to more recent development in the West. In collating what has transpired in the last several decades of Chan/Zen scholarship, the collection recognizes and honors the scholarly accomplishments and influences of Steven Heine, arguably the most important Zen scholar in the past three decades. As it looks back at the intellectu...
Preserving the Dharma
In this beautifully illustrated book, eminent art historian John Rosenfield explores the life and art of the Japanese Buddhist monk Hozan Tankai (1629–1716). Through a close examination of sculptures, paintings, ritual implements, and primary documents, the book demonstrates how the Shingon prelate's artistic activities were central to his important place in the world of late-seventeenth-century Japanese Buddhism. At the same time, the book shows the richness of early modern Japanese Buddhist art, which has often been neglected and undervalued. Tankai was firmly committed to the spiritual disciplines of mountain Buddhism—seclusion, severe asceticism, meditation, and ritual. But in the 16...
