Experimental Buddhism

by John K. Nelson

Author	: John K. Nelson
Publisher	: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages	: 322
Release	: 2013-10-31
Genre	: Religion
ISBN	: 0824838343

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Based on ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, it is one of the first studies to give readers a sense of what is happening on the front lines as a growing number of Buddhist priests try to reboot their roles and traditions to gain greater significance in Japanese society. The book profiles innovative as well as controversial responses to the challenges facing Buddhist priests. From traditional activities (conducting memorial rituals; supporting residences for the elderly and infirm; providing relief for victims of natural disasters) to more creative ones (collaborating in suicide prevention efforts; holding symposia and concerts on temple precincts; speaking out against nuclear power following Japan’s 2011 earthquake; opening cafés, storefront temples, and pubs; even staging fashion shows with priests on the runway), more progressive members of Japan’s Buddhist clergy are trying to navigate a path leading towards renewed relevance in society. An additional challenge is to avoid alienating older patrons while trying to attract younger ones vital to the future of their temples. The work’s central theme of “experimental Buddhism”provides a fresh perspective to understand how priests and other individuals employ Buddhist traditions in selective and pragmatic ways. Using these inventive approaches during a time of crisis and transition for Japanese temple Buddhism, priests and practitioners from all denominations seek solutions that not only can revitalize their religious traditions but also influence society and their fellow citizens in positive ways.

The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Buddhism

by Michael K. Jerryson

Author	: Michael K. Jerryson
Publisher	: Oxford University Press
Total Pages	: 761
Release	: 2017
Genre	: Philosophy
ISBN	: 0199362386

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The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Buddhism offers a comprehensive collection of work by leading scholars in the field. They examine the historical development of Buddhist traditions throughout the world, from traditional settings like India, Japan, and Tibet, to the less well known regions of Latin America, Africa, and Oceania.

Where Buddhism Meets Neuroscience

by The Dalai Lama

Author	: The Dalai Lama
Publisher	: Shambhala Publications
Total Pages	: 217
Release	: 2018-10-30
Genre	: Religion
ISBN	: 1559394781

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Designed as a conversation between the Dalai Lama and Western neuroscientists, this book takes readers on a journey through opposing fields of thought—showing that they may not be so opposing after all Is the mind an ephemeral side effect of the brain’s physical processes? Are there forms of consciousness so subtle that science has not yet identified them? How does consciousness happen? Organized by the Mind and Life Institute, this discussion addresses some of the most troublesome questions that have driven a wedge between Western science and religion. Edited by Zara Houshmand, Robert B. Livingston, and B. Alan Wallace, Where Buddhism Meets Neuroscience is the culmination of meetings between the Dalai Lama and a group of eminent neuroscientists and psychiatrists. The Dalai Lama’s incisive, open-minded approach both challenges and offers inspiration to Western scientists. This book was previously published under the title Consciousness at the Crossroads.

Why Buddhism is True

by Robert Wright

Author	: Robert Wright
Publisher	: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages	: 339
Release	: 2017-08-08
Genre	: Psychology
ISBN	: 1439195471

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From one of America’s most brilliant writers, a New York Times bestselling journey through psychology, philosophy, and lots of meditation to show how Buddhism holds the key to moral clarity and enduring happiness. At the heart of Buddhism is a simple claim: The reason we suffer—and the reason we make other people suffer—is that we don’t see the world clearly. At the heart of Buddhist meditative practice is a radical promise: We can learn to see the world, including ourselves, more clearly and so gain a deep and morally valid happiness. In this “sublime” (The New Yorker), pathbreaking book, Robert Wright shows how taking this promise seriously can change your life—how it can loosen the grip of anxiety, regret, and hatred, and how it can deepen your appreciation of beauty and of other people. He also shows why this transformation works, drawing on the latest in neuroscience and psychology, and armed with an acute understanding of human evolution. This book is the culmination of a personal journey that began with Wright’s landmark book on evolutionary psychology, The Moral Animal, and deepened as he immersed himself in meditative practice and conversed with some of the world’s most skilled meditators. The result is a story that is “provocative, informative and...deeply rewarding” (The New York Times Book Review), and as entertaining as it is illuminating. Written with the wit, clarity, and grace for which Wright is famous, Why Buddhism Is True lays the foundation for a spiritual life in a secular age and shows how, in a time of technological distraction and social division, we can save ourselves from ourselves, both as individuals and as a species.

Beyond the Self

by Matthieu Ricard

Author	: Matthieu Ricard
Publisher	: MIT Press
Total Pages	: 294
Release	: 2018-11-13
Genre	: Science
ISBN	: 0262536145

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A Buddhist monk and esteemed neuroscientist discuss their converging—and diverging—views on the mind and self, consciousness and the unconscious, free will and perception, and more. Buddhism shares with science the task of examining the mind empirically; it has pursued, for two millennia, direct investigation of the mind through penetrating introspection. Neuroscience, on the other hand, relies on third-person knowledge in the form of scientific observation. In this book, Matthieu Ricard, a Buddhist monk trained as a molecular biologist, and Wolf Singer, a distinguished neuroscientist—close friends, continuing an ongoing dialogue—offer their perspectives on the mind, the self, consciousness, the unconscious, free will, epistemology, meditation, and neuroplasticity. Ricard and Singer’s wide-ranging conversation stages an enlightening and engaging encounter between Buddhism’s wealth of experiential findings and neuroscience’s abundance of experimental results. They discuss, among many other things, the difference between rumination and meditation (rumination is the scourge of meditation, but psychotherapy depends on it); the distinction between pure awareness and its contents; the Buddhist idea (or lack of one) of the unconscious and neuroscience’s precise criteria for conscious and unconscious processes; and the commonalities between cognitive behavioral therapy and meditation. Their views diverge (Ricard asserts that the third-person approach will never encounter consciousness as a primary experience) and converge (Singer points out that the neuroscientific understanding of perception as reconstruction is very like the Buddhist all-discriminating wisdom) but both keep their vision trained on understanding fundamental aspects of human life.

The Mind Experiment

by Bavo Lievens

Author	: Bavo Lievens
Publisher	:
Total Pages	: 537
Release	: 2020-04-20
Genre	:
ISBN	:

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======PUBLISHER DESCRIPTION====== Buddhism that matters. A comprehensive, no-nonsense practical guide to the enlightenment teachings, including many first-time translations from the Buddhist canon, as well as useful information not readily found elsewhere-- * a symbolic, deeply relevant biography of the Buddha * a comprehensive cosmology, including the various heavens and their associate mind-states * a full guide to the most positive methods of meditation, plus more. =======FROM THE BACK COVER======= THE MIND EXPERIMENT approaches Buddhism unlike any other book, not as a foreign belief system or an academic study to the specialty of 'Buddhology' but as an exploration of the enlightenment teachings that answers the spiritual needs of our time--a universal and secular spirituality, without beliefs or dogmas. It contains many first-time translations directly from the Buddhist canon, linking the enlightenment teachings of Buddhism with the main body of Western wisdom, --from Greek philosophy to Christian mysticism, modern science to American transcendentalism. =======ABOUT THE AUTHOR======= BAVO LIEVENS worked for the Belgian Foreign Service in Beijing, Hong Kong and Singapore, for 14 years, then moved to the US where he taught Buddhist Philosophy and Chinese Classics at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, for 14 years. He studied privately under Chinese Zen master Nan Huai-chin, who advised him in writing this book. =================================== For more information, please visit the book website at WWW.THEMINDEXPERIMENT.COM for an author autobiography, as well as testimonials from early manuscripts of the book. ===================================

Dilemmas of Adulthood

by Nancy R. Rosenberger

Author	: Nancy R. Rosenberger
Publisher	: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages	: 234
Release	: 2013-10-31
Genre	: Social Science
ISBN	: 0824839021

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In Dilemmas of Adulthood, Nancy Rosenberger investigates the nature of long-term resistance in a longitudinal study of more than fifty Japanese women over two decades. Between 25 and 35 years of age when first interviewed in 1993, the women represent a generation straddling the stable roles of post-war modernity and the risky but exciting possibilities of late modernity. By exploring the challenges they pose to cultural codes, Rosenberger builds a conceptual framework of long-term resistance that undergirds the struggles and successes of modern Japanese women. Her findings resonate with broader anthropological questions about how change happens in our global-local era and suggests a useful model with which to analyze ordinary lives in the late modern world. Rosenberger’s analysis establishes long-term resistance as a vital type of social change in late modernity where the sway of media, global ideas, and friends vies strongly with the influence of family, school, and work. Women are at the nexus of these contradictions, dissatisfied with post-war normative roles in family, work, and leisure and yet—in Japan as elsewhere—committed to a search for self that shifts uneasily between self-actualization and selfishness. The women’s rich narratives and conversations recount their ambivalent defiance of social norms and attempts to live diverse lives as acceptable adults. In an epilogue, their experiences are framed by the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, which is already shaping the future of their long-term resistance. Drawing on such theorists as Ortner, Ueno, the Comaroffs, Melucci, and Bourdieu, Rosenberger posits that long-term resistance is a process of tense, irregular, but insistent change that is characteristic of our era, hammered out in the in-between of local and global, past and future, the old virtues of womanhood and the new virtues of self-actualization. Her book is essential for anyone wishing to understand how Japanese women have maneuvered their lives in the economic decline and pushed for individuation in the 1990s and 2000s.

Japanese Temple Buddhism

by Stephen Covell

Author	: Stephen Covell
Publisher	: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages	: 274
Release	: 2005-09-30
Genre	: Religion
ISBN	: 0824829670

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There have been many studies that focus on aspects of the history of Japanese Buddhism. Until now, none have addressed important questions of organization and practice in contemporary Buddhism, questions such as how Japanese Buddhism came to be seen as a religion of funeral practices; how Buddhist institutions envision the role of the laity; and how a married clergy has affected life at temples and the image of priests. This volume is the first to address fully contemporary Buddhist life and institutions—topics often overlooked in the conflict between the rhetoric of renunciation and the practices of clerical marriage and householding that characterize much of Buddhism in today’s Japan. Informed by years of field research and his own experiences training to be a Tendai priest, Stephen Covell skillfully refutes this "corruption paradigm" while revealing the many (often contradictory) facets of contemporary institutional Buddhism, or as Covell terms it, Temple Buddhism. Covell significantly broadens the scope of inquiry to include how Buddhism is approached by both laity and clerics when he takes into account temple families, community involvement, and the commodification of practice. He considers law and tax issues, temple strikes, and the politics of temple boards of directors to shed light on how temples are run and viewed by their inhabitants, supporters, and society in general. In doing so he uncovers the economic realities that shape ritual practices and shows how mundane factors such as taxes influence the debate over temple Buddhism’s role in contemporary Japanese society. In addition, through interviews and analyses of sectarian literature and recent scholarship on gender and Buddhism, he provides a detailed look at priests’ wives, who have become indispensable in the management of temple affairs.

Sojiji

by Joshua A. Irizarry

Author	: Joshua A. Irizarry
Publisher	: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages	: 311
Release	: 2022-06-13
Genre	: History
ISBN	: 0472055364

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Introduction: Sōjiji, the Forest for a Thousand Years -- Chapter 1. The History of Sōjiji -- Chapter 2. The Training of a Sōtō Zen Novice -- Chapter 3. Bearing the Mantle of Priesthood -- Chapter 4. Struggling for Enlightenment (While Keeping Your Day Job) -- Chapter 5. Performing Compassion Through Goeika Music -- Chapter 6. Making Ancestors Through Memorial Rituals -- Conclusion: For a Thousand Years -- Epilogue: In Perpetuity -- Afterward: Writing Sōjiji -- Glossary -- Bibliography -- Notes -- Index.