Books in the Buddhism and Modernity series

Insight meditation, which claims to offer practitioners a chance to escape all suffering by perceiving the true nature of reality, is one of the most popular forms of meditation today. Offering a narrative of the life and legacy of one of modern Buddhism's most important figures, this book provides an account of the development of mass meditation.

The credit for creating Buddhism goes to the Buddha. But who was this Buddha, and how did he become the Buddha we know and love today? This book follows the twists and turns of Eastern and Western notions of the Buddha, leading finally to his triumph as the founder of a world religion.

Offers a view of how Buddhism was understood in the early years of the nineteenth century. This work also offers information and insight into the theory and practice of the religion.

Anagarika Dharmapala is one of the most galvanizing figures in Sri Lanka's turbulent history. Following Dharmapala on his travels between East Asia, South Asia, Europe, and North America, the author traces his project of creating a unified Buddhist world, recovering the place of the Buddha's Enlightenment, and imitating the Buddha's life course.

In 1941, philosopher and poet Gendun Chopel (1903-51) sent a large manuscript by ship, train, and yak across mountains and deserts to his homeland in the northeastern corner of Tibet. He would follow it five years later, returning to his native land after twelve years in India and Sri Lanka.

Examines the complex relationship between transnational religion and politics through the lens of one cosmopolitan community in Siberia: Buryats, who live in a semiautonomous republic within Russia with a large Buddhist population. This book illustrates how this community employed Buddhism to adapt to key moments of political change.

Gendun Chopel is considered the most important Tibetan intellectual of the twentieth century. This title presents the English translation of the work, "Adornment for Nagarjuna's Thought", accompanied by an essay on Gendun Chopel's life liberally interspersed with passages from his writings.

A comprehensive collection of poems in both the original Tibetan and in English translation. It composes hymns to the Buddha, pithy instructions for the practice of the dharma, stirring tributes to the Tibetan warrior-kings, cynical reflections on the ways of the world, and laments of a wanderer, forgotten in a foreign land.

For millions of people around the world, Tibet is a domain of undisturbed tradition, the Dalai Lama a spiritual guide. This book addresses the question of who has the right to represent Tibet in museums and beyond.

In the years after World War II, Westerners and Japanese alike elevated Zen to the quintessence of spirituality in Japan. Pursuing the sources of Zen as a Japanese ideal, this title uncovers the role of two cultural touchstones: Eugen Herrigel's "Zen in the Art of Archery" and the Ryoanji dry-landscape rock garden.

Despite popular images of priests seeking enlightenment in snow-covered mountain temples, the central concern of Japanese Buddhism is death. This title investigates what changing burial forms reveal about the ways temple Buddhism is perceived and propagated in contemporary Japan.

Both practitioners and admirers of Buddhism have proclaimed its compatibility with science. This book explores how and why these two seemingly disparate modes of understanding the inner and outer universe have been so persistently linked.

The Passion Book is the most famous work of erotica in the vast literature of Tibetan Buddhism, written by the legendary scholar and poet Gendun Chopel (19031951).