With the emergence of literacy as part of human cultural evolution, new kinds of relations and activities formed that have created structures of participation in larger and more distant organizations, relying on accumulating knowledge and mediated through genre-shaped texts. It is for these activity contexts that individuals must produce texts, mobilizing the resources of language, and it is within these contexts that the texts will have their effect.

This second, companion volume to A Rhetoric of Literate Action supplies the theoretical understanding of what written language is and does which underlies that volume’s practical advice. But far from being a mere appendix, this survey of psycho-social theories of media and culture serves well as a compelling introduction to the theory of language in general and its place in society.

The first four chapters of this volume provide a framework for identifying and understanding the situations writing comes out of and is directed toward. The next four chapters then consider how a text works to transform a situation and achieve the writer’s motives as the text begins to take form. The final four chapters provide more specific advice of the work to be accomplished in bringing the text to final form and how to manage the work and one’s own emotions and energies so as to accomplish the work most effectively. The advice of this book is for the experienced writer with a substantial repertoire of skills, who now would find it useful to think in more fundamental strategic terms about what they want their texts to accomplish, what form the texts might take, how to develop specific contents, and how to arrange the work of writing.

For a deep exploration of the theoretical understanding of written language undergirding this book, see its companion volume, A Theory of Literate Action.

The report includes chapters for each continent, habitat type, and social system, analyzing the impacts on each in depth, ending with a chapter on sustainable development.

What do we expect when we say something to someone, and what do they expect when they hear it? When is a conversation successful? The book considers a wide set of two-person conversations, and a bit of game theory, to show how conversational statements and their interpretations are governed by beliefs.

The book describes the theoretical framework and empirical measurements of misunderstandings—written by an economist, but in simple words and using interdisciplinary concepts.

For a brief synopsis of the book’s chapters, see the introduction on Lion’s Roar.

The production of cheap talk relies everywhere on the depoliticisation of communication. Cheap talk displaces a shared traversal of difference with a technocratic exchange of messages. […] This is a thoroughly sterile ecology of communication: minds making speech to transfer information to other minds. […] It is not [stuttering] but fluency that ensnares life with a type of deathly repetition.

This book explains how information capitalism commodifies and dehumanizes speech through the contrasting examples of speech pathology and television punditry. Written before the explosion in generative AI, the book is helpful for explaining the market logics underlying LLMs and for understanding what such “cheap talk” does to people and society.

There are political and existential questions at stake here that are difficult even to articulate within a surge of cheap talk: What might a dysfluent event become if not immediately managed? How might we relate differently? What might we become?

Texts are more amenable to alteration than people.

[Sassa Seisetsu was] keen to counter the image—perhaps the result of victory in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904—of the Japanese as a race of battle-hungry samurai. The true Japanese is a lover of beauty, a person of gentility and feeling—in other words, a Heian courtier. The Tale of Genji, as the “epitome of this culture,” thus had important tasks to perform: to make “every citizen” aware of his or her “true national character” and to provide proof of a certain cultural superiority. The Tale of Genji, in short, ought to be one of the prime movers in the Meiji project of forging a new national identity:

[But] the Shinshaku project was never completed; nor would it have been a readable, modern Genji even if it had been. […] In the end, it was Yosano Akiko—self–taught, a disciple of no one, and with no ideological axe to grind—who actually achieved what the scholars of ‘National Literature’ had been aiming to do.

It is three in the morning and another day has begun at the Korean Buddhist monastery of Songwang-sa…

Based on years of engagement with Korean Buddhist history as well as observation of this particular monastery, this monograph describes, in intimate and honest detail, what it is like to be a monk in Korea.

It is difficult to overestimate the role that The Life of Milarepa has played in shaping the way Buddhism developed in Tibet and later came to be understood in the West. The present version, composed by Tsangnyön Heruka in the late fifteenth century, almost four hundred years after Milarepa, draws upon these early works. But the resulting narrative eclipsed them all, serving as the canonical record of Milarepa’s life ever since. It is now famous for its themes of sin and redemption, faith and devotion to the guru, perseverance in the face of hardship, dedication to meditative mastery, and the possibility of liberation in a single life.

An alternate English translation by Lobsang Lhalungpa (1982) can be found here.

The Konjaku monogatari shu (今昔物語集) is a Japanese anthology dating from the early twelfth century. The original work contains more than one thousand systematically arranged tales from India, China, and Japan. It is the most important example of a genre of collections of brief tales which, because of their informality and unpretentious style, were neglected by Japanese critics until recent years but which are now acknowledged to be among the most significant prose literature of premodern Japan.

What we mean by maps that have ‘gone wrong’ is maps with big, stinking, awful map blunders, like a country that’s gone missing, or a fictional mountain range, or a mis-drawn border that crosses all sorts of boundaries – the sort of mistakes that could lead to the unfortunate map-user getting hopelessly lost. We love them because they provoke the question: What on earth happened here? And the answer is most often a fascinating story.

Where Japanese Zen is given to aesthetic considerations in multitudinous forms, Korean Zen is earthy, natural and unpretentious.

This book presents the history of Korean Zen from the “insider” perspective of an American ordained in the tradition.

Wonhyo examined the broad range of Mahāyāna doctrines in a systematic, rational, thoroughgoing, and insightful manner. In addition to the breadth of his scholarly mastery of the Mahāyāna system, he possessed excellent skills in literary Chinese, and the combination of these talents allowed his writings to bring a profound influence on the development of Buddhism in East Asia.

This volume brings together key writings and prefaces of Wonhyo that present his integrative approach to Mahāyāna Buddhism—systematising multiple doctrinal strands into a unified framework and emphasising the harmonisation of apparent conflicts.

The crown prince asked:
“Where do you come from?
What are you looking for?”
The brahmin said:
“I come from Dunnivittha,
And I am begging for two children.”

A translation of the Worin Cheongang Jigok by Sejon the Great, the fourth monarch of the Joseon. The work celebrates the life of Shakyamuni Buddha and is noted for being one of the first works printed in vernacular Korean.

The significance of this book within the history of research lies in its comparatively rigorous and objective interpretation of the entire history of Korean Buddhism, from the Three Kingdoms period to modern times.

The English translation of Joseon Bulgyosa-go, a book on Korean Buddhist history by Gim Yeongsu. This work delves into the development, struggles, and societal impact of Buddhism in Korea, exploring its relationship with politics, culture, and the broader historical context.

Buddhist temples were meant to be halls of truth, places where the Buddha’s teachings are imparted and practiced and centers where those whose lives are sustained by that truth can gather. But in the Edo period, temples came to be supported not by individual believers but by the parish, or danka, system. Temples became places where memorial services for parishioners’ ancestors were held…

This short and easy-to-read cultural history pays especial attention to the wider, non-Buddhist forces and trends which shaped the history of Buddhism in Japan.

We explore how Japanese Buddhists of varying contexts drew upon Buddhist ideas and practices to make sense of their lives, to solve problems, and to create a meaningful world – a cosmos – out of chaos.

This academic overview of Japanese Buddhist history serves as an excellent launching pad for further study as it makes passing reference to a large number of historical events and figures showing how they fit into the larger evolution of Buddhist thought in Japan.

No one enters Burmese traffic with any assumptions about fundamental rights. Pedestrians, certainly, enjoy no “right of way.” No one, by the same token, is ever excluded from the game as long as they remain in motion. […] If you get ahead, you were right to try. If you don’t, you were right to yield. What’s to argue?

When it comes to hierarchies, Southeast Asia can be frustratingly (even scandalously) foreign for those of us raised in egalitarian, Western democracies. This is a book which explains clearly and sympathetically, but not uncritically, the logic behind Burma’s hierarchical arrangements with a close focus on the unique role of monks and gender.

Their tools to create their own Buddhism are quite limited. And yet, the tale is one of success, as these children often find ways to affirm their own religious identities in contradistinction to their parents. Paradoxically, they do this by identifying their parents as the primary source for their encounter with Buddhism—theirs is a familial lineage.

Convert (typically White) American Buddhists largely hold to (racialized) narratives that denigrate “heritage” Buddhists-by-birth. But where does this leave their children?

In this highly theoretical book of post-colonial critique, Drew Baker (himself a second-generation Buddhist American) analyzes how scholars have missed this group of American Buddhists and then tells us about their experience of growing up Buddhish in America.

This book is recommended for parents in the West who are comfortable with jargon and are into Buddhism, but who aren’t sold on “labels.”

The parents are more comfortable with the ambiguity because they chose it, while their children are overtly driven and haunted by the question “well, what am I?”

Rest the mind (of discrimination) and walk the path, so that the ancient style does not collapse, and then your own matter (of original endowment) will be clear and bright. The flowering mountains and spring begins invariably. I laughed once.

This book provides historical background on Kanhua Chan (hwadu practice) in Korea, explains key terms, and contains an annotated translation of the “Seon Dialogues” text, which outlines the practices of various Seon masters.

Nakatsukasa did not do the pilgrimage just once but kept going around the island on a journey lasting some fifty-six years until his death in 1922. In this time he completed 280 pilgrimage circuits of Shikoku and left the island just twice.

Many Japanese Buddhists become “addicted” to the beautiful life of the pilgrimage circuit.

See also the NBN interview about the book.

Together with the Silla dynasty scholiast Wonhyo (617-686), Chinul is one of the two most important figures produced by Korean Buddhism. Chinul was the inheritor of a mature tradition already rich after seven hundred years of symbiotic development with its Chinese counterpart.

This pivotal work in Korean Buddhist Studies provides an extensive introduction to Chinul’s life and thought alongside the complete translations of all his surviving writings.

The harmony between the master and the disciple was as fortunate as a mustard seed falling from the sky hitting the point of a needle.

This work offers English readers a threefold insight into Korean Buddhist hagiography by presenting three major compilations of biographies of eminent monks. The translations and annotations were based on an annotated Korean manuscript, with reference to the Hanmun originals held at the Archives of Buddhist Culture at Dongguk University.

Because sustainability is a cross-disciplinary field of study, producing this text has required bringing together over twenty experts from a variety of fields….

By covering a wide range of topics with a uniformity of style, and by including glossaries, review questions, case studies, and links to further resources, the text has sufficient range to perform as the core resource for a semester course. Students who cover the material in the book will be conversant in the language and concepts of sustainability, and will be equipped for further study in sustainable planning, policy, economics, climate, ecology, infrastructure, and more.

Notwithstanding the long history of Buddhism in the peninsula, it was far from certain at the dawn of the twentieth century that the tradition would be able to secure a viable and legitimate place in modern Korean society. This book argues that a key factor in the effort to revitalize the religion was the concerted and sustained attempt by a wide variety of Buddhist organizations and individuals to systematically propagate (p’ogyo 布敎) Buddhism.

The way of the Vajrayāna is the Way of Power that leads to the mastery of good and evil. It is also the Way of Transformation, whereby inward and outward circumstances are transmuted into weapons by the power of mind.

Originally published in 1970, John Blofeld’s work explains the techniques, purpose, and underlying theory of Tantric forms of meditation commonly practiced in Vajrayana Buddhism. In this revised edition, Sanskrit terms have been added, and new material has been incorporated from various sources, along with explanatory footnotes and editorial comments.

An introduction to Tibetan Buddhism written specifically for people with little or no previous exposure to the tradition.

A thorough introductory textbook covering the history, practice, beliefs, and schools of Buddhism in Tibet.

I especially appreciate the book’s organization: the chapters are arranged as the tradition often explains itself and each chapter is further subdivided into short sections, making it easy to pick and choose from or to reference later. Each chapter ends with reflection questions and pointers to additional reading, making this a perfect teaching resource.

What more protection do I need? What else could serve as my protection?

A journalist buys a bulletproof vest and travels to war zones in the Middle East to report. He learns what a bulletproof vest can and cannot do for you.

Air conditioning relieves us of having to think about the air, so that we can think about other things.

How climate control created and sustains the dualistic thinking underlying climate change and its inequities.

The old court eventually fell to a new military government which brought about the Kamakura period (1192–1333). The increasing discord and chaos of the times led to disillusionment and a call for the revival of faith. It was during these troubled time that Hōnen (1133–1212), Shinran (1173–1262), Eisai (1141–1215), Dōgen (1200–1253), Nichiren (1222–1282), and other Buddhist leaders appeared and expounded their teachings of salvation for all.

A concise history of Buddhism in Japan, tracing its development from its arrival to the present day. The work also explores the relationship between Japanese daily life and Buddhist rituals. It concludes with a hopeful message of fostering world peace through an understanding of oneness.

The following is an attempt to provide the reader, particularly those of you who come to this in a distant and certainly different era, with plain facts about American life at the beginning of the twenty-first century…

A memoir arranged, amusingly, in alphabetical order.

Over the course of the twentieth century, America developed a right that fought the government and a left that hobbled it. […] new institutions can make new kinds of thinking possible.

Thoughtful state intervention is critical for both the invention of new technologies and for scaling them up to solve pressing, societal issues. This idea forms the core of the authors’ proposed “supply-side progressivism”: “a liberalism that builds.”

1. Huangbo Xiyun’s Essentials of the Transmission of Mind
2. Myōan Eisai’s A Treatise on Letting Zen Flourish to Protect the State
3. Eihei Dōgen’s Universal Recommendation for True Zazen
4. Keizan Jōkin’s Advice on the Practice of Zazen

Together, they offer a rich introduction to the texts of Zen practice and philosophy.

We cannot describe it completely. We call the state “ineffable,” or “dharma,” or “truth,” or “reality.” But even these words are inadequate to describe the simple and original state that we return to in Zazen.

A concise introduction to zazen, the central practice of the Sōtō Zen school, according to the teachings of Gudo Nishijima Roshi.

‘Dying was beautiful, peaceful, and graceful. I have been dead. I know the truth. And I am not scared.’

Although this book is based on my forty-five years of scientific research into NDEs, it was not written specifically for other scientists. And although I hope people who have had NDEs will feel that I have done justice to their experiences, I have not written this book for them. Rather, I’ve written this book for the rest of us, for those who are curious about the incredible scope of the human mind and about the deeper questions about life and death.

Science can tell us what experiencers say about what happens after death, and about the consistency of their reports across different individuals and different cultures. But science at this point usually can’t tell us anything about the accuracy of what they say. I say “usually” because in some cases, we can investigate what experiencers say if what they say is related to things we can observe…

‘You were wearing a striped tie with a red stain on it,’ she repeated, glaring at me. She then went on to repeat the conversation I’d had [while she was dead]…

Among the experiencers I’ve studied, 90 percent said their attitudes and beliefs changed as a result of their NDEs, and…

It is not unusual for family and friends to find that their attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors change as a result of intimate exposure to experiencers. And the same is true, I found, for near-death researchers.

I am just ‘who am.’ This ‘who am’ is never grasped as an object. To see this ‘who am’ without grasping or without using concepts is manifesting prajna (wisdom), just being present with ‘who am.’

This introduction to zazen is a collection of writings that includes reflections, instructions, a brief history of the Sōtō school, and translations of short foundational texts on the practice.

The tip of a pencil with a bit of graphite can hold within its pointed space all the potential words you can think of! I can produce a whole book with that pencil point! […] Right now I am just hyper-visualizing the tip, learning how to look; concentrated world of language on that tip.

Call it hyper-vision. Call it unrealistic. I follow the gypsy air.

All our two times two and definitions of photosynthesis, our political understanding and complaining cannot free us from the boundary of a dusty earth and so much brown of it.

Forget what the experts say about Autism; their knowledge is anything but solid. Autism flows: it doesn’t settle; it doesn’t shape.

the aim of the present book, which is based on the workshop “Wandering Religious Poets” held at Stockholm University in 2017, is to highlight some aspects of the religious poet for whom wandering is a lifestyle, as well as the religious poetry which has wandering as its subject – in a variety of religious traditions, societies and different periods of time. Besides Indian, Tibetan, and Japanese, some Indo-European comparative material is included, but we have not been able to cover certain neighbouring areas, like China, where the phenomenon of wandering poets can be found as well.

The charismatic and idiosyncratic Ajaan Man and his widely revered forest-dwelling disciples remained on the rim of the establishment for much of their lives — yet constituted the mystical core of orthodoxy

This book provides an analysis of the political and historical context in which the modern Thai Forest Tradition arose.

I intend that this offering will, however imperfect, stand as a memorial to the many Cambodian Buddhist monks and laypeople, both named and unknown, who lost their lives or had their futures traumatically altered by the tragedy that overwhelmed their country in the 1970s.

This report offers guidance about adopting subjective well-being measures in official government surveys to inform social and economic policies and considers whether research has advanced to a point which warrants the federal government collecting data that allow aspects of the population’s subjective well-being to be tracked and associated with changing conditions.

Theravāda Buddhism, once it had anchored itself in Cambodian soil, possessed a remarkable facility for assimilation and accretion.

An introductory overview of the history of Buddhism in Cambodia, from the earliest archeological evidence in 5th c. Funan to its tentative reemergence in the 1980s and ’90s.

Purity of mind is the greatest common denominator of all religions. Love, which alone is the means for the unity of mankind, must be supreme, and it cannot be so unless the mind is transcendentally pure.

This book contains the transcripts of three lectures given in 1951 to a class of Westerners in Burma who were looking to better understand the local religion.

These were attempts in the first instance not to achieve liberation, but to revive the forest-dwelling way of life and re-establish hermitages, whence liberation could be sought. It is relatively recent history…

The biographies of several pioneering recluses.

Our times are characterized by the sheer intensity and spread of bhakti religion; and while it starts among the urban poor, it gets accepted by others as a reaction to the fundamentalism and the puritan ethics of Protestant Buddhism.

An analysis of the parallel threads of modern Sri Lankan Buddhism: the “rational,” European-inflected forms of the educated, upper classes and the Hindu-inflected “devotional” forms of the masses.

While much has continued to change in Sri Lanka in the decades since their field work, the book remains a solid introduction to the modern history of Buddhism in Ceylon.

Later published by the Buddhist Publication Society as The Requisites of Enlightenment.

It is the human need to express devotion to and adoration of the Buddha and his teaching that manifests itself in the act of building pagodas and in making ceremonial offerings before shrines.

This illustrated book is a journey through Burma’s legendary and renowned pagodas and other famous places, sharing the myths and stories tied to each site—legends that are deeply ingrained in the hearts and minds of every Burmese.

Ledi Sayadaw was simultaneously a great teacher to his monks and lay disciples, a great Dhamma preacher to large segments of the Burmese population, a founder and organizer of many Buddhist lay organizations, a famous teacher and popularizer of meditation practice, especially Ānāpāna and Vipassanā, and a classical scholar-monk and author of classical work.

Born in 1846, known for his deep meditation practice and devotion to the Abhidhamma, Ledi Sayadaw played a pivotal role in the revival of Theravāda Buddhism in Burma and beyond.

The political problem to which the social contract must be able to provide a solution is the following: to imagine a form of association that protects the person, the goods, and the privacy of each partner, and promotes conviviality and justice conceived as the sharing of nourishment.

A systems perspective teaches one to focus not only on the various components of the system but also on their interconnections and interactions. Demography, production processes, government, economy, and environment cannot be seen in isolation from one another. There are feedback loops that are as important for studying social structure and change as are the various components themselves.

An introduction to macrosociology and how modern societies operate.

I am like a tree in a forest, full of leaves, blossoms and fruit. Birds come to eat and nest, and animals seek rest in its shade. Yet the tree does not know itself. It follows its own nature. It is as it is.

This enriching collection features Ajahn Chah’s most well-known similes, divided into two parts. Part I includes the 75 similes from the first volume of the bilingual edition of A Tree in a Forest, while Part II contains the 108 similes from the second volume.

poverty and hunger, racism and sexism, drug use and violence, and climate change, to name just a few: Why do these problems exist? What are their effects? What can be done about them?

Now over a decade old and mostly from the U.S. perspective, the text is still an adequate introduction to various problems in modern society and the ways that sociologists tend to think about them.

Our cultivation of the mind is aimed both at firmly establishing calm and at developing the arising of true wisdom and insight. We depend on the practice as laid down by the Lord Buddha which I have been explaining in stages.

In this brief work, Somdet Phra Nyanasaṁvara illuminates the principles of mindfulness within the larger framework of mental cultivation. Each section is taken from twenty-two talks given between August and October 1961 to both monastics and laypeople, in which the venerable offers practical instruction for cultivating clarity, calm, and insight.

The need of the Romans for Chinese silk urged the extension of trade through Central Asia, while at the same time Buddhism spread, first from India northwards, picking up classical elements, and then gradually via Central Asia and China to Japan.

This book explains how artistic patterns from ancient Greece found their way into Japanese designs.

These tales provide us with a glimpse of the ways that cosmologies do not materialize fully formed but are cumulatively built over time, subject to continual reshaping in different contexts. In this book I argue that preta narratives do not merely illustrate a changing cosmological system after the fact but played a crucial role in the process of the formation of that system

It is a difficult task to compile the Buddha’s teachings, especially on the premise that one is presenting the true or genuine teachings, even if one cites passages from the Pali Canon which are considered the words of the Buddha.

The authoritative book of Thai Buddhist doctrine.

The goal of the hungry ghost stories in the Avadānaśataka is pithily summarized at the end of nearly every story: “Work hard to rid yourself of meanness!”

Early Buddhist literature depicts the animal rebirth as a most “unfortunate destiny” (durgati), won through negative karma and characterized by violence, fear, suffering, and a lack of wisdom, moral agency, or spiritual potential. … major animal characters within the life-story of the Buddha [however] can be seen as “doubles” of the Buddha…

For an interview with the author about this book, see The New Books Network Episode.

This text is bilingual, being in both English and Indonesian.

Cetasika means literally: ‘belonging to the mind.’ There are fifty two different cetasikas which each have their own characteristic and function.

The various objects of mind according to the traditional Theravādan exegesis.

In this book, both Pāli originals and English translations are provided so it’s appropriate for those who want to learn Pāli or just read the translations. A full Pāli-English Glossary, detailed Endnotes, and other indices will help the interested reader to learn more about the elder bhikkhunis, their circumstances, and their efforts.

It was what most Germans wanted—or, under pressure, came to want. They wanted it; they got it; and they liked it.
I came back home a little afraid for my own country: afraid of what it might want, and get…

An American journalist befriends ten Nazis after World War 2 in order to understand what drove so many Germans to The Party.

Whenever I say “mental content” in English, the Arabic word is maʿnā, and whenever I say “accurate,” “accuracy,” or “accurately” in English, the Arabic word is ḥaqīqah.

An exploration of medieval, Arabic philosophy of language and in particular their attempts to explain the “miracle” of poetry.

Anchored in sociological and political theory, this comprehensive volume provides hard data and empirical research that traces the power and influence of the fossil fuel industry through economics, politics, media, and higher education. Contributors demonstrate how corporations secure popular consent, and coopt, disorganize, or marginalize dissenting perspectives to position the fossil fuel industry as a national public good.

If we were to isolate and analyze each verse in the Dhammapada by itself, we would miss a great deal, for each verse draws much meaning from a larger context.

After intensive logging in the 17th century nearly wiped out Akita Prefecture’s native forests, the government undertook various programs in the 18th and 19th centuries to encourage trees be replanted and preserved for us future generations.

Fundamental geographic concepts and regions are presented in concise chapters that provide a foundational framework for understanding development patterns around the world. Essential topics include location, the environment, and global economic dynamics. The book focuses on the primary issues that have created our societal structures within a framework for global understanding.

I feel like I’ve fallen off the map yet am, oddly, in the center of the universe…

A journalist writes humorously about traveling the world and what different cultures seem to believe about “the good life.”

If we agree that “illusion” is a negative and the prefix “dis-” a kind of minus sign, then logically and by mathematical analogy “disillusion” and “disillusionment” must be positives, no? And yet in common parlance they’re anything but.

Wood duck
I feel for you
You never had hands to stroke
Your own wings

A collection of poems originally written in Braille, ASL, and Protactile by a deafblind poet.

Mutually they devour each other’s flesh,
Locked in an endless chain of combat…

A series of poems, quotes, and stories encouraging vegetarianism and a compassionate stance towards animals.

at the farthest reach
of my watering
hose stream
a cabbage white
flutters a while

… an important technical contribution to English-language poetry written in the Japanese style in Canada.

There is no difference in the legibility of serif and sans-serif typefaces either when reading from paper or when reading from screens.

Designers should feel free to use either a serif or a sans-serif font, “even if legibility is a key criterion in their choice.”

Inventions do not simply emerge in a particular setting and spread gradually and uniformly across the globe. The common notion of one-way “technology transfer” only rarely describes accurately the relation between various nations or continents. Whereas people in one region may adopt innovations willingly, inhabitants in other regions may reject them outright. History teaches us that technologies can be later discarded. As I will show in several chapters, new technological solutions and long-established technologies are often employed in synergy.

A “snapshot” history of modern technology from the perspective of everyday people in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Idea systems could be drawn from or embedded in the worlds of art, sciences, politics, or religion. The logics that tie an idea system’s components together can be as diverse as the ways that humans can think. Structurally speaking, the following set of mechanisms are fundamental for an idea system to operate: coherence mechanisms, defense mechanisms, adaptive mechanisms, and communicative-cognitive mechanisms.

A scholarly analysis of how ideologies develop and operate with a particular emphasis on their social function. Three case studies are analyzed in depth: the European witch hunts of the early modern period, Mao’s Communist Revolution in 20th-century China, and Bush’s “War on Terror” in the 21st-century United States. Commonalities are discussed and theorized along with some thoughts on what “fair-minded” people might do with this understanding to keep a level head in turbulent times.

For an interview with the author about the book, see the New Books Network episode.

The Abhidhamma is not for those timid souls who are not content that a philosophical thought should not actually contradict Buddhist tradition, but demand that it must be expressly, even literally, supported by canonical or commentarial authority. Such an attitude is contrary to the letter and the spirit of the BuddhaDhamma.

In this collection of essays, Venerable Nyanaponika Thera makes the complex principles and methods of the Abhidhamma accessible, focusing on Dhammasangani. He delves into the nature of consciousness, time, and the psychology of spiritual development. The book highlights the ongoing relevance of Buddhist thought for contemporary philosophical and psychological inquiry.

No matter how many stories one reads in which the bodhisattva agrees to give his body away, one still holds one’s breath every time the momentous decision is made. One still feels a shudder run up the spine whenever the bodhisattva cuts open his flesh, and the text dwells almost lovingly on the pain and agony endured. It is only the story that engages us to such an extent…

The following lines intend to sketch dogs’ relation to humans and their fellow quadrupeds and birds from the ancient Indian sources, as was done exhaustively for Greek and Latin literature long ago.

We want friendly, helpful software. Why wouldn’t we? Yet as we cede to software more of the toil of thinking, we are diminishing our own brain power in subtle but meaningful ways.

Using their skill and their astonishing knowledge of bison biology and behaviour, bands of hunters drove great herds of buffalo over steep cliffs and into wooden corrals. In the blink of an eye they obtained more food in a single moment than any other people in human history.

Gazing at a massive dam as it holds forth against the huge forces of a river, can we doubt that we are witnessing a marvelous feat of engineering, a triumph of human ingenuity over nature? Yet what a receipt does is no less remarkable and no less powerful, even if it is less immediately apparent, for it is holding forth against the ravages of time.

A history of “the document” and writing in all its forms.

First, a primary form of intersubjectivity was necessary for language to have begun evolving in our species in the first place. Second, language then transformed the nature of our intersubjectivity, through its defining properties of inferentially articulated description, self-reflexivity, and productive grammatical flexibility. Social accountability—the bedrock of society—is grounded in this linguistically transformed and enhanced kind of intersubjectivity.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and the road to environmental destruction is paved with hope, which is shaped like a phoenix.

Proxies function as the necessary forms of make-believe and surrogacy that enable the production of knowledge. Such knowledge production relies on accessible representations of the world, and proxies are the people, artifacts, places, and moments invested with the authority to represent the world. To interrogate the use of proxies is to ask: to whom or to what do we delegate the power to represent the world?

Proxies are instrumental to developing ‘group-licensed ways of seeing,’ and they are crucial to the ways we learn how to participate in our communities by training ourselves through common references, by coming to see problems as akin, and by taking for granted that others in our community share those references and those ways of seeing.

Eissler may have been attracted to Jeff in somewhat the way Freud was attracted to Fliess. Fliess was a very charming and vivacious man, and Freud had a need and a terrible weakness for that kind of glamorous person. When Jung came along, he became that person again for Freud. Both Fliess and Jung were charlatans in some ways, but very bright, very beguiling ones. There must have been something of that sort going on between Eissler and Jeff.

A “charming charlatan” weasels his way into the Sigmund Freud Archives and discovers shocking letters the family had been hiding for decades.

Whilst it is possible, as I have done, to craft an historical outline of Buddhism that foregrounds the many women who have played a part, this is not usually how the history of women in Buddhist tradition is told. More often, the critical accounts of their role and presence are highlighted at the expense of the rest. The adverse part of the history has been much more in focus—both within Buddhist traditions themselves and in Buddhist studies scholarship—than the progressive. As a result, the lives and endeavours of the many women who have contributed to shaping the history and modern manifestations of Buddhism have been hidden from view.

The decision of a Buddhist council in favor of extensive missionary work outside India and the dispatch of monks to Afghanistan and Kashmir launched Buddhism’s development into a world religion. Thus, at the beginning of our era, Buddhist monks were wandering as missionaries through Central and Far East Asia.

This is a catalog of a 1982 exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with the pieces themselves dating from the 3rd century CE to the 10th century CE and now housed in the collections of the West Berlin State Museums. Also included is a scholarly introduction, giving a background to both the Silk Road and the movement of Buddhist art (and therefore Buddhism itself) through Central and East Asia.

It is possible to care without helping. It is also possible to help without caring. Given these two options, most people would choose the second, especially in difficult moments. Dear reader, this is an honest book.

Help requires the establishment of an interpretive context or system of meaning — a relationship, in several senses — in which help does not threaten the creativity, autonomy, or personhood of the helpee and in which, instead, help facilitates development and strengthens the self. This is a creative act.

At the same time as we have become more civilized, the state has extended its formal reach, multiplying law and punishing us for transgressions. We have learned to delay gratification, moderate our impulses, resist our instincts, and act with a restraint, forbearance, and self-abnegation unknown in the early modern era. Yet the more we discipline ourselves, the more law the state trains on us.

A history of the state from premodern to modern times with a particular emphasis on how uniquely ubiquitous the modern state is in controlling the life, affairs, and even thoughts of its subjects.

For an academic discussion of this Mahayana Sutra and its parallels, see Levman’s 2005 article in CJBS.

The medium is the message.

The foundational text of media studies.

McLuhan explained how the affordances of technologies themselves reshape the humans around them.

The number of works preserved from this era attests not only to the relative magnitude of literary production but also to the fact that these works have long been preserved as key authorities for the Theravāda Buddhist tradition throughout Southern Asia.

The productivity and orthodoxy of pre-modern Sri Lanka was not due to political stability but rather to the political chaos brought about by invasions and civil wars. Gornall shows that monastic reforms led to new forms of Pali literature, which, in turn, preserved the Buddhist tradition and expanded it.

The moon was bright and the stars were clear. There was no more darkness. Celestial flowers fell down like rain from the sky to worship the Bodhisattva.

A translation of the Chinese version of Aśvaghoṣa’s famous epic composed in the second century of the common era. The classic Indian poem gives a tasteful biography of Śākyamuni Buddha’s life which is still admired for its artistry today.

For an older translation of the (reconstructed) Sanskrit, see Cowell, 1894.

For, of course, at bottom, no subject is naïve. Every hoodwinked widow, every deceived lover, every betrayed friend, every subject of writing knows on some level what is in store for him, and remains in the relationship anyway, impelled by something stronger than his reason.

Something seems to happen to people when they meet a journalist, and what happens is exactly the opposite of what one would expect. One would think that extreme wariness and caution would be the order of the day, but in fact childish trust and impetuosity are far more common. The journalistic encounter seems to have the same regressive effect on a subject as the psychoanalytic encounter. The subject becomes a kind of child of the writer, regarding him as a permissive, all-accepting, all-forgiving mother, and expecting that the book will be written by her. Of course, the book is written by the strict, all-noticing, unforgiving father.

If everybody put his cards on the table, the game would be over. The journalist must do his work in a kind of deliberately induced state of moral anarchy.

The moral ambiguity of journalism lies not in its texts but in the relationships out of which they arise—relationships that are invariably and inescapably lopsided.

A unique lawsuit against a murderer’s “best friend” (the journalist) lays bare the deception at the heart of the journalistic encounter.

Ideas are not then genuine ideas unless they are tools in a reflective examination which tends to solve a problem.

The renowned theorist of childhood education defines the thinking process as he understands it and enjoins teachers to deploy more “experimental” (hands-on) learning in the classroom: a message which is sadly still needed, over a hundred years later.

Transference—how we all invent each other according to early blueprints—was Freud’s most original and radical discovery.

[Psychoanalysis] rearranges things inside the mind the way surgery rearranges things inside the body. It’s that impersonal and that radical. [Yet] the changes achieved are very small.

An excellent—thoughtful, funny—introduction to the world of Freudian psychoanalysis centered around the “case study” of one (pseudonymous) New York analyst, placing his work in the context of the field, its histories and its controversies.

1. The Pali Literature of Ceylon by G. P. Malalasekera
2. The Pali Literature of Burma by Mabel Haynes Bode
3. The Pali Literature of South-East Asia by H. Saddhātissa

All three works, previously published independently, are here compiled into a single volume.

Not just a catalog of sculptures, the included essays by leading scholars explain much of what is known about the early history of Southeast Asian polities and their Indic religions.

They looked generic. Yet a fangirl still exists in contradiction to the dominant culture. She’s not considered normal or sane…

The definitive history of the One Direction Fandom.

When we observe people around us, one of the first things that strikes us is how different people are from one another.

Personality is a carefully created balance of traits and behaviors in each unique person.

As the entrepreneur of its own self, the neoliberal subject has no capacity for relationships with others that might be free of purpose. Nor do entrepreneurs know what purpose-free friendship would even look like.

The idiot [however] does not exist as a subject – he is more like a flower: an existence simply open to light.

Experiencing autonomy—being allowed to make those choices that constitute an autonomous life—as a learner is a better way of learning to be autonomous than being told what to do.

Education of whatever type cannot be sustained without some notion of imparting a belief system.

A rigorous philosophical analysis of how humans acquire mental categories which argues that human values are always already present in any act of teaching or learning, thus solving some of Wittgenstein’s problems and encouraging us to ask radical questions about what our education system currently values, and what it might be designed to value instead.

But gaining mystical experience is not the purpose of our spiritual practice. The purpose of spiritual practice is to empty ourselves of self-identity.

A fascinating conversation between Master Sheng-Yen and former astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell, narrated by Professor Raymond Yeh. The discussion began with Mitchell recounting his mystical experience upon returning to Earth after a lunar mission.

… confrontations and collaborations between the traditional and the modern, the particular and the global, were emblematic of the world between 1870 and 1914.

A collection of short essays giving a snapshot of world history around the turn of the century.

I do not exist and yet I am everything. You know what I am. I am History. Now make me good.

… and Bhutan’s famous Gross National Happiness, which uses thirty-three metrics to measure the titular quality in quantitative terms.

All these indexes are attempts to portray civilization in our time using the terms of the hegemonic discourse, which is to say economics, often in the attempt to make a judo-like transformation of the discipline of economics itself, altering it to make it more human, more adjusted to the biosphere, and so on. Not a bad impulse!

But it’s important also to take this whole question back out of the realm of quantification, sometimes, to the realm of the human and the social. To ask what it all means, what it’s all for. To consider the axioms we are agreeing to live by. To acknowledge the reality of other people, and of the planet itself. To see other people’s faces. To walk outdoors and look around.

A novel attempting to imagine civilization coming through climate change stronger for it.

Kamma is action; vipáka is result. Therefore kamma is the active principle; vipáka is the passive mode of coming-to-be.

A collection of essays by five different authors that explain actions and results and how this understanding plays a role in cultivating the Buddha path. The essays are:

1. Action — Francis Story
2. Kamma and Causality — Francis Story
3. Action and Reaction in Buddhist Teachings — Leonard A. Bullen
4. Questions and Answers about Kamma and its Fruit — Nina von Gorkom
5. Kamma and Freedom — Francis Story
6. Collective Karma — Francis Story
7. Reflection on Kamma and its Fruit — Nyanaponika Thera
8. Karma: The Ripening Fruit — Bhikkhu Ñāṇajīvako

… the days began to walk.
And they, the days, made us.

Three hundred and sixty-five short vignettes of life across the ages.

The age of haste, its cinematographic succession of point-like presences, has no access to beauty or to truth. Only in lingering contemplation, even ascetic restraint, do things unveil their beauty, their fragrant essence.

A spirited defense of slowing down in a world obsessed with acceleration.

With the restoration of my old ID number, the previous six years of my life, including the three years I spent in prison, became a numberless life. In truth, this was a blessing for me. I believe that the record of my punishment and imprisonment had been wiped from the police system. Networked computers had not yet been widely adopted.

The true story of how a Uyghur poet and film director narrowly managed to escape a genocide—and of the friends and family that he left behind.

A moth will never know what a zebra finch hears in its song, a zebra finch will never feel the electric buzz of a black ghost knifefish, a knifefish will never see through the eyes of a mantis shrimp, a mantis shrimp will never smell the way a dog can, and a dog will never understand what it is to be a bat. We will never fully do any of these things either, but we are the only animal that can try.

Our Umwelt is still limited; it just doesn’t feel that way. To us, it feels all-encompassing. It is all that we know, and so we easily mistake it for all there is to know. This is an illusion—one that every animal shares.

Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every animal can only tap into a small fraction of reality’s fullness. Each is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of an immense world.

If as spiritual practitioners we ignore the discoveries of science, our practice is also impoverished…

In their ignorance and delusion, the Buddha said, human beings are unable to realise and remember any single vestige of the sufferings they had experienced in their previous existences, and in their deluded cravings for and clingings to sensuous pleasures they are inevitably reborn to a world where their cravings, clingings and kamma take them.

A thorough explanation of the thirty-one realms of existence that a human may be reborn into, depending on their kamma. Suvanno Mahathera warns readers about the horror to which unskillful action leads and how to gain better rebirths through wholesome actions.

What happens—biologically, cognitively, and socially—when we communicate?

A short introduction to the science of human communication.

As you practice jhana-oriented meditation, you move over time through a series of mental states that become more and more subtle as you proceed through them. You start where you are now and you go far, far beyond.

Being nearly 25% bibliography, the book is more of a springboard for further study than a comprehensive introduction.

… because Cura first fashioned the being, let her possess it as long as it lives.

This existential insecurity is the kind that comes from being dependent on others for survival; from being vulnerable to physical and psychological illness or wounding; and, of course, from being mortal. It’s the insecurity of randomness and risk, of a future that is impossible to control or to know. It is a kind of insecurity we can never wholly escape or armour ourselves against, try as we might to mitigate potential harms.

Yet however unknowable the future may be, there is no doubt our fortunes will remain interlinked. Risks proliferate, time passes, and things fall apart. But even amid the rubble, we can always reimagine, repair, and rebuild. Accepting our fundamental insecurity—the gift we all share—is the first step toward escaping our fear-filled burrows and ensuring our collective freedom, safety, and well-being.

Therefore it is very important to learn to shape the mind, and when you learn to shape the mind then you can achieve a mind that is free. So the importance of meditation is learning to achieve a mind that is free, a mind that is happy, a mind that is peaceful, a mind that has loving-kindness.

This is a representation of Goodwin Samararatne’s talks given in Hong Kong in 1997.

In these talks, Samararatne explains a variety of topics related to meditation on loving-kindness and mindfulness, especially in daily life.

Three touchpoints for ecological comparison emerge: Buddhist vegetarianism, the alleged practice of religion by animals and other natural beings, and nature mysticism.

A tour of different forms of Buddhism and how they relate to the environment through the lens of three common, Buddhist tropes.

A synthetic analysis of how Buddhism may help us move forward appropriately in the climate change age as well as a clear-sighted understanding of the limits of Buddhist environmental ethics.

In examining how Buddhist depictions of the natural world and native Chinese taxonomies mutually enriched each other, I offer a special perspective for understanding how Buddhism as a religious culture took root in Chinese society.

An unfortunately dull book about an interesting topic, the author will likely succeed in his stated goal of encouraging others to write about it more eloquently.

The reasons for banning the Asoke group and using legislation to outlaw it have more to do with Thai politics than with Buddhist concerns.

An ethnography of the controversial group of vegetarian monks and nuns founded by Bhikkhu Bodhiraksa in Thailand in 1975 along with a few words on the reasons behind their persecution in the late ‘80s.

some people cite the Lankavatara Sutra’s passage on gradual cultivation as a proof that what Great Master Bodhidharma transmitted was gradual practice Zen, paying no attention to a later passage on the equal importance of the sudden and the gradual. This is really the epitome of crudity and shallowness.

A polemical overview of the Chan school from an energetic and opinionated modernist.

Assavavirulhakarn pulls together a variety of epigraphical and other arguments to show that all these religious strands coexisted in Southeast Asia well before Anawrahta the Great—as, of course, they continue to today.

I want to theorize, broadly, the role of culture in meditative practices. I ask the general question, what role does culture play in meditation?—as well as the more specific question: what role has modern, western, secular, and elite-transnational culture played in its constituting its current forms?

Not to be confused with the 1988 Snow Lion book about Sakyadhītā nor the 2015 book about contemporary nuns which both share a similar title.

To practice meditation is to look deeply in order to see into the essence of things.

A translation and commentary on the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta by the renowned Vietnamese reformer.

With the present book I return to the Pāli version of the Satipaṭṭhāna-sutta. My exploration is entirely dedicated to the actual practice of satipaṭṭhāna, informed by the previously gathered details and overall picture as it emerges from a study of relevant material in the early discourses.

Building on his early work, Bhikkhu Analayo details a mindfulness practise that incorporates all aspects of Buddhist psychology.

When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened.

What happens after all your culture’s ways of making meaning disappear? How can you move forward when the future is literally inconceivable?

A philosophical meditation on the courageous life of the great Apsáalooké (Crow Indian) Chief Plenty Coups.

For a further teaser, see the review in The Marginalian.

You conquer it? Why this unfriendly feeling? Aren’t you glad the mountain could lift you up so high in the air, so as to enjoy the view?

… you can build the knowledge and practice the skills necessary to become a more competent and ethical communicator.

A standard, first-year college textbook introducing Communication Studies, with a particular focus on public speaking.

We make ourselves in our own scientific image of the kinds of people it is possible to be.

A series of case studies on the interaction between mental illness and modern society.

We may quibble over whether the Latin ‘indices’ or the Anglicized ‘indexes’ is the correct plural in English, but at least history has not plumped for the Greek: ‘sillyboi’.

…how the index responded to shifts in the reading ecosystem – the rise of the novel, of the coffee-house periodical, of the scientific journal – and how readers, and reading, changed at these points.

The first thing a student of magic learns is that there are books about magic and books of magic.

A reverse myth imagining the re-emergence of magic in 19th-century England.

… the four noble truths, the four seals of the view, the four mindfulnesses, the four schools of Buddhist philosophy, and the four reliances

Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think.

We are brothers in what we share.

Beyond issues of sexuality, Genji queers in its reluctance to romanticize or reproduce a flawed social order.

One of the important contributions of the past 30 years of research has been to clarify the concepts involved in the tragedy of the commons. Things are not as simple as they seem in the prototypical model. Human motivation is complex, the rules governing real commons do not always permit free access to everyone, and the resource systems themselves have dynamics that influence their response to human use. The result is often not the “tragedy” described by Hardin but what [Bonnie] McCay has described as a “comedy”—a drama for certain, but one with a happy ending.

The desires of the audience’s heart are as crooked as corkscrews. We continue to love what we ought to hate.

This is the human condition, this sneaking suspicion of our own badness. It lies at the heart of our fascination with people who do awful things. Something in us—in me—chimes to that awfulness, recognizes it in myself, is horrified by that recognition, and then thrills to the drama of loudly denouncing the monster.

What do we do with the art of monsters from the past? Look for ourselves there—in the monstrousness.

The future holds daunting challenges for human society and our environment. Populations are expanding, demand for resources is increasing, the climate is changing, and humanity’s impacts on the planet continue to mount. Will we be able to achieve a better quality of life for our growing population without compromising the ability of future generations to achieve the same?

By refocusing and redoubling its efforts to advance practical, impactful solutions for humanity’s multifaceted, vexing problems, the field of environmental engineering can build on its past successes—and chart new territory—in the decades ahead.

Drawn during his last years by the Zen monk Giei Satō, these sketches recollect his days as an unsui, an apprentice monk. With humor and steadfast warmth Satō depicts the day of leaving home and the day of returning; the rainy season and the snowy season; the chores, the rainy season and the snowy season; the chores, the celebrations

A global civilization is in the process of formation. This book is the result of that kind of fermentation. It focuses on the spiritual and ethical foundations and contours of such a civilization when and if genuine global dialogue is pursued. It has taken us eight years, frequent meetings, and continuous correspondence to arrive at this point. We share it with you, dear reader, in the belief that something is to be gained by learning that human experience and ideas are inevitably varied around the world, but when two persons of good will enter into a sincere conversation about their own truths, a more universal truth emerges.

It is when doubts regarding the nature of reality, ourselves, or our beliefs arise that we start to ponder philosophical questions…

The [seven] studies presented in this book stem from a symposium of the same name which was held at the University of Hamburg in November 2017

What if short swords, enchanted tree trunks, and hefted boulders were allowed a voice? Shouldn’t an Althing include all things? Isn’t a republic a res publica, a public thing? At a parliament, what gets to speak?

…when you look at a photo or realistic drawing of a face, you see it as the face of another. But when you enter the world of the cartoon, you see yourself.

Buddhism consistently holds that liberation from suffering is achieved through awareness.

A large collection of writings (mostly from the North American, Mahāyāna tradition) on environmental ethics with an eye towards orienting spiritual practice towards confronting our contemporary climatic challenge.

Despite the title, this book is not a standard primer and instead takes a more critical stance. For a more standard introduction, see King, 2009.

The point of commonality of the teachings is that they are all concerned with how something works: none of them is concerned with what something is, or, indeed, with what it is not. Most crucially, they are focused on how all the factors of human existence in the cycle of lives are dependent on other factors.

The mind of man is capable of anything.

A British novel about the “horrors” of colonialism and what Europeans thought about them.

For more about this classic novel, see (for example) the Writ Large Episode on the book and its history.

The peoples of Sri Lanka have participated in far-flung trading networks, religious formations, and Asian and European empires for millennia. This interdisciplinary volume sets out to draw Sri Lanka into the field of Asian and Global History by showing how the latest wave of scholarship has explored the island as a ‘crossroads’, a place defined by its openness to movement across the Indian Ocean.

Experts in the history, archaeology, literature and art of the island from c.500 BCE to c.1850 CE use Lankan material to explore a number of pressing scholarly debates.

A metaphor can also die when it becomes so common that we forget it is a metaphor. It no longer functions as a figure of speech; its meaning is taken to be literal. This is what happened to the computational theory of mind

An extended meditation on what it means to be a sentient being in this disenchanted era.

The country’s rapid and recent economic integration into global agro-food systems and consumer markets spurred new quality-of-food safety concerns, health issues and distrust in food distribution networks which have become increasingly obscured.

Please, O Lord, may all the boons
for which I fervently pray
come true at once and come to be
from now until nirvana’s time!

… highlights of the Cambodian Dharma song tradition. Many of the most popular songs are included, along with others of exceptional interest or literary merit. All of the major themes of the genre are covered: the life of the Buddha, gratitude to parents, the impermanence of the body, and [the] aspiration for nirvana.

Listen to an interview with the author on the New Books Network or hear him perform a few of the songs from this book on Shambhala’s website. And for the author’s previous translations and performances, see his open-access album “Stirring and Stilling” (2011).

The book also contains a number of original essays on the history of Cambodian Buddhism and its poetry, alongside a thorough bibliography for the author’s sources.

Today, artists practicing Nichiren Buddhism are active around the world. Through our dialogue, I want to explore with you the bright future prospects of a cultural movement based on Buddhism.

A transcript of a series of conversations between two great Jazz musicians and the president of Soka Gakkai.

People, where they live, their ways of life, and their interactions in different places around the world.

An introduction to the human landscape of Earth. Primarily aimed at undergraduates in the United States, the book should still be appropriate for anyone interested in learning more about the current, physical arrangement of humanity.

As long as they get their money, they don’t care how many of us they kill off.

It took me no time at all to notice that this nothing, this hole where a head should have been, was no ordinary vacancy

An Englishman recounts his experience of satori

There is only one kind of success that really matters: the success of transforming ourselves

[T]he great, irreplaceable potentiality of fiction is that it makes possible the imagining of possibilities.

When future generations look back upon the Great Derangement they will certainly blame the leaders and politicians of this time for their failure to address the climate crisis. But they may well hold artists and writers to be equally culpable—for the imagining of possibilities is not, after all, the job of politicians.

This book began as a set of four lectures, presented at the University of Chicago in the fall of 2015. The lectures were the second in a series named after the family of Randy L. and Melvin R. Berlin.

The Slave’s role is no less brief upon his second appearance than it was in his first. But he has grown in stature now: he has earned himself a footnote.

… soon enough, events began to unfold around [the Geniza] in a sly allegory on the intercourse between power and the writing of history.

… here is something that will certainly pass for an apocalypse until the real thing comes along.

This time spent in the company of nuns, listening to their guidance, was a seminal moment.

A journalist documents her time with Buddhist nuns around the world.

The Great Way is not difficult
for those who have no preferences.
When love and hate are both absent
everything becomes clear and undisguised.
Make the smallest distinction, however,
and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart.

An approachable and clear commentary on this famous Chinese poem explaining how Chan can be understood as a merging of Taoism with Buddhism.

… memoir, a genre that gives us access to that lost Middlemarch of reflection

Ranjani de Silva has been described as the “person most responsible for the Theravāda bhikkhunī revival,” and “the prime mover in the re-establishment of the bhikkhunī sangha in Sri Lanka.” Yet her full story—including her account of the revival—had never [before] been told.

You can get the student workbook here.

… although they were wedded to scientific worldviews, science was not seen as offering meaning to them. Buddhism gave them what they needed, offering a scientifically-compatible ethical framework which they could draw upon in their day-to-day decision-making.

A deep, ethnographic study of young adult Buddhists in Britain.

This volume emerges from a symposium entitled ‘Inevitable Ends: Meditations on Impermanence’, held at Aarhus University in May 2019, and an accompanying exhibition at the Moesgaard Museum, ‘Museum of Impermanence: Stories from Nepal, Papua New Guinea and Tibet’ (on display from 9 February to 19 May 2019)

… how culture reflects and shapes the mind and behavior of its members

… an overview of the main stylistic features of early Buddhist sutras and the organizational principles employed in the formation of textual collections of sutras that support the idea of these texts and collections being transmitted as fixed entities and the ways in which such texts changed and were changed over time

… how hereditary (nature) and experiential (nurture) variables interact to influence the thoughts, feelings, and behavior of individuals

… human beings reset themselves to something altruistic, communitarian, resourceful, and imaginative after a disaster. We revert to something we already know how to do. The possibility of paradise is already within us as a default setting.

Disasters reveal, in their failure, how social hierarchies are a product of state violence, not “human nature.”

In truth, it’s the cynic who’s out of touch. In truth, we’re living on Planet A, where people are deeply inclined to be good to one another. So be realistic. Be courageous. Be true to your nature.

Although Ru and Dao are disparate gateways,
Clouds and grove are rather a shared mode.

The preeminent example of Classical Chinese Buddhist poets, Meng Haoran shows how deeply Buddhist and Chinese culture mixed during the Tang Dynasty to produce the quintessentially East Asian Buddhism we now call “Chan.”

Fiction helps us remember that everything remains to be seen

After teaching a course on Russian short-stories for a number of years, author George Saunders put his classes’ accumulated wisdom into this book about fiction.

What even is the immune system and how does it actually work?

… this study critically examines the traditional Buddhist distinction between the ‘practice of serenity’ (samatha-bhāvanā) and the ‘practice of insight’ (vipassanā-bhāvanā); doing so challenges the traditional positioning of the four jhānas under the category of ‘serenity (or concentration) meditation’ and the premise regarding their secondary and superfluous role in the path

… the boundary between colonizer and colonized always is dangerously and excitingly permeable

My interest is in the fact that the young Rudyard Kipling’s first exposure to Buddhism was in London, not India or Tibet or Japan; that he wrote the novel Kim for the most part from Rottingdean in Sussex; that most of the textual sources on which he drew were written and published in England, not Asia. My focus is upon the textualized Buddhism fashioned by Englishmen

[which] was, as Max Müller once labeled it, a form of madness, but the madness was not, as he intended, among Buddhists; it was the madness of Westerners confronted with concepts and doctrines so utterly incommensurable with their most cherished ideals that they could not be assimilated.

My analysis begins from the publications of comparative religion starting in the 1850s and 1860s, incorporates the lively dialogue about Buddhism that occurred in the periodical literature soon thereafter, and then focuses on the works of fiction, poetry, religion, and philosophy that emerged especially in the 1870s to the 1890s.

… conditions in the world are deteriorating drastically, so that peace-loving neighbours are finding it hard not to be drawn into difficult and fearful situations. It was the Buddha’s explicit teaching that real peace and happiness cannot be found within worldly conditions. First, they are always changing, but also they do not contain enough depth and profundity to really satisfy the yearning in our hearts for a deep and lasting contentment. This little volume of Dhamma talks is offered here to show a way out of our problems and suffering.

The main themes of the book are the diversity and flexibility of the way that the Buddha taught meditation

Making sure to cover all forty of the traditional meditation subjects and placing them within the context of sense restraint, this anthology is an excellent introduction to the textual foundations of Buddhist meditation.

All aspects of our practice—zazen in the monks’ hall, chanting of verses and sutras during services, ceremonies in the Dharma hall—and all our other activities in daily life are the practice of the bodhisattva vow actualized moment by moment. We chant these verses and sutras as an expression of this interpenetrating reality

Chan transcends knowledge, symbols, and all the apparatus of language. You may call Chan ‘emptiness’ but it is not emptiness in the nihilistic sense.

An introduction to the practice of meditation retreat in the Chan tradition and a selection of Sheng Yen’s retreat talks.

… a concise yet thorough exposition of the essentials of Tibetan Buddhist meditation practice

In tantra, the ultimate result is the union of the illusory body and clear light manifesting on the path of no-more-learning, while in sūtra the ultimate result is the form body and dharma body of a buddha.

A systematic outline of the tantric vehicle.

Dhammaloka’s life is a window into the relationships at the heart of empire, a glimpse into alternative possibilities of the struggle against colonialism. It is a way of thinking about the meaning of “Buddhism” at the start of its modern globalization. It is also, of course, a remarkable tale

The biography of a turn-of-the-century, plebeian agitator against the British colonial establishment and one of the first, Western monks.

You can hear an interview with Alicia Turner talking about the book on the New Books Network.

The only time we can live is now

Explaining the fundamentals of meditation practice and the Buddhist outlook in accessible and winning prose, Being Nobody, Going Nowhere is a much-beloved, classic introduction.

Up until the middle of the first millennium, Avalokiteshvara consistently appeared in a magnificent, idealized body, yet one in accord with human norms. But sometime around the 6th century, an iconographic revolution occurred in Indian art, and he began to acquire additional arms, heads, and eyes.

An introduction to the history of Avalokiteshvara through Buddhist art.

General Gutiérrez Mellado pulls his arm violently out of the Prime Minister’s grip; then the burst of gunfire erupts.

The history of the 1981 failed Spanish coup and of the gestures that saved democracy.

Anthropological methods and insights can be transformative, making possible the kinds of empathy and dialogue necessary to solve our global problems. The goal of this textbook is to guide you in this process of transformation as you learn about the cultural lives of the various peoples with whom you share this planet.

Museum of Nonhumanity calls for the deconstruction of the categories of animality and humanity in order to enter a new, more inclusive era.

You have to live your way into a new way of thinking.

An earnest introduction to humanity.

Primarily intended for young Americans, The Art of Being Human has enough perennial wisdom and charming sincerity to make it an enjoyable read for most.

It is legitimate to write a history of Buddhism, but such a book will be more history than Buddhism, and in order to make sense of that history one should first have an understanding of Buddhism. This book is an introduction to Buddhism in terms of a methodology that Buddhism itself suggests.

The DPCW is drafted, to some extent, to take account of the evolution in international politics, and the failures of the existing international legal norms dedicated to securing international peace.

This book describes the basics of Buddhist philosophy and practice within the contexts of a number of dramatic, not documentary, films. It introduces some of the main traditions of Buddhism. Little or no knowledge of Buddhism is assumed of the reader. Instead, Buddhist concepts, practices, and histories are presented in progression so that this might serve as an introduction to Buddhism particularly accessible to those interested in film.

She does not quite grasp that he is something like her, but her formidable ability to calculate strategies has gained a new dimension. A new category appears that expands her options a hundredfold: ally.

A heartwarming tale of war, betrayal, and super-intelligent spiders.

… the present feels as if it is constituted by emptying out the future to sustain a looping version of a past that never existed

A collection of philosophical essays by a celebrated artist grappling with our current, global predicament.

We have become a civilization based on work—not even “productive work” but work as an end and meaning in itself.

An expansion of Graeber’s 2013 essay on the same subject, exploring the “spiritual violence” of modern employment.

In the morning when the Sun returns, it’s possible for us to hope.

Three steps, one bow: that was how they made their pilgrimage. […] an unadorned account of an authentic spiritual journey.

A monk and novice write letters to their teacher as they prostrate their way up the California coast.

Note: this Second Edition is entitled Highway Dharma Letters: Two Buddhist Pilgrims Write to Their Teacher.

Menocchio was certain that at death man reverted to the elements of which he was composed. But an irresistible yearning drove him to picture some sort of survival after death.

A riveting reconstruction of the thought-world of a particular, early-modern, Italian peasant who had fashioned for himself an unpopular popular cosmology.

The victory of written over oral culture has been, principally, the victory of the abstract over the empirical.

As with language, culture offers to the individual a horizon of latent possibilities—a flexible and invisible cage in which he can exercise his own, conditional, liberty.

No explanation has ever been offered or demanded for the admiration the Chinese have had for hermits. Hermits were simply there: beyond city walls, in the mountains, lone columns of smoke after a snowfall. As far back as records go, there were always hermits in China.

A beautifully written introduction to the (living!) tradition of Chinese eremitism: from its pre-Daoist roots to contemporary Chungnan Shan.

… to increase awareness among Buddhists of their own rich heritage of religious and ethical thinking as well as to increase understanding among non-Buddhists of the fundamental values and principles of Buddhism. It seeks to strike a balance between what is common to the Buddhist traditions and the diversity of perspectives among them.

This inspiring and engaging collection of short stories will be useful for both scholars and students of Thai Buddhism who are curious to learn what the tradition was like before the modern state.

Where are all the young adult Asian American Buddhists, and what can we learn from them?

A heartwarming ethnography.

And after you’ve finished reading it (or before you start!), listen to this interview with the author to hear more about the process behind writing the book.

In this work, the questions pertaining to the means of knowledge known to, criticized in, and accepted by the Buddhism of the Pali Canon are fully discussed. A comprehensive survey of the historical background was indispensable for this purpose.

For Bhante Sujato’s lectures on this book, see Sujato, 2021.

Power allows the ego to be with him- or herself in the other. It creates a continuity of the self.

An exploration of power reacting to a few modern philosophers on the subject.

I found the work engaging and impressive, despite its odd avoidance of the psychological. As a Buddhist, I can’t agree that “life as such cannot be understood in terms of causal relations,” though I appreciate the book, insofar as it advocates and “leads to […] an ethics and aesthetics of the no one: friendliness free of intentions, even free of wishes.”

We must stay hopeful;
We must stay patient –
because when they excavate the modern day
they’ll find us: the Brand New Ancients

An epic poem about inglorious Brits, a morality tale with a potty mouth, and a crafty myth without artifice, Brand New Ancients attempts to tell the story of human life through a series of interwoven vignettes.

The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite. […] May the House in its Beauty shelter us both.

A man imprisoned in The Labyrinth of Forgotten Things makes sense of his new/old/perpetual Home.

The novel resists a simple, allegorical reading, but instead hums with symbolism and irony as it dances around its heady themes. While intellectuals will enjoy turning those over, ultimately it is Piranesi’s sincerity and emotional strength that ensure the book won’t soon be Forgotten.

… tourism is a highly political phenomenon, the implications of which have been only rarely perceived and almost nowhere fully understood. […] If tourism policy does not integrate or anticipate its political component, then policies and the people affected by them will suffer.

A monograph to help tourism development planners to avoid disasters like Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s 2012 “Maitreya” debacle. If only he had read this book!

If you want to find a resting place,
Cold Mountain will keep you long.
A gentle breeze blows the hidden pines:
The closer you come, the better it sounds.

A corpus of over three hundred poems attributed to a legendary Tang (618–907) era recluse who took the name Hánshān (Cold Mountain) from the isolated hill on which he lived in the Tiantai 天台 range. In pre-modern times, editions of the collection usually included fifty-some poems attributed to Hanshan’s monastic companion, Shídé 拾得­ (“Foundling”) and two poems attributed to another monk, Fēnggān 豐­干. This translation contains the complete text of the earliest surviving edition.

… fundamental methodological points posed by the study of the Collections of Connected Discourses as windows into the formation of early Buddhist texts and the organisation of their transmission

Engaged Buddhism is a contemporary form of Buddhism that engages actively yet nonviolently with the social, economic, political, social [sic], and ecological problems of society. At its best, this engagement is not separate from Buddhist spirituality, but is very much an expression of it.

… a history of the future of the Maitreya Project 2.0, a non-existent statue that nonetheless has touched many lives around the world, for better and for worse

When examined closely, the doctrines of the schools cannot be explained away as simplistic errors or alien infiltrations or deliberate corruptions. It would then follow that more sympathetic and gentle perspectives on the schools are likely to be more objective.

Theravāda, Zen and Lamaism, for all their superficial differences, share common ground in the practice of meditation, which is the ground of original Buddhism and qualifies them to take the name

The authoritative history of early Buddhism.

This man is one of those who have seldom been seen from ancient times to the present. Since the Great Doctrine flowed on to the East there has been no one to be compared with Hien in his forgetfulness of self and search for the Law.

The extraordinary first-hand account of Buddhism in South Asia during the fifth century and of one monk’s journey to bring the true Buddhist texts back to China.

Those who wanted to uphold the radical non-substantialist position of early Buddhism were faced with the dual task of responding to the enormously substantialist and absolutist think­ing of the non-Buddhist traditions as well as to those within the Buddhist tradition who fell prey to such thinking.

… a consolidation of thirty years of research and reflection on early Buddhism as well as on some of the major schools and philosophers associated with the later Buddhist tradi­tions

The fossils found clearly show that there has been a development from reptile to bird, even though the particular animal whose remains have been discovered was of course not the first one to start jumping or gliding from one tree to the next. Comparable to the fossils of an archaeopteryx, some early discourses reflect particular stages in the development of Buddhist thought.

… the modern pilgrim needs to have some idea about the religious, historical and archaeological background of each of the sacred places

This book provides a thorough account of the history behind the sacred sites of Buddhist India, from ancient to modern times.

For the intending pilgrim, it is imperative to understand that a pilgrimage is essentially a spiritual journey in veneration of the Blessed One. This act of veneration purifies one’s thoughts, speech and action and through it, many noble qualities can be developed.

A famous, contemporary pilgrim shares his understanding and love of the practice.

… building spectacular ecumenical leisure sites often runs into problems

A clear-eyed but sympathetic analysis of the pervasive construction of Buddhist tourist attractions in Asia, what they accomplish and don’t.

… the major focus of each chapter is the attempt to broadly interrelate the political, economic, social and religious aspects of a period with the intention of showing where and why changes have occurred

An excellent introduction to early Indian history and the setting in which the Buddha and his Religion grew.

I, Li Bo, love wine completely, right now. How to attain the immortality within wine? This Dao always gets muddled. Don’t look for it in a ladle! The deity of drunkenness will give transmission to whoever is chosen.

An anthology of writing by and about the legendary swashbuckler-poet of Tang China.

Despite the volumes of scholarship published since, Buddhist India remains a remarkable introduction to the topic more than a century later.

How does one say “what if” without reproach?

A kaleidoscopic meditation on race, identity, culture, and deep listening.

Although fairly short, this book presents several challenges. Not all of these are easily digested, and I anticipate that some of my readers will not feel comfortable with the material collected here and will experience at least parts of it as unwelcome and even enervating. I would like to apologize in advance if anything I say is felt as an affront. It is definitely not my intention to offend or be dismissive, but only to offer perspectives that might help to diminish conceit, even though the medicine might at times taste bitter.

… a book about people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems

A few case studies of humanity setting out to fix the environment.

By zooming in on tiny fish and out to the entire stratosphere, it beautifully captures the staggering scope of climate change and its challenges. In highlighting the scientists and engineers working on it, the book offers a somewhat more hopeful picture of our possible future: less apocalyptic but still incredibly strange. See 99pi’s “Model Organism” for a taste.

The book also makes a strong case for being skeptical that we even can engineer our way out of climate change. While it nods to the “but what other choice do we have” counterargument, I hope that readers come away from this tension in the book more confident than ever in our need for decarbonization and I hope that readers won’t leap to even worse ideas than those highlighted in the book, such as fatalism or population control. As one character in the book memorably put it:

Pissing your pants will only keep you warm for so long.

… the trick that has helped me squint at the bleakness and see them more clearly is to admit, with every breath, that you have no idea what you are looking at.

Half a history of, and accessible meditation on the philosophy of, science and half memoir of the author’s grappling with depression, this pleasantly easy read captures something of “emptiness.” It shows how Buddhism still has much to add in the West’s ongoing struggle to reconcile its extremes of naive, Christian eternalism and cynical, “scientific” nihilism.

Remember this when you wake up in the morning and think you have nothing. Stand up and face the east. Now praise the sky and praise the light within each person under the sky. It’s okay to be unsure. But praise, praise, praise.

A collection of short stories about weird people.

It is as if an arrow has been pulled out of your heart.

The comprehensive biography of one of the most revered of the modern Thai masters.

You can find the official audiobook here.

… here is a book to take up at quiet times

A haphazard collection of inspirational quotes on the Lord Buddha’s nine virtuous qualities taken mostly from the Pāli Canon.

The book doesn’t pretend to have a thesis or an agenda. It’s merely a ready companion for your devotional recollection.

… if you carry much weight, you will very soon condemn whatever way you carry it

I invite the reader to join me in a search for what could be found in the textual corpus of early Buddhist discourses

In the first chapter I investigate the bodhisattva conception as such, surveying relevant passages from the early discourses. With the second chapter I turn to the meeting between the previous Buddha Kāśyapa and the bodhisattva Gautama, examining the relation of this meeting to the notion of a vow the bodhisattva took to pursue the path to Buddhahood. The future Buddha Maitreya is the theme of the third chapter, in which I take up the notion of a prediction a bodhisattva receives in assurance of his future success.

… in many cases, I did not know how the inscriptions could possibly mean what I had said they meant, and as a result of not knowing how they could mean what I had said, I had great doubts about what they did actually mean. And so my study of the Aśokan inscriptions led to a situation where every year I understood less and less.

A classic series of ten lectures exploring the languages of ancient India and how they help us unravel the mysteries of early Buddhist history.

If we have learned one thing from the #MeToo campaign, apart from just how pervasive sexual violence is, it is that we as a society do not have a clear, uncontested idea of what sexual consent looks like, and that we do not all universally and equally value it.

A lucid treatment of an important and difficult subject, this book should be considered required reading for anyone who wishes to navigate their sexual relations more skillfully or who wishes to understand the contemporary discourse about sex.

Nearly incontrovertible in its conclusion, the book inspired a revolution in charity in the West and encouraged many (me included) to donate more to charity than they ever had before.

The tenth anniversary edition is available for free online.

We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life

A Holocaust survivor describes the mental hoops he (and many) prisoners jumped through during their trying time so close to death. He concludes that people needed a reason to live, a “will to meaning,” as a necessary core of their psychological health, without which survival was impossible.

In America, the book became wildly popular for its descriptions of life in the German concentration camps and for its feel-good defense of positive thinking and a generic, rationalized, Judeo-Christian spirituality. Personally, I read Frankl’s anecdotes more as a defense of ethical behavior in the face of death less than as a defense of the imagination and its attachments as he imagined. As he himself points out: those survivors most strongly attached to hope were those most strongly disillusioned by their return.

Frankl’s Judeo-Christian lens also prohibited him from engaging in more sober self-analysis in ways that are worth unpacking for what they say about Western culture more broadly. For example, it’s more than a little problematic that Frankl approvingly (!) quotes Nietzsche.

In the final analysis, Man’s Search for Meaning remains a complex classic, as much in need of psychoanalysis as it purports to contain it.

… teachings from twelve of the greatest masters and monasteries in the Theravāda tradition

This classic book on insight meditation introduced the West to the Theravāda Tradition of Southeast Asia and launched the career of not only its author, but also many of his readers who subsequently sought out, learned from, and carried on the tradition of these venerable masters.

It’s basically impossible to understand modern Theravāda Buddhism without being familiar with at least most of the teachers featured in this outstanding book, but its value isn’t strictly historical as the wisdom and advice it contains is invaluable not just to scholars but also to any serious meditator intent on realizing the fruits of insight practice.

In explaining the nearly impossible diversity of Mahayana texts, the book strikes an admirable balance between respect and skepticism, sticking mostly to the established historical facts. The reader is left to draw her own conclusions about the merits or demerits of the texts themselves.

If you’re going to tell yourself a story,
Why not tell yourself a story of freedom?

A deeply American meditation on (not translation of!) the Therigatha.

Read this book critically, alongside a real translation, so that you can see for yourself how the poems changed the originals. Consider what was lost, what was added, and how the tone shifted. What does this collection say about American Buddhism?

The beautiful, almost without any effort of our own, acquaints us with the mental event of conviction, and so pleasurable a mental state is this that ever afterwards one is willing to labor, struggle, wrestle with the world to locate enduring sources of conviction–to locate what is true. …beauty is a starting place for education.

A thorough defense of beauty and of its power to push the boundaries of our concern outward.

Not written from the Buddhist perspective, these essays dismiss (too?) casually the ugly failure modes of beauty: the acquisitiveness, possessiveness, and jealousy which consume many the beholder. However, I find it a useful corollary or even corrective to the standard Buddhist “rejection” of aesthetics, explaining how beauty can condition becoming’s wholesome forms.

In this way, we start to view the spiritual education as a kind of aesthetic education: acquainting the student with “truer” sources of beauty and affording them the more sublime responses outlined in these notes.

… revised versions of previously published articles. Each study builds around a partial or complete translation of an Ekottarika-āgama discourse, followed by an examination of aspects that I felt to be of further interest.

The integration of later elements into the Ekottarika-āgama, often related to Mahāyāna thought, distinctly distinguishes it from the other Chinese Āgamas as well as their counterparts, the Pali Nikāyas. When, where, how and why did this early Buddhist collection and its translation undergo such striking transformations?

I will consider the Zengyi ahan jing chiefly as the product of historical actors, three-dimensional human beings engaging their own world, rather than the putative witness to some ill-defined sectarian tradition

A lengthy monograph on the historical circumstances surrounding the production and dissemination of T.125 — a process that would have an enduring impact on Chinese Buddhism.

Note that certain “combining” diacritics were dropped in the PDF due to a publishing error. The corrected diacritics are listed here.

… revised versions of articles published previously. Each study is based on a partial or complete translation of the Saṃyukta-āgama discourse in question, followed by an examination of some aspects that I felt to be of further interest.

Thanks to the discovery and ongoing publication of the incomplete Sanskrit Dīrgha-āgama manuscript from Gilgit, three different versions of the Collection of Long Discourses are now available for comparative study: the Pali Dīgha-nikāya transmitted within the Theravāda tradition, the just-mentioned Dīrgha-āgama in Sanskrit, identified as Sarvāstivāda or Mūlasarvāstivāda, and the Chinese translation of an Indic Dīrgha-āgama (長阿含經), generally considered to be affiliated with the Dharmaguptakas.

The seminar, “The Chinese Translation of the Dīrgha-āgama (長阿含經, Taishō 1)”, took place on 18 and 19 October, 2013. It was organised in collaboration with the Chung-Hwa Institute of Buddhist Studies at Dharma Drum Mountain and the Numata Center for Buddhist Studies at Hamburg University. The event was generously funded by the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange. In this volume, we publish most of the papers that were presented and discussed at the seminar, with the chapters – six in total – arranged according to the authors’ names in alphabetical order.

… in what follows I briefly survey the four main Chinese Āgamas. In the first of the chapters that follow this introduction, I try to place the early discourses in historical perspective. An assessment of their value as testimonies for early Buddhist thought serves as a foundation for the comparative studies found in this and the other three volumes.

With contributions by Kin-Tung Yit, William Chu, Teng Weijen, Shi Chunyin, and Kuan Tse-fu.

Each study is based on partial or complete translations of the Madhyama-āgama discourse in question – one exception being the parallel to the Cūḷavedalla-sutta, where I instead translate the Tibetan parallel – followed by an examination of some aspects that I felt to be of further interest.

… the third volume of proceedings of the Āgama seminars held by the Āgama Research Group at the Dharma Drum Institute of Liberal Arts (formerly Dharma Drum Buddhist College) during the last weekend of October 2015

Many of the individual translations from this book were released for free distribution and have been collected into this open source ebook for your convenience. The entire book can be read on the publisher’s website with a free account.

More than 800 of the individual translations from the collection are available for free distribution and have been collected into this open source ebook for your convenience. The rest of the book can be read on the publisher’s website for free (by signing up for an account).

About a third of the suttas have been made available for free by the publisher under a Creative Commons License and have been collected into this open source booklet for your consideration. Furthermore, the rest of the book can be read on their website for free if you sign up for a (free) account.

The original draft of the book by Bhikkhu Ñāṇamoli can be found online as either his handwritten notes or as an incomplete, typed manuscript.

In this thousand-page tome, Bhikkhu Analayo goes systematically through the MN, one sutta at a time, and explains how the Pāli text differs (or not) from its parallels preserved in Sanskrit, Chinese and Tibetan. Perhaps surprisingly, they don’t differ all that much, though in some places the differences do shed light on the original teaching and shows what kinds of changes occurred to the texts during the process of transmission.

The book begins and ends with Bhikkhu Analayo’s reflections on the EBTs and the process of oral transmission, and while the book could certainly be read cover-to-cover, the primary way to use this book is as a reference work alongside the Majjhima Nikāya.

You can also download the book for free at the University of Hamburg website:

• Volume 1 and Volume 2

An acclaimed meditation on our material existence, some of the photos from this book can be previewed on The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings), Menzel’s Website or on Google Drive.

Psychopaths are more likely to be attracted to singing, dancing, love, light, miracles, and channeling. Usually psychopaths have a great deal of trouble sitting quiet and still. I appreciate the boring facade of Buddhism, as it is a great protection.

A new age mystic gives his advice on how to identify psychopaths on the spiritual journey.

Despite Bill’s many painful experiences, he never lost his faith in the transformative, human potential to awaken. His lifetime of spiritual stumbling is a rich source of warnings and advice, especially for Westerners still struggling to get a foothold in a tradition.

That said, however, the book’s interpretation of “enlightenment” should be taken cautiously, as his understanding seems to come from ecumenical assumptions that the various “contemplative traditions” (never defined) all describe the same goal. A bit of a black sheep even within the heterodox, secular “Insight” community, Bill Hamilton is best read with his own warning in mind, that “monks and nuns make safer teachers than laypeople, especially if they are actively associated with their tradition.”

The shift from hunting-gathering to farming began only about 11,000 years ago; the first metal tools were produced only about 7,000 years ago; and the first state government and the first writing arose only around 5,400 years ago. “Modern” conditions have prevailed, even just locally, for only a tiny fraction of human history

Paints a vivid picture of what traditional life was like (is still like in some places) in prehistoric human societies and contrasts this with how most humans (especially in the West) live today. Jared Diamond himself lived this way for some time and brings a unique and earnest voice to the subject which I found affective and memorable.

The spread of farming from those few sites of origin usually did not occur as a result of the hunter-gatherers’ elsewhere adopting farming; hunter-gatherers tend to be conservative…. Instead, farming spread mainly through farmers’ outbreeding hunters, developing more potent technology, and then killing the hunters or driving them off of all lands suitable for agriculture.

A classic of anthropology and world history, this book answers the simple historical question: Why was Europe able to conquer the world during the Early Modern / Colonial period?

The short answer to this question is the book’s title and the long answer, its contents.

Design is really an act of communication, which means having a deep understanding of the person with whom the designer is communicating.

A foundational classic in the field of product design, you will never look at any thing the same way again.

And if you loved this book, which I know you will, I also highly recommend its sequel: Emotional Design published by Basic in 2003.

…and maybe because of the boiling April sun, he thought about water and ice. Water and ice were made of the same thing. He thought most people were made of the same thing, too. He himself was probably a little different from the corrupt people around him. Ice was distinct from—and in his view, better than—what it was made of. He wanted to be better than what he was made of. In Mumbai’s dirty water, he wanted to be ice.

A haunting and beautiful portrait of humanity, Behind the Beautiful Forevers reads more like a novel than nonfiction. But journalism it is. Of the highest order.

Written after three years of observations and interviews in a small slum of Mumbai, the book follows a few locals as they build their lives amidst the devastating poverty just behind the Beautiful Forevers.

… everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances

A short tour of some of the world’s great religious traditions along with the author’s own reflections on what a modern, atheistic reader can glean from them in the project of their own life.

There are three stages in scientific discovery. First, people deny that it is true, then they deny that it is important; finally they credit the wrong person.

We know a lot about the world. For example, that it weighs about 5.97×10²⁴ kg. But how do we know that?! You can’t just put it on a scale!

To answer this question (and many more), Bill Bryson interviewed a few scientists and uncovered the fascinating, brilliant, and often absurd history of modern science.

It isn’t just that Bohr’s atom with its electron “orbits” is a false picture; all pictures are false, and there is no physical analogy we can make to understand what goes on inside atoms. Atoms behave like atoms, nothing else.

A metaphysical exploration of the possible interpretations of quantum mechanics.

The universe doesn’t allow perfection.

A classic of popular science books, A Brief History of Time—along with its sequel, The Universe in a Nutshell (Bantam Spectra, 2001)—provides a whirlwind tour of modern physics from one of the field’s preeminent minds.

Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.

A classic of modern psychology, Thinking, Fast and Slow explains the two halves of our brain and how they contribute to our sometimes-less-than-rational behavior.

Our inability to recall how we really felt is why our wealth of experiences turns out to be poverty of riches.

A classic of modern psychology, Stumbling on Happiness explains in detail the cognitive biases that prevent us from accurately predicting what will make us happy.

And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.

A much-beloved, short, poetic story (nominally for children) which captures poignantly the existential crisis of growing up in the modern world, and encourages us all to not lose touch with that simple, direct wisdom of our inner child.

Note that the original, illustrated translation by Richard Howard is still under copyright, so the link above will instead take you to a more recent, scholarly translation by M. H. Bowker published by punctum in 2021.

“Anthropocene” is the proposed name for a geologic epoch in which humans have become the major force determining the continuing livability of the earth. The word tells a big story: living arrangements that took millions of years to put into place are being undone in the blink of an eye. The hubris of conquerors and corporations makes it uncertain what we can bequeath to our next generations, human and not human.

This is a gorgeous pair of edited volumes collecting papers and artwork grappling with the enormity of climate change and painting a uniquely multifaceted portrait of our damaged planet. Better suited to the coffee-table than the night-stand, these hefty books contain not a single, pat message but just a series of snapshots from around our pale blue dot.

If history shows anything, it is that there’s no better way to justify relations founded on violence—to make such relations seem moral—than by reframing them in the language of debt—above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it’s the victim who’s doing something wrong.

A thorough deconstruction of the idea of money and a scandalous exposé of the history of our global order from the perspective of one of man’s most powerful ideas.

Just as the sun is valued not only for its own intrinsic radiance but also for its ability to illuminate the world, so the brilliance of the Buddha is determined not only by the clarity of his Teaching but by his ability to illuminate those who came to him for refuge

The Buddha’s first generation of followers established the traditions and values of the early Sangha. Indeed, it is nearly impossible to understand Buddhism without understanding the lives of the early Buddhist saints. This rich and inspiring series of biographies edited by Bhikkhu Bodhi mainly draws from the traditional commentaries of the Theravāda tradition and so provides an excellent balance between readability and faithfulness to the source material. A must read for all students of Buddhism.

… the Sonora passed through the Golden Gate and steamed out upon the broad Pacific, heading south, carrying five hundred passengers, thirty-eight thousand letters, and a consigned shipment of gold totaling $1,595,497.13.

The fascinating and brilliantly told story of one ship pivotal to the California Gold Rush: its historic sinking and equally historic recovery.

Growing tolerance toward Asian peoples and cultures was fostered in a mass-mediated environment in which the role of the visual image took on increasing importance. While this environment allowed a popular engagement with Asian religious traditions, it also relied on and reinforced certain racialized notions of Asianness and Asian religiosity. These notions form patterns of representation that, because they are linked to such positive images, go unchallenged and unseen.

This fascinating and compelling history of the “Oriental Monk” figure in 20th century American media shows how Americans came to have certain feelings and expectations (that is to say, stereotypes) about Eastern spirituality in general and monks in particular which continue to shape Buddhism to this day.

I yearned to convey to [Charles Darwin] how marvelously his simple idea has flowered and itself evolved, informing countless new fields of inquiry, and to share with him the scientific news that would have eased his troubled mind: Earth is old.

An extraordinary retelling of the history of both the Earth and our understanding of it, which will stretch and stagger your temporal imagination.

… the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions.

A refreshing and unromantic take on the history of our species heavily influenced by the author’s vipassana practice.

… in people and in things, there is no such thing as trash.

The autobiography of an acclaimed Zen monk, containing a few extremely touching scenes from his life in the temple.

The rate of change is visibly unsustainable. The profiteers call this process “disruption,” while commentators on the left generally call it “neoliberalism” or “late capitalism.” Millennials know it better as “the world,” or “America,” or “Everything.” And Everything sucks.

Explaining the economic moment we are caught in, its tangled roots, and the challenges of trying to fight our collective, exponential momentum.

I have seen much death in my lifetime–war, famine, disease. I am at the end of my life now. One day soon I will die. The lesson of the flood is still with me. I know that there is no use worrying about death. The important thing is to live fully until the moment when it comes.

A modern Zen master tells his story of hardship and diaspora, showing how Buddhism moved from China to Taiwan and, eventually, the West.

For the 2020 documentary, see Master Sheng Yen (Film).

Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.

A classic collection of essays on the relationship between ideas and society which draws heavily on Huxley’s engagements with Buddhist philosophy.

The product of a bygone era, Ends and Means diagnoses modernity without the despair or self-promotion characteristic of later engagements. One instead feels the vitality and honesty that animated Huxley’s life and continue to inspire readers nearly a century later.

Perhaps this is how racism feels no matter the context–randomly the rules everyone else gets to play by no longer apply to you, and to call this out by calling out “I swear to God!” is to be called insane, crass, crazy. Bad sportsmanship.

An astonishingly good book of poetry describing the contemporary African American experience and how “race” emerges in relation.

Sprawling industrial complexes where armies of thousands [of workers] manufactured products from start to finish gave way to smaller, more specialized plants that shipped components and half-finished goods to one another in ever-lengthening supply chains. […] Once the world began to change, it changed very rapidly.

The remarkable story of how a metal box changed the world.

If we accept that there will always be sides, it’s a nontrivial to-do list item to always be on the side of angels. Distrust essentialism. Keep in mind that what seems like rationality is often just rationalization, playing catch-up with subterranean forces that we never suspect. Focus on the larger, shared goals. Practice perspective taking. Individuate, individuate, individuate. […] You don’t have to choose between being scientific and being compassionate.

A magisterial and heart-felt survey of neuroscience, psychology, and biology which paints a broad but rigorous picture of how and why humans act the way they do–for better or for worse–and what we (individual meatbags) can do to be our best selves.

The book is based on Sapolsky’s Stanford course, “Human Behavioral Biology”, available for free on YouTube.

This translation had a large impact on Pāli scholarship, being the first reliable and beautiful translation of the book in English. Every translation since (and there have been many!) is deeply indebted to Venerable Buddharakkhita’s thoughtful rendering, now available for free through the generosity of the BPS.

On my electric pottery wheel, a lump of freshly kneaded gray clay has already been set out for me, a gift that always makes me feel more than a little incompetent.

The wife of a Soto Zen priest writes about pottery, her Japanese community, American family, memories and loneliness in this gorgeously well-written diary of her year (mostly) apart from her beloved husband during his formal monastic training in Japan.

The book was written in 1990, and Wisdom published an expanded version in 1991 that became a huge success. That version has since undergone several revisions and reprints, the latest being the “20th Anniversary Edition” from 2011.

A shorter version of this book from the 1970s (called Come and See) is available over at the Corporate Body of the Buddha Educational Foundation.

Listen to the book read by Ajahn Amaro here

Then one day, [the young man] utters these three words. When the young lady hears this, she trembles, because it is such an important statement. When you say something like that with your whole being, not just with your mouth or your intellect, but with your whole being, it can transform the world. A statement that has such power of transformation is called a mantra.

A lucid and concise explanation of emptiness and interdependence beautifully tailored to his American audience, this book is based on a lecture Thay delivered at the Green Gulch Zen Center, in Muir Beach, California on April 19, 1987.

“The person” has to be killed before one can be an arahant. If what we call “the person” has not been killed, there is no way one can be an arahant.

Transcribed from talks delivered to the students of Thammasat University in Bangkok in 1966, this short and readable series of question-and-answers gives a lucid corrective to many popular misconceptions and questions about Buddhism.

Zen practice is the direct expression of our true nature. Strictly speaking, for a human being, there is no other practice than this

This modern classic of Japanese Buddhism has introduced several generations of Westerners to the simple yet challenging beauty of Zen practice.

We are a huge and diverse Buddhist family following the same wise and compassionate Teacher, Śākyamuni Buddha. I believe our diversity is one of our strengths. It has allowed Buddhism to spread throughout the world and to benefit billions of people on this planet.

This introduction to the forms of Buddhism practiced today outlines with clarity and ecumenical understanding the convergences and the divergences between the two major schools–the Mahayana and the Theravāda. Especially deep consideration is given to the foundational Indian traditions and to their respective treatment of central Buddhist tenets.

Consistent precedence given to the development of contentment during all activities as well as when settling down for formal meditation goes a long way in preparing the ground for what is, in a way, the direct result of contentment: a mind that is happily settled within and therefore able to gain deep concentration.

Part two of Anālayo’s “excursions,” he continues to explore key Pāli terms, this time exploring Upādāna, Sakkāyadiṭṭhi, Sammādiṭṭhi, Saṅkhārā, Vitakka, Yoniso Manasikāra, Vipassanā, Samatha & Vipassanā, Samādhi, Viveka, Vossagga, and Suññatā.

These two complementary perspectives on happiness — distinguishing between unwholesome and wholesome types and treating the stages of development of its wholesome manifestations — run like a red thread through the entire compass of the teachings in the Pāli discourses, from instructions on basic morality through the path of mental purification all the way up to full awakening.

Bhikkhu Anālayo analyzes a dozen key doctrinal terms in depth: exploring their meaning, nature, imagery and importance.

Walpola Rahula’s book has had a dramatic impact on the shape of Buddhist thought in the West but its interest is far from merely historical: it remains one of the most lucid and sympathetic introductions available in English, even today. Recommended for newcomers to Buddhism or anyone looking for a solid grounding in Buddhist doctrine.

You can also find the book read out loud on YouTube, or you can order a physical copy of the book for free by contacting the Corporate Body of the Buddha Educational Foundation.

An open-source version can be read online for free at Reading Faithfully or via the links compiled online, but the real book is still recommended for its helpful redactions and notes.

I have referenced the fourth edition on this site, but the newest available version should be preferred.

Note: The above PDF link is missing Chapter 40. You can read the missing chapter online here.