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Buddhism For The Rational Mind
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Book Synopsis Buddhism for the Rational Mind by : Conrad Riker
Download or read book Buddhism for the Rational Mind written by Conrad Riker and published by Conrad Riker. This book was released on 101-01-01 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are you tired of the chaos and uncertainty in your life? Do you yearn for peace and clarity but struggle to find it in the complexities of modern society? This book is your key to achieving mental freedom and enlightenment without losing your rationality. Are you constantly overwhelmed by anger, frustration, and stress? Do you struggle with maintaining self-discipline and emotional intelligence? Are you curious about the concepts of impermanence and karma, but skeptical of their scientific validity? "Buddhism for the Rational Mind" answers these questions and more. It provides practical, logical, and scientific approaches to: - Understanding the Buddhist concept of impermanence - Exploring the Four Noble Truths - Practicing mindfulness and meditation for mental clarity - Embracing reality from a Buddhist perspective - Applying Buddhist ethics in modern society - Discovering the path to enlightenment - Solving the psychology of suffering with Buddhist solutions - Exploring karma and cause-and-effect scientifically - Managing anger and frustration using Buddhist techniques - Developing emotional intelligence with Buddhist teachings - Achieving self-discipline the Buddhist way - Approaching death and dying from a Buddhist perspective If you want to live a more peaceful and enlightened life without losing your rational mind, then buy this book today. It's time to embrace the tranquility and clarity that Buddhism offers, without losing your scientific perspective.
Book Synopsis Why I Am Not a Buddhist by : Evan Thompson
Download or read book Why I Am Not a Buddhist written by Evan Thompson and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-28 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A provocative essay challenging the idea of Buddhist exceptionalism, from one of the world's most widely respected philosophers and writers on Buddhism and science. Buddhism has become a uniquely favored religion in our modern age. A burgeoning number of books extol the scientifically proven benefits of meditation and mindfulness for everything ranging from business to romance. There are conferences, courses, and celebrities promoting the notion that Buddhism is spirituality for the rational; compatible with cutting-edge science; indeed, "a science of the mind." In this provocative book, Evan Thompson argues that this representation of Buddhism is false. In lucid and entertaining prose, Thompson dives deep into both Western and Buddhist philosophy to explain how the goals of science and religion are fundamentally different. Efforts to seek their unification are wrongheaded and promote mistaken ideas of both. He suggests cosmopolitanism instead, a worldview with deep roots in both Eastern and Western traditions. Smart, sympathetic, and intellectually ambitious, this book is a must-read for anyone interested in Buddhism's place in our world today."--Provided by publisher.
Book Synopsis An End to Suffering by : Pankaj Mishra
Download or read book An End to Suffering written by Pankaj Mishra and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2010-08-24 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An End to Suffering is a deeply original and provocative book about the Buddha's life and his influence throughout history, told in the form of the author's search to understand the Buddha's relevance in a world where class oppression and religious violence are rife, and where poverty and terrorism cast a long, constant shadow. Mishra describes his restless journeys into India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, among Islamists and the emerging Hindu middle class, looking for this most enigmatic of religious figures, exploring the myths and places of the Buddha's life, and discussing Western explorers' "discovery" of Buddhism in the nineteenth century. He also considers the impact of Buddhist ideas on such modern politicians as Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. As he reflects on his travels and on his own past, Mishra shows how the Buddha wrestled with problems of personal identity, alienation, and suffering in his own, no less bewildering, times. In the process Mishra discovers the living meaning of the Buddha's teaching, in the world and for himself. The result is the most three-dimensional, convincing book on the Buddha that we have.
Download or read book Buddhist Magic written by Sam van Schaik and published by Shambhala Publications. This book was released on 2020-07-28 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating exploration of the role that magic has played in the history of Buddhism As far back as we can see in the historical record, Buddhist monks and nuns have offered services including healing, divination, rain making, aggressive magic, and love magic to local clients. Studying this history, scholar Sam van Schaik concludes that magic and healing have played a key role in Buddhism's flourishing, yet they have rarely been studied in academic circles or by Western practitioners. The exclusion of magical practices and powers from most discussions of Buddhism in the modern era can be seen as part of the appropriation of Buddhism by Westerners, as well as an effect of modernization movements within Asian Buddhism. However, if we are to understand the way Buddhism has worked in the past, the way it still works now in many societies, and the way it can work in the future, we need to examine these overlooked aspects of Buddhist practice. In Buddhist Magic, van Schaik takes a book of spells and rituals--one of the earliest that has survived--from the Silk Road site of Dunhuang as the key reference point for discussing Buddhist magic in Tibet and beyond. After situating Buddhist magic within a cross-cultural history of world magic, he discusses sources of magic in Buddhist scripture, early Buddhist rituals of protection, medicine and the spread of Buddhism, and magic users. Including material from across the vast array of Buddhist traditions, van Schaik offers readers a fascinating, nuanced view of a topic that has too long been ignored.
Book Synopsis The World Could Be Otherwise by : Norman Fischer
Download or read book The World Could Be Otherwise written by Norman Fischer and published by Shambhala Publications. This book was released on 2019-04-30 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An imaginative approach to spiritual practice in difficult times, through the Buddhist teaching of the six paramitas or "perfections"—qualities that lead to kindness, wisdom, and an awakened life. In frightening times, we wish the world could be otherwise. With a touch of imagination, it can be. Imagination helps us see what’s hidden, and it shape-shifts reality’s roiling twisting waves. In this inspiring reframe of a classic Buddhist teaching, Zen teacher Norman Fischer writes that the paramitas, or “six perfections”—generosity, ethical conduct, patience, joyful effort, meditation, and understanding—can help us reconfigure the world we live in. Ranging from our everyday concerns about relationships, ethics, and consumption to our artistic inspirations and broadest human yearnings, Fischer depicts imaginative spiritual practice as a necessary resource for our troubled times.
Book Synopsis Meditations of a Buddhist Skeptic by : B. Alan Wallace
Download or read book Meditations of a Buddhist Skeptic written by B. Alan Wallace and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A radical approach to studying the mind. Renowned Buddhist philosopher B. Alan Wallace reasserts the power of shamatha and vipashyana, traditional Buddhist meditations, to clarify the mind's role in the natural world. Raising profound questions about human nature, free will, and experience versus dogma, Wallace challenges the claim that consciousness is nothing more than an emergent property of the brain with little relation to universal events. Rather, he maintains that the observer is essential to measuring quantum systems and that mental phenomena (however conceived) influence brain function and behavior. Wallace embarks on a two-part mission: to restore human nature and to transcend it. He begins by explaining the value of skepticism in Buddhism and science and the difficulty of merging their experiential methods of inquiry. Yet Wallace also proves that Buddhist views on human nature and the possibility of free will liberate us from the metaphysical constraints of scientific materialism. He then explores the radical empiricism inspired by William James and applies it to Indian Buddhist philosophy's four schools and the Great Perfection school of Tibetan Buddhism. Since Buddhism begins with the assertion that ignorance lies at the root of all suffering and that the path to freedom is reached through knowledge, Buddhist practice can be viewed as a progression from agnosticism (not knowing) to gnosticism (knowing), acquired through the maintenance of exceptional mental health, mindfulness, and introspection. Wallace discusses these topics in detail, identifying similarities and differences between scientific and Buddhist understanding, and he concludes with an explanation of shamatha and vipashyana and their potential for realizing the full nature, origins, and potential of consciousness.
Book Synopsis Omniscience and the Rhetoric of Reason by : Sara L. McClintock
Download or read book Omniscience and the Rhetoric of Reason written by Sara L. McClintock and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-05-10 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The great Buddhist scholars Santaraksita (725 - 88 CE.) and his disciple Kamalasila were among the most influential thinkers in classical India. They debated ideas not only within the Buddhist tradition but also with exegetes of other Indian religions, and they both traveled to Tibet during Buddhism's infancy there. Their views, however, have been notoriously hard to classify. The present volume examines Santaraksita's Tattvasamgraha and Kamalasila's extensive commentary on it, works that cover all conceivable problems in Buddhist thought and portray Buddhism as a supremely rational faith. One hotly debated topic of their time was omniscience - whether it is possible and whether a rational person may justifiably claim it as a quality of the Buddha. Santaraksita and Kamalasila affirm both claims, but in their argumentation they employ divergent rhetorical strategies in different passages, advancing what appear to be contradictory positions. McClintock's investigation of the complex strategies these authors use in defense of omniscience sheds light on the rhetorical nature of their enterprise, one that shadows their own personal views as they advance the arguments they deem most effective to convince the audiences at hand.
Book Synopsis Why Buddhism is True by : Robert Wright
Download or read book Why Buddhism is True written by Robert Wright and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-08-08 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From one of America’s most brilliant writers, a New York Times bestselling journey through psychology, philosophy, and lots of meditation to show how Buddhism holds the key to moral clarity and enduring happiness. At the heart of Buddhism is a simple claim: The reason we suffer—and the reason we make other people suffer—is that we don’t see the world clearly. At the heart of Buddhist meditative practice is a radical promise: We can learn to see the world, including ourselves, more clearly and so gain a deep and morally valid happiness. In this “sublime” (The New Yorker), pathbreaking book, Robert Wright shows how taking this promise seriously can change your life—how it can loosen the grip of anxiety, regret, and hatred, and how it can deepen your appreciation of beauty and of other people. He also shows why this transformation works, drawing on the latest in neuroscience and psychology, and armed with an acute understanding of human evolution. This book is the culmination of a personal journey that began with Wright’s landmark book on evolutionary psychology, The Moral Animal, and deepened as he immersed himself in meditative practice and conversed with some of the world’s most skilled meditators. The result is a story that is “provocative, informative and...deeply rewarding” (The New York Times Book Review), and as entertaining as it is illuminating. Written with the wit, clarity, and grace for which Wright is famous, Why Buddhism Is True lays the foundation for a spiritual life in a secular age and shows how, in a time of technological distraction and social division, we can save ourselves from ourselves, both as individuals and as a species.
Book Synopsis The Buddha Was a Psychologist by : Arnold Kozak
Download or read book The Buddha Was a Psychologist written by Arnold Kozak and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-05-07 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Buddha Was a Psychologist: A Rational Approach to Buddhist Teachings, Arnold Kozak argues for a secular and psychological interpretation of the Buddha’s wisdom, with a particular focus on his mind model and use of metaphor. Kozak closely examines the Buddha’s hagiography, analyzing Buddhist dharma through the contexts of neuroscience, cognitive linguistics, and evolutionary psychology.
Download or read book Mixing Minds written by Pilar Jennings and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-12 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "We cannot find ourselves, or be ourselves, alone." - from Mixing Minds Mixing Minds explores the interpersonal relationships between psychoanalysts and their patients, and Buddhist teachers and their students. Through the author's own personal journey in both traditions, she sheds light on how these contrasting approaches to wellness affect our most intimate relationships. These dynamic relationships provide us with keen insight into the emotional ups and downs of our lives - from fear and anxiety to love, compassion, and equanimity. Mixing Minds delves into the most intimate of relationships and shows us how these relationships are the key to the realization of our true selves.
Download or read book Buddha's Brain written by Rick Hanson and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 2011-07-13 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jesus, Moses, Mohammed, Gandhi, and the Buddha all had brains built essentially like anyone else's, yet they were able to harness their thoughts and shape their patterns of thinking in ways that changed history. With new breakthroughs in modern neuroscience and the wisdom of thousands of years of contemplative practice, it is possible for us to shape our own thoughts in a similar way for greater happiness, love, compassion, and wisdom. Buddha's Brain joins the forces of modern neuroscience with ancient contemplative teachings to show readers how they can work toward greater emotional well-being, healthier relationships, more effective actions, and deepened religious and spiritual understanding. This book will explain how the core elements of both psychological well-being and religious or spiritual life-virtue, mindfulness, and wisdom--are based in the core functions of the brain: regulating, learning, and valuing. Readers will also learn practical ways to apply this information, as the book offers many exercises they can do to tap the unused potential of the brain and rewire it over time for greater peace and well-being.
Download or read book Rational Zen written by Thomas Cleary and published by Shambhala Publications. This book was released on 2001-05-01 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Zen has often been portrayed as being illogical and mystifying, even aimed at the destruction of the rational intellect. These new translations of the thirteenth-century Zen master Dogen—one of most original and important Zen writers—illustrate the rational side of Zen, which has been obscured through the centuries, tainting people's understanding of it. Rational Zen consists of enlightening selections from Dogen's two masterworks, "Treasury of Eyes of True Teaching" (the famed Shobogenzo, Japan's most sophisticated philosophical work) and "Universal Book of Eternal Peace," which until now has been unavailable in English. The translator also provides explanations of the inner meanings of Dogen's writings and sayings—the first commentaries of their kind of English. A compendium of authentic source materials further enhances the reader's insight into Dogen's methods, linking them to the great classical traditions of Buddhism that ultimately flowered in Zen.
Download or read book Buddha's Nature written by Wes Nisker and published by Bantam. This book was released on 1998 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Buddha said that "everything we need to know about life can be found inside the body". Yet most people's spirituality -- whether Buddhist, Christian, or Jewish -- is cut off completely from their body. In this provocative and groundbreaking San Francisco Chronicle bestseller, Wes Nisker brings readers to a deep understanding and acceptance of their biology and its important role in their spiritual evolution. Using the "Four Foundations of Mindfulness", a traditional Buddhist meditation, the author shows how cutting-edge science is proving the very tenets first offered by the Buddha.Most important, Nisker offers a practical program -- complete with meditations and exercises -- so readers can take their own evolutionary journey into their bodies to find the origins of emotions, desires, and thoughts. Nisker provides a liberating way for each of us to incorporate into our lives the understanding, proven by the latest scientific evidence and foretold in the great traditional teachings of the Buddha, that we are not separate from nature and the evolving universe. Our biology is not our destiny, but our way to enlightenment.
Book Synopsis Beyond the Self by : Matthieu Ricard
Download or read book Beyond the Self written by Matthieu Ricard and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2018-11-13 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Buddhist monk and esteemed neuroscientist discuss their converging—and diverging—views on the mind and self, consciousness and the unconscious, free will and perception, and more. Buddhism shares with science the task of examining the mind empirically; it has pursued, for two millennia, direct investigation of the mind through penetrating introspection. Neuroscience, on the other hand, relies on third-person knowledge in the form of scientific observation. In this book, Matthieu Ricard, a Buddhist monk trained as a molecular biologist, and Wolf Singer, a distinguished neuroscientist—close friends, continuing an ongoing dialogue—offer their perspectives on the mind, the self, consciousness, the unconscious, free will, epistemology, meditation, and neuroplasticity. Ricard and Singer’s wide-ranging conversation stages an enlightening and engaging encounter between Buddhism’s wealth of experiential findings and neuroscience’s abundance of experimental results. They discuss, among many other things, the difference between rumination and meditation (rumination is the scourge of meditation, but psychotherapy depends on it); the distinction between pure awareness and its contents; the Buddhist idea (or lack of one) of the unconscious and neuroscience’s precise criteria for conscious and unconscious processes; and the commonalities between cognitive behavioral therapy and meditation. Their views diverge (Ricard asserts that the third-person approach will never encounter consciousness as a primary experience) and converge (Singer points out that the neuroscientific understanding of perception as reconstruction is very like the Buddhist all-discriminating wisdom) but both keep their vision trained on understanding fundamental aspects of human life.
Book Synopsis A Critique of Western Buddhism by : Glenn Wallis
Download or read book A Critique of Western Buddhism written by Glenn Wallis and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-09-06 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched. What are we to make of Western Buddhism? Glenn Wallis argues that in aligning their tradition with the contemporary wellness industry, Western Buddhists evade the consequences of Buddhist thought. This book shows that with concepts such as vanishing, nihility, extinction, contingency, and no-self, Buddhism, like all potent systems of thought, articulates a notion of the “real.” Raw, unflinching acceptance of this real is held by Buddhism to be at the very core of human “awakening.” Yet these preeminent human truths are universally shored up against in contemporary Buddhist practice, contravening the very heart of Buddhism. The author's critique of Western Buddhism is threefold. It is immanent, in emerging out of Buddhist thought but taking it beyond what it itself publicly concedes; negative, in employing the “democratizing” deconstructive methods of François Laruelle's non-philosophy; and re-descriptive, in applying Laruelle's concept of philofiction. Through applying resources of Continental philosophy to Western Buddhism, A Critique of Western Buddhism suggests a possible practice for our time, an "anthropotechnic", or religion transposed from its seductive, but misguiding, idealist haven.
Book Synopsis Religion and the Subtle Body in Asia and the West by : Geoffrey Samuel
Download or read book Religion and the Subtle Body in Asia and the West written by Geoffrey Samuel and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-04-12 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Subtle-body practices are found particularly in Indian, Indo-Tibetan and East Asian societies, but have become increasingly familiar in Western societies, especially through the various healing and yogic techniques and exercises associated with them. This book explores subtle-body practices from a variety of perspectives, and includes both studies of these practices in Asian and Western contexts. The book discusses how subtle-body practices assume a quasi-material level of human existence that is intermediate between conventional concepts of body and mind. Often, this level is conceived of in terms of an invisible structure of channels, associated with the human body, through which flows of quasi-material substance take place. Contributors look at how subtle-body concepts form the basic explanatory structure for a wide range of practices. These include forms of healing, modes of exercise and martial arts as well as religious practices aimed at the refinement and transformation of the human mindbody complex. By highlighting how subtle-body practices of many kinds have been introduced into Western societies in recent years, the book explores the possibilities for new models of understanding which these concepts open up. It is a useful contribution to studies on Asian Religion and Philosophy.
Book Synopsis The Making of Buddhist Modernism by : David L. McMahan
Download or read book The Making of Buddhist Modernism written by David L. McMahan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-11-14 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A great deal of Buddhist literature and scholarly writing about Buddhism of the past 150 years reflects, and indeed constructs, a historically unique modern Buddhism, even while purporting to represent ancient tradition, timeless teaching, or the "essentials" of Buddhism. This literature, Asian as well as Western, weaves together the strands of different traditions to create a novel hybrid that brings Buddhism into alignment with many of the ideologies and sensibilities of the post-Enlightenment West. In this book, David McMahan charts the development of this "Buddhist modernism." McMahan examines and analyzes a wide range of popular and scholarly writings produced by Buddhists around the globe. He focuses on ideological and imaginative encounters between Buddhism and modernity, for example in the realms of science, mythology, literature, art, psychology, and religious pluralism. He shows how certain themes cut across cultural and geographical contexts, and how this form of Buddhism has been created by multiple agents in a variety of times and places. His position is critical but empathetic: while he presents Buddhist modernism as a construction of numerous parties with varying interests, he does not reduce it to a mistake, a misrepresentation, or fabrication. Rather, he presents it as a complex historical process constituted by a variety of responses -- sometimes trivial, often profound -- to some of the most important concerns of the modern era.
