New Books in Buddhist Studies

Eric Ripert is chef and co-owner of Le Bernardin on 7th Avenue in Manhattan’s Theater District, author of the autobiography 32 Yolks: From My Mother’s Table to Working the Line from Random House, numerous cookbooks, and host of the television series AVEC Eric. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/buddhist-studies

Rethinking 'Classical Yoga' and Buddhism (Bloomsbury, 2021) revisits the early systemic formation of meditation practices called 'yoga' in South Asia by employing metaphor theory. Karen O'Brien-Kop also develops an alternative way of analysing the reception history of yoga that aims to decentre the Eurocentric and imperialist enterprises of the nineteenth-century to reframe the cultural period of the 1st – 5th centuries CE using categorical markers from South Asian intellectual history. Buddhist traditions were just as concerned as Hindu traditions with meditative disciplines of yoga. This analysis demystifies early yoga-meditation as a timeless 'classical' practice and locates it in a specific material context of agrarian and urban economies.Raj Balkaran is a scholar, online educator, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/buddhist-studies

Of the many differences between the West and the rest of the world the issue of religiosity is one of the most striking. In the West ever fewer people belong to a religion – the number for the UK is now around 50% - and in the US around a third of people are religiously unaffiliated. But elsewhere in the world religions are growing – and in the world as a whole nearly 90% of people are religious. Robin Dunbar – Professor of Evolutionary Biology at Oxford University has been thinking about the reason for religion’s appeal for his book How Religion Evolved and Why it Endures (Oxford UP, 2022).Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/buddhist-studies

Dr. Ann Gleig is associate professor of religious studies at the University of Central Florida. She is co-editor of Homegrown Gurus: From Hinduism in America to American Hinduism and has published widely on contemporary Buddhism. She is the author of American Dharma: Buddhism Beyond Modernity, from Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/buddhist-studies

Corey Ichigen Hess is an ordained Zen monk and body therapist. He lived a monastic life for many years at Sogenji Zen Monastery in Okayama, Japan. He teaches meditation classes and works with individual clients doing private embodiment process coaching sessions, Sourcepoint Therapy, Structural Integration, and Biodynamic Craniosacral therapy at his home on Whidbey Island in Langley, Washington. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/buddhist-studies

Although Buddhism is one of the religious traditions best known for asserting rebirth, the history and scope of Buddhist approaches to the idea has not received comprehensive treatment—until now. This first-ever guide to ideas and practices surrounding rebirth in Buddhism covers the historical context for the Buddha’s teachings on the topic, explains what Buddhists believe is actually reborn and where, surveys rebirth-related practices in multiple Buddhist cultures, and considers whether all Buddhist traditions agree about what happens after death. Roger R. Jackson's book Rebirth: A Guide to Mind, Karma, and Cosmos in the Buddhist World (Shambhala, 2022)is, in short, the first truly comprehensive overview of rebirth across the major Buddhist traditions, written by a leading scholar and teacher of Buddhism.Raj Balkaran is a scholar, online educator, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/buddhist-studies

Welcome to this Great feast conversation. Philosophy Professor at Seattle University, Soto Zen Priest, Sangha leader, and Dharma teacher, Jason M. Wirth is the author of Nietzsche and other Buddhas: Philosophy after Comparative Philosophy (Indiana UP, 2019), Engaging Dogen’s Zen and Mountains, and Rivers, and the Great Earth, both from 2017. In a rare and deep conversation, we discuss whether Nietzsche is a Buddha, the problem of ideology and Buddhist identities, advice from Gramsci on good sense, Heidegger’s Zen, the Kyoto School & even Critical Buddhism.Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/buddhist-studies

Rima Fujita was born in Tokyo and now resides in Southern California. She graduated from Parsons School of Design with her B.F.A. and has exhibited her work internationally to much acclaim. As a descendant of the Last Samurai her creative aesthetics is strongly influenced by the philosophy of Bushido and Buddhism.Known for her distinctive style with vivid colors on black surface, Rima’s works are extracted from her dreams and meditation process. They are ethereal and evoke a timeless sense of longing and peace, and yet if examined deeply her images trigger a powerful ripple of infinite emotions. She is inspired by “Nibiiro,” an expression of a very dark grey color from the Heian period in Japan (AD 794 to1185). If you mixed all colors that exist in Nirvana, the Buddhist land of Perfect Bliss, it would become “Nibiiro.”Rima’s life passion lays in her philanthropic work. In 2001 she established “Books for Children,” an organization that produces children’s books and donates them to children in needs around the world. She has created 4 children’s books and has donated more than 12,000 books to the Tibetan children in exile. All profits go to support the Tibetan children’s education. H.H. The Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu and Betty Williams, the Nobel Peace Laureates personally gave her special recognition in 2006 at the International Peace Summit in Japan. His Holiness The Dalai Lama calls her, “An artist who creates beautiful art.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/buddhist-studies

Today I talked to Dean Sluyter about his book The Dharma Bum's Guide to Western Literature: Finding Nirvana in the Classics (New World Library, 2022).Suppose we could read Hemingway as haiku . . . learn mindfulness from Virginia Woolf and liberation from Frederick Douglass . . . see Dickinson and Whitman as buddhas of poetry, and Huck Finn and Gatsby as seekers of the infinite . . . discover enlightenment teachings in Macbeth, The Catcher in the Rye, Moby-Dick, and The Bluest Eye.Some of us were lucky enough to have one passionate, funny, inspiring English teacher who helped us fall in love with books. Add a lifetime of teaching Dharma -- authentic, traditional approaches to meditation and awakening -- and you get award-winning author Dean Sluyter. With droll humor and irreverent wisdom, he unpacks the Dharma of more than twenty major writers, from William Blake to Dr. Seuss, inspiring readers to deepen their own spiritual life and see literature in a fresh, new way: as a path of awakening. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/buddhist-studies

Duncan Ryuken Williams was born in Tokyo, Japan to a Japanese mother and British father. After growing up in Japan and England until age 17, he moved to the U.S. to attend college (Reed College) and graduate school (Harvard University, where he received a Ph.D. in Religion). Williams is currently a Professor of Religion and East Asian Languages & Cultures and the Director of the USC Shinso Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Culture. Previously, he held the Shinjo Ito Distinguished Chair of Japanese Buddhism at University of California at Berkeley and served as the Director of Berkeley's Center for Japanese Studies for four years. He has also been ordained since 1993 as a Buddhist priest in the Soto Zen tradition and served as the Buddhist chaplain at Harvard University from 1994-96.Williams' latest book is American Sutra: A Story of Faith and Freedom in the Second World War (Harvard University Press, 2019).  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/buddhist-studies