New Books in Buddhist Studies

Anita Feng (Zen Master Jeong Ji) serves as the guiding teacher at Blue Heron Zen Community in Seattle, Washington. She has practiced Zen in the lineage of Zen Master Seung Sahn since 1976. In the late ’70s she lived and studied intensively with Zen Master Seung Sahn at the Providence Zen Center. She received Inka from Zen Master Ji Bong 2008 and received final transmission as a Zen Master in 2015. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/buddhist-studies

Jeffery D. Long and Michael G. Long's Nonviolence in the World's Religions: A Concise Introduction (Routledge, 2021) introduces the reader to the complex relationship between religion and nonviolence. The meanings of both religion and nonviolence are explored through engagement with nonviolence in Hindu, Buddhist, Chinese, Sikh, Jewish, Christian, Islamic, Jain, and Pacific Island religious traditions. This is the ideal introduction to the relationship between religion and violence for undergraduate students, as well as for those in related fields, such as religious studies, peace and conflict studies, area studies, sociology, political science, and history.Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, 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

Stef Aupers is professor of media culture in the Institute for Media Studies at the University of KU Leuven in the Netherlands. As a cultural sociologist, he studies the role of cultural meaning in the production, textual representation and consumption of media. Stef has published widely in international journals on the topics of religion, modern myth, conspiracy theories and the way these cultures are mediatized.We discuss the fascinating phenomenon of conspirituality, which refers to the overlap between conspiracies and spirituality, something we have seen explode with Covid, and now the attack by Russia on the Ukraine.In this conversation we dive into conspiracies, the spiritual turn, the sacralisation of the self, the New Age, Covid, and more. As always, these conversations bridge the gap between the intelligent practitioner and the academic expert and there is something for everybody in this rich conversation. 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

“Doubt is an uncomfortable condition, but certainty is a ridiculous one.” VoltaireYou know too much, yet understand too little. And it’s the same for me, and everyone you and I happen to know.And, so it begins.What follows are a series of posts and audio-casts that respond to this living human condition, bringing together practice materials from non-Buddhism, post-traditional approaches to Buddhism, and the work of Peter Sloterdjik. Each post represents a visit to the Great Feast and provides ideas for practice for those who simply cannot find a home in mainstream Buddhism, Mindfulness, Atheism, or some other form of spirituality.This first part engages Socrates and the Buddha and tosses a practice salad of exiting ingredients for the hungry practitioner.It can be read and re-read here if you still have appetite for more here. 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

Dinty W. Moore is author of The Accidental Buddhist and The Mindful Writer. He is a professor of nonfiction writing at Ohio University, the editor of Brevity Magazine, and lives in Athens, Ohio. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/buddhist-studies

Brad Warner is the author of several books on Zen. A Soto Zen priest, he is a punk bassist, filmmaker, Japanese-monster-movie marketer, and popular blogger based in Los Angeles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/buddhist-studies

Ruth Ozeki, whose most recent novel is The Book of Form and Emptiness, speaks with critic Rebecca Evans and guest host Emily Hyde. This is a conversation about talking books, the randomness and serendipity of library shelves, and what novelists can learn in the editing room of a movie like Mutant Hunt. Ozeki is an ordained Zen Buddhist priest, and her novels unfold as warm-hearted parables that have been stuffed full of the messiness of contemporary life. The Book of Form and Emptiness telescopes from global supply chains to the aisles of a Michaels craft store and from a pediatric psychiatry ward to the enchanted stacks of the public library. The exigencies of environmental storytelling arch over this conversation. Evans asks Ozeki questions of craft (how to move a story through time, how to bring it to an end) that become questions of practice (how to listen to the objects stories tell, how to declutter your sock drawer). And we learn Ozeki’s theory of closure: her novels always pull together at the end so that readers are free to continue pondering the questions they raise.Mentioned in this episode: Mutant Hunt, directed by Tim Kinkaid (1987) My Year of Meats, Ruth Ozeki (1998) All Over Creation, Ruth Ozeki (2003) The Book of Form and Emptiness, Ruth Ozeki (2021) The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Marie Kondo (2014) Aarthi Vadde is Associate Professor of English at Duke University. Email: aarthi.vadde@duke.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/buddhist-studies

Seido Ray Ronci is a Rinzai Zen monk and the director of the Hokoku-An Zendo meditation center in Columbia, Missouri. He is the author of the poetry collection The Skeleton of the Crow, winner of the 2009 PEN Center USA Award for Poetry, and This Rented Body (2006). He contributed to the Zen poetry collection America Zen: A Gathering of Poets, published in 2004. His work has also appeared in Tricycle, Narrative, and Rattle. Seido Ronci is an associate professor at the University of Missouri, where he teaches critical theory and literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/buddhist-studies

Eviatar Shulman's Visions of the Buddha: Creative Dimensions of Early Buddhist Scripture (Oxford University Press, 2021) offers a ground-breaking approach to the nature of the early discourses of the Buddha, the most foundational scriptures of Buddhist religion. Although the early discourses are commonly considered to be attempts to preserve the Buddha's teachings, Shulman demonstrates that these texts are full of creativity, and that their main aim is to beautify the image of the wonderous Buddha. While the texts surely care for the early teachings and for the Buddha's philosophy or his guidelines for meditation, and while at times they may relate real historical events, they are no less interested in telling good stories, in re-working folkloric materials, and in the visionary contemplation of the Buddha in order to sense his unique presence. The texts can thus be, at times, a type of meditation. Shulman frames the early discourses as literary masterpieces that helped Buddhism achieve the wonderful success it has obtained. Much of the discourses' masterful storytelling was achieved through a technique of composition defined here as the play of formulas. In the oral literature of early Buddhism, texts were composed of formulas, which are repeated within and between texts. Shulman argues that the formulas are the real texts of Buddhism, and are primary to full discourses. Shaping texts through the play of formulas balances conservative and innovative tendencies within the tradition, making room for creativity within accepted forms and patterns. The texts we find today are thus versions--remnants--chosen by history of a much more vibrant and dynamic creative process. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/buddhist-studies

In Buddhist Ethics: A Philosophical Exploration (Oxford University Press, 2022), Jay Garfield argues that Buddhist ethics is a distinctive kind of moral phenomenology whose ethical focus is not primarily cultivation of virtues or the achievement of certain consequences. Rather, its goal is for moral agents to shift a non-egocentric attitude about the world from recognizing its interdependence, impermanence, and lack of any essential selves. He makes this argument through investigation into a number of Buddhist thinkers, attending to both pre-modern and modern texts whose genres range from narrative to the more straightforwardly philosophical. While Buddhist Ethics is written for philosophers trained in the broadly “Western” traditions, and therefore engages with ethical literature from Ancient Greece to early modern Europe to the present day, the work’s goal is primarily to show what is characteristic of Buddhist ethics as a historical and also living philosophical tradition.Malcolm Keating is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Yale-NUS College. His research focuses on Sanskrit philosophy of language and epistemology. He is the author of Language, Meaning, and Use in Indian Philosophy (Bloomsbury Press, 2019) and host of the podcast Sutras (and stuff). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/buddhist-studies