SUNY series in Buddhist Studies
Constituting Communities
Explores how community is defined and how it functions among Theravada Buddhists in South and Southeast Asia.
Mediating the Power of Buddhas
Analyzes a seventh-century ritual manual that provides both a rich source of information of medieval Buddhist life and addresses the ongoing concern of how an adherent can encounter the power of a buddha.
A Clear Differentiation of the Three Codes
The first English translation of the influential and controversial Tibetan Buddhist classic.
Portraits of Buddhist Women
A collection of stories about women from the thirteenth-century Buddhist work that reveals much about women's status in their society and within Buddhism.
Lord of the Dance
A first-hand description of the Mani Rimdu festival of Tibet and Nepal, an event which encapsulates the Himalayan Buddhist experience.
Popular Buddhist Texts from Nepal
Drawing on textual and anthropological research, this book demonstrates how popular ritual texts and stories have shaped the religion and culture of the only surviving Mahayana Buddhist society, the Newars of Kathmandu.
Toward a Contemporary Understanding of Pure Land Buddhism
Explores the potential significance of Japanese Pure Land Buddhist Thought in the contemporary world, and provides a new model of interreligious dialogue as Buddhist thinkers engage with Christian theologians concerned with the present-day significance of their own tradition.
The Buddha from Dolpo
Examines the life and thought of Dolpopa Sherab Gyaltsen (1292-1361), one of the most important thinkers in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition and one whose ideas have excited controversy from his day to the present.
Zen Buddhist Landscape Arts of Early Muromachi Japan (1336-1573)
Explores Japanese literary Zen through the landscape arts of poetry, prose, painting, and gardens expressed in the writings of Japan's Five Mountain monks.
The Legend of Queen Cāma
An English translation and a commentary on the chronicle of Queen Cama, an important but neglected female monarch who founded a dynasty in Northern Thailand.
Buddhahood Embodied
Provides many new translations of original texts formative of Mahayana concepts of Enlightenment and resolves the 1200-year-old controversy between Indian and Tibetan views of the meaning of buddhahood.
Interpreting Amida
Examines the history of Japanese Pure Land Buddhism and how orientalist assumptions have caused the West to ignore this important tradition.
Recognizing Reality
Examines the central ideas of Dharmakirti, one of the most important Indian Buddhist philosophers and their reception by Tibetan thinkers.
Dōgen's Pure Standards for the Zen Community
Presents a complete, annotated translation of Dogen's writing on Zen monasticism and the spirit of community practice. Dogen (1200-1253) is Japan's greatest Zen master.
Buddhadhamma
Written by one of the most highly regarded monk-scholars in Southeast Asia, this book is a modern distillation of the pivotal doctrines found in the Pali Buddhist canon.
Visions of Sukhāvatī
One of the masters of Pure Land Buddhism shows how to have a vision of the Land Sukhavati and its Lord by using the sutra as a manual of visualization.
How Master Mou Removes Our Doubts
This is the first English translation of the earliest Chinese Buddhist text, but it is more than a translation. Keenan shows that Mou-tzu's Treatise on Alleviating Doubt is a Buddhist hermeneutic on the ...
Path to the Middle: Oral Mādhyamika Philosophy in Tibet
Does a Bodhisattva's initial direct cognition of emptiness differ from subsequent ones? Can one "improve" a nondualistic understanding of the unconditioned and, if so, what role might subtle states of ...
The Life of Shabkar
The Life of Shabkar has long been recognized by Tibetans as one of the master works of their religious heritage. Following his inspired youth and early training in his native province of Amdo under the ...
Wholeness Lost and Wholeness Regained
This book deals in narrative form with the theme of recovering lost wholeness—with the perennial question of beginnings and what role a human being must play in order to find meaning in his or her life. ...
Ocean of Eloquence
This book is of particular interest because it shows the presence of the Yogācāra (Mind Only) school in Tibet. It is well known that the Mādhyamaka school flourished in Tibet, but less well known that ...
The Discipline of Freedom
The author interprets Zen Master Shunryu Suzuki's account of Zen practice from a Kantian perspective in order to explore the deep connection between Zen meditation, or zazen, and respect for universal ...
On Understanding Buddhists
Carter unfolds the cumulative traditions of Theravāda Buddhism by showing how one "looks at the world through Buddhist eyes." Presenting evidence from the Buddhist heritage in Sri Lanka, he develops ...
Unfolding A Mạṇdala
Ellora is one of the great cave temple sites of India, with thirty-four major Buddhist, Hindu, and Jain monuments of the late sixth to tenth centuries A. D. This book describes the Buddhist caves at Ellora ...
In the Mirror of Memory
This book studies the diverse array of species of memory in Buddhism. Contributors focus on a particular school, group of texts, terms, or practices and identify a considerable range of types of mnemonic ...
The Sovereign All-Creating Mind - The Motherly Buddha
What distinguishes this Buddhist text from so many others is the timelessness of its ideas. It constitutes a radical attempt toward deconstructing Buddhist philosophy, and presents a feminist perspective ...
In Search of the Dharma
This is the first and only book in English on modern Chinese Buddhism written by a practicing Chinese monk. Chen-hua provides a rare eyewitness account of Chinese monastic life and Buddhist practices ...
Tibetan Buddhism
This volume consists of eight studies, each one bringing to light new material of use to comparative religionists and historians of religion, as well as to students of Tibetan Buddhism. These studies ...
A Dose of Emptiness
This book is an annotated translation of one of the great Tibetan classics of Mahayana Buddhist thought, mKhas grub rje's sTong thun chen mo. The text is a detailed critical exposition of the theory and ...
The Classical Tibetan Language
Among Asian languages, Tibetan is second only to Chinese in the depth of its historical record, with texts dating back as far as the eighth and ninth centuries, written in an alphabetic script that preserves ...
Inner Peace, World Peace
What can one person do to foster world peace? How does one person's state of mind affect the state of the world? How can the ideal of nonviolence be manifested in daily life? Buddhists have been exploring ...
Ethics of Tibet
One of the great contributions of Tibetan Buddhism to the Buddhist tradition as a whole, and one of the things that distinguishes it from the Mahayana traditions that developed via China, has been the ...
Mutual Causality in Buddhism and General Systems Theory
This book brings important new dimensions to the interface between contemporary Western science and ancient Eastern wisdom. Here for the first time the concepts and insights of general systems theory ...
The Buddha Within
Tathagatagarbha — Buddha Nature — is a central concept of Mahayana Buddhism crucial to all the living practice traditions of Tibetan and Zen Buddhism. Its relationship to the concept of emptiness ...
Jewels of the Doctrine
This is a translation of the first fifteen stories of the thirteenth century Sinhala work, the Saddharma Ratnāvaliya written by the monk Dharmasēna. The Saddharma Ratnāvaliya is in turn an expanded ...
Mādhyamika and Yogācāra
Nagao invariably focuses on the core of Mahāyāna Buddhism--the path of the Bodhisattva, the doctrine of śūnyatā, and the system of Trisvabhāva are explained.
Important technical terms used in the ...
Buddha Nature
This volume presents the first book-length study in English of the concept of Buddha nature as discussed in the Buddha Nature Treatise (Fo Xing Lun), attributed to Vasubandhu and translated into Chinese ...
Existence and Enlightenment in the Laṅkāvatāra-Sūtra
This book offers a systematic analysis of one of the most important concepts characterizing the Yogācāra School of Buddhism (the last creative stage of Indian Buddhism) as outlined and explained in ...
Tao-Sheng's Commentary on the Lotus Sūtra
(Chu) Tao-sheng stands out in history as a unique and preeminent thinker whose paradigmatic, original ideas paved the way for the advent of Chinese Buddhism. The universality of Buddha-nature, which Tao-sheng ...
The Poetry of Han-shan
This is an annotated English translation of the poetry of Han-shan (Cold Mountain), a 7th or 8th century Chinese Buddhist recluse who wrote many poems about his life alone in the hills. Many of his poems ...
Me and Mine
This work brings together in a single volume the translated essays of Buddhadasā Bhikkhu, the major interpreter of Theravada Buddhism in Southeast Asia.
Foundational Standpoint of Mādhyamika Philosophy, The
The Madhyamika philosophy of Nagarjuna articulates the basic Mahayana insights in two themes: the identity of emptiness-dependent co-arising, and the two truths. In The Foundational Standpoint of Madhyamika ...
Sounds of Valley Streams
Sounds of Valley Streams is a study of Zen Buddhist enlightenment in nine chapters of Shōbōgenzō Dōgen. Francis H. Cook has translated the nine chapters and has preceded them with four chapters of ...
The Heart Sūtra Explained
Renowned for its terse declaration of the perfection of wisdom, the Heart Sutra is the most famous of Buddhist scriptures. The author draws on previously unexamined commentaries, preserved only in Tibetan, ...
Principles of Buddhist Psychology
The book bases Buddhist psychology on a sophisticated and thoroughgoing empiricism. Jamesean psychological concepts are used in order to clarify the Buddhist ideas. The first part of the book outlines ...
Christ and the Bodhisattva, The
In this book, the authors explore and reconsider the contemporary significance of the Christ and the Bodhisattva. The volume includes essays by three eminent Christian theologians, Langdon Gilkey, Brother ...
The Body
Explores mind-body philosophy from an Asian perspective.
The Logic of Unity
This clear and elegant translation reveals how a modern Japanese thinker dared to show the basic flaw of Western epistemology. In unmasking this limitation, Matsuo presents an Eastern view of a unified ...
Jñānagarbha's Commentary on the Distinction Between the Two Truths
The Mādhyamaka School of Indian Buddhist thought has had tremendous influence in the Buddhist world, particularly in Tibet, China and Japan: in the West it has become the subject of intense interest ...
Masters of Mahamudra
In Tibetan Buddhism, Mahamudra represents a perfected level of meditative realization: it is the inseparable union of wisdom and compassion, of emptiness and skillful means. These eighty-four masters, ...
The Real is Not the Rational
What is real? What is man? Beginning with these two fundamental questions, The Real is not the Rational searches back into the history of philosophy for the development of these issues. It presents selected ...
Nāgārjuna
This is a completely new translation of Nagarjuna's major work, the Mulamadhyamakakarika, accompanied by a detailed annotation of each of the verses. The annotation identifies the metaphysical theories ...
Sand and Pebbles
Sand and Pebbles presents the first complete English rendering of Shasekishū--the classic, popular Buddhist "Tale Literature" (setsuwa). This collection of instructive, yet often humorous, anecdotes ...
The Bodymind Experience in Japanese Buddhism
In a pioneering study, David Shaner uses the resources of phenomenology to penetrate Buddhist philosophy in terms of Kukai and Dogen. In addition to this original and rigorous methodology, his work offers ...
Existential and Ontological Dimensions of Time in Heidegger and Dōgen
In a landmark work, Steven Heine establishes the basis and framework for philosophical dialogue between Heidegger's approach to "Being and Time" and Dogen's doctrine of "being-time. " Close examination ...