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Introduces the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Tibetan hanging scroll paintings (tangkas) in the collection of the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2018 ONE OF THE ECONOMIST'S BOOKS OF THE YEAR "My new favorite book of all time." --Bill Gates If you think the world is coming to an end, think again: people are living longer, healthier, freer, and happier lives, and while our problems are formidable, the solutions lie in the Enlightenment ideal of using reason and science. By the author of the new book, Rationality. Is the world really falling apart? Is the ideal of progress obsolete? In this elegant assessment of the human condition in the third millennium, cognitive scientist and public intellectual Steven Pinker urges us to step back from the gory headlines and prophecies of doom, which play to our psychological biases. Instead, follow the data: In seventy-five jaw-dropping graphs, Pinker shows that life, health, prosperity, safety, peace, knowledge, and happiness are on the rise, not just in the West, but worldwide. This progress is not the result of some cosmic force. It is a gift of the Enlightenment: the conviction that reason and science can enhance human flourishing. Far from being a naïve hope, the Enlightenment, we now know, has worked. But more than ever, it needs a vigorous defense. The Enlightenment project swims against currents of human nature--tribalism, authoritarianism, demonization, magical thinking--which demagogues are all too willing to exploit. Many commentators, committed to political, religious, or romantic ideologies, fight a rearguard action against it. The result is a corrosive fatalism and a willingness to wreck the precious institutions of liberal democracy and global cooperation. With intellectual depth and literary flair, Enlightenment Now makes the case for reason, science, and humanism: the ideals we need to confront our problems and continue our progress.
This is a book about awareness - it's about being 'awake' and in touch with what is going on here and now. Practical and down-to-earth, it deals exclusively with the present, not with speculation, theory or belief in some far-off time and place. The teachings of the Buddha are plain and straightforward, and because they remain focused on the moment they are just as relevant now as they have ever been. BUDDHISM PLAIN AND SIMPLE is the book for anyone wanting to discover, or rediscover, the essence of Buddhism.
A favorite with early Zen practitioners in China and Japan, The Ten Oxherding Pictures uses the ox as a symbol for Buddha nature the original possession of all human beings and the taming of the ox as a symbol for the practice of realizing that nature. This volume contains lectures on the text given by Yamada Mumon Roshi (1900 1988) to his monks while master of Shofuku-ji Monastery. It is the first authentic explication of a Zen text by a traditional Japanese Zen master. A seeker of the way, Yamada Mumon spent many years sharing a life of practice with young monks at the monastery in addition to serving as president of Hanazono College and director of the Research Institute for Zen Studies. Later he assumed the post of chief abbot of the Myoshin-ji temples. Followers of Zen have long been waiting for this book. According to Mumon Roshi, the path of the seeker is not only for the committed specialist. Even the average reader, drawn along by Mumon Roshi s straightforward explanations, will move forward on the journey of the self (symbolized by the taming of the ox) and come to see humanity with new eyes.
This monograph is a wide-ranging and sophisticated analysis of representations in text and image of the English past between 1830 and 1870. It consists of a series of inter-related case-studies of illustrated history books, ranging from editions of David Humes History of England to W. H. Ainsworths The Tower of London (1840). It contributes to present debates on nationalism, highlighting the complex and variable nature of cultural constructions of identity. Simultaneously, if offers an overall interpretation of historiographical change in early and mid-Victorian Britain, focusing in particular on the transition from picturesque reconstructions of the English past to the scientific approaches of the professional historian. Genuinely interdisciplinary, Picturing the Past presents new perspectives on traditional studies of Victorian historiography, literature, and illustration. It explores relationships between text and image, author, illustrator, and publisher, in the production of illustrated historical texts, often drawing on neglected material in publishers archives. The tendency to analyse text and image, fiction and non-fiction, popular and elite publications in isolation from each other is challenged in the interests of a more complex and nuanced portrait of the middle-class Victorian historical consciousness.
A magisterial history that recasts the Enlightenment as a period not solely consumed with rationale and reason, but rather as a pursuit of practical means to achieve greater human happiness. One of the formative periods of European and world history, the Enlightenment is the fountainhead of modern secular Western values: religious tolerance, freedom of thought, speech and the press, of rationality and evidence-based argument. Yet why, over three hundred years after it began, is the Enlightenment so profoundly misunderstood as controversial, the expression of soulless calculation? The answer may be that, to an extraordinary extent, we have accepted the account of the Enlightenment given by its conservative enemies: that enlightenment necessarily implied hostility to religion or support for an unfettered free market, or that this was “the best of all possible worlds”. Ritchie Robertson goes back into the “long eighteenth century,” from approximately 1680 to 1790, to reveal what this much-debated period was really about. Robertson returns to the era’s original texts to show that above all, the Enlightenment was really about increasing human happiness – in this world rather than the next – by promoting scientific inquiry and reasoned argument. In so doing Robertson chronicles the campaigns mounted by some Enlightened figures against evils like capital punishment, judicial torture, serfdom and witchcraft trials, featuring the experiences of major figures like Voltaire and Diderot alongside ordinary people who lived through this extraordinary moment. In answering the question 'What is Enlightenment?' in 1784, Kant famously urged men and women above all to “have the courage to use your own intellect”. Robertson shows how the thinkers of the Enlightenment did just that, seeking a well-rounded understanding of humanity in which reason was balanced with emotion and sensibility. Drawing on philosophy, theology, historiography and literature across the major western European languages, The Enlightenment is a master-class in big picture history about the foundational epoch of modern times.
Srinivas Aravamudan here reveals how Oriental tales, pseudo-ethnographies, sexual fantasies, and political satires took Europe by storm during the eighteenth century. Naming this body of fiction Enlightenment Orientalism, he poses a range of urgent questions that uncovers the interdependence of Oriental tales and domestic fiction, thereby challenging standard scholarly narratives about the rise of the novel. More than mere exoticism, Oriental tales fascinated ordinary readers as well as intellectuals, taking the fancy of philosophers such as Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Diderot in France, and writers such as Defoe, Swift, and Goldsmith in Britain. Aravamudan shows that Enlightenment Orientalism was a significant movement that criticized irrational European practices even while sympathetically bridging differences among civilizations. A sophisticated reinterpretation of the history of the novel, Enlightenment Orientalism is sure to be welcomed as a landmark work in eighteenth-century studies.
"In this book, the Enlightenment derives its special appeal as the historical staging ground for an intellectual ferment across Europe and America. Dorinda Outram places ideas in their widest possible context, expounding upon their social, political, and cultural implications and how they condition society's conduct in a variety of ways. She looks at what "Enlightenment" meant to contemporaries, how it affected day-to-day life - for instance, by the spread of reading, the open discussion of religion and the relationship between the sexes, self-knowledge and introspection, scientific research, and advances in medicine."--BOOK JACKET.
Addressing important issues of the day, this series examines how each of the eight major religions approaches a particular theme. Constructed to be comparative, the books are both authoritative and accessible. Each chapter is followed by a selected bibliography. Individual books are ideal for students at university and A level. As a set they form a complete reference collection.
Poet, scholar, philosopher, and master of Vajrayana (Tibetan) Buddhism, Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche led a life of profound dedication to spiritual enlightenment and teaching. During the final fourteen years of his life his personal assistant was Matthieu Ricard. Together they traveled throughout Tibet, Bhutan, India, and Nepal, returning to the places of Khyentse Rinpoche's youth: his birthplace in Eastern Tibet; the monastery of Shechen which he had entered at the age of eleven; and the retreats where he spent years in meditation and study. At every stop on his journey, Khyentse Rinpoche was welcomed with elaborate ceremonies and outpourings of devotion. Ricard's deeply personal photographs of this journey are enhanced by a biographical narrative that is interspersed with extensive passages from the writings and teachings of Khyentse Rinpoche. Together, these images and texts form an inspiring portrait of one of the great spiritual leaders and teachers of our time. Many masters of Tibetan Buddhism studied with Khyentse Rinpoche, including His Holiness the Dalai Lama, who regarded him as his principal instructor in the Nyingma tradition of Tibetan Buddhism.