Through a Lens of Emptiness
Through a Lens of Emptiness

Author: L. Alan Weiss

Publisher: iUniverse

Published: 2015-02-09

Total Pages: 190

ISBN-13: 1491753870

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There is no question that entering the third act of life often prompts individuals to reflect on their journey to date, their purpose in life, and their search for self. Through A Lens of Emptiness recounts how one man seeking clarity and perspective in the story of a lifetime learns to discard preconceptions, embrace emptiness, abandon ego, and ultimately discover a path of enlightenment. L. Alan Weiss details how he began his quest to create his life narrative by utilizing Buddhist and Taoist philosophies and powerful tools that helped him define the nature of self through meditation, productive emptiness, and reflective thought processes. Weiss then turns the lens on his own life and thoughts as he sought clarity and understanding, searched for his back story, and explored his religious roots. Included are Weisss reflections on his personal discoveries, the nature of change, and what he gained through the process of revisiting his life story. Through a Lens of Emptiness shares a journal of contemplation as one man embarks on a critical search for the essence of a meaningful life.

J.D. Ponce on Laozi: An Academic Analysis of Tao Te Ching
J.D. Ponce on Laozi: An Academic Analysis of Tao Te Ching

Author: J.D. Ponce

Publisher: J.D. Ponce

Published: 2024-07-24

Total Pages: 190

ISBN-13:

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This exciting essay focuses on the explanation and analysis of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching, one the most influential works in history and whose understanding, due to its complexity and depth, escapes comprehension on a first reading. Whether you have already read the Tao Te Ching or not, this essay will allow you to immerse yourself in each and every one of its meanings, opening a window to Laozi's philosophical thought and his true intention when he created this immortal work.

Paul Tillich and Sino-Christian Theology
Paul Tillich and Sino-Christian Theology

Author: Keith Ka-fu Chan

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-06-23

Total Pages: 239

ISBN-13: 1000905950

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With contributors from different generations of the Chinese-speaking world, the book addresses the relevance of Paul Tillich’s thought in the Chinese cultural-political contexts. Appropriating and transforming different themes of Tillich’s thought in the Chinese context, the contributors reframe the dialogue with Buddhism and Confucianism, religion and science, and religion and politics under the interpretation of Tillich’s ideas. The thought-provoking essays examine the intellectual potentiality or further contribution of Paul Tillich’s ideas in Sino-Christian Theology. The book will be of interest to scholars and postgraduate students studying Paul Tillich’s thought, Chinese theology, and East-West religious dialogues.

A Philosophy of Emptiness
A Philosophy of Emptiness

Author: Gay Watson

Publisher: Reaktion Books

Published: 2014-03-15

Total Pages: 207

ISBN-13: 1780232853

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In this book Gay Watson offers an alternative view of emptiness via a tour of early and non-Western philosophy, taking us from Buddhism, Taoism and religious mysticism to the contemporary world of philosophy, science and art practice.

Merleau-Ponty and Buddhism
Merleau-Ponty and Buddhism

Author: Jin Y. Park

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2009-08-13

Total Pages: 350

ISBN-13: 0739140779

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Merleau-Ponty and Buddhism explores a new mode of philosophizing through a comparative study of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology and philosophies of major Buddhist thinkers such as Nagarjuna, Chinul, Dogen, Shinran, and Nishida Kitaro. Challenging the dualistic paradigm of existing philosophical traditions, Merleau-Ponty proposes a philosophy in which the traditional opposites are encountered through mutual penetration. Likewise, a Buddhist worldview is articulated in the theory of dependent co-arising, or the middle path, which comprehends the world and beings in the third space, where the subject and the object, or eternalism and annihilation, exist independent of one another. The thirteen essays in this volume explore this third space in their discussions of Merleau-Ponty's concepts of the intentional arc, the flesh of the world, and the chiasm of visibility in connection with the Buddhist doctrine of no-self and the five aggregates, the Tiantai Buddhist concept of threefold truth, Zen Buddhist huatou meditation, the invocation of the Amida Buddha in True Pure Land Buddhism, and Nishida's concept of basho.

The Way of the Mindful Warrior
The Way of the Mindful Warrior

Author: William Van Gordon

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2020-12-02

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 153814672X

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The Way of the Mindful Warrior provides a fresh, authentic, and structured path to using mindfulness to embrace living in awareness and reconnecting with our innermost nature of peace, wisdom, and compassion. Mindfulness is a 2,500-year-old Buddhist meditation practice that involves focusing awareness on the present moment, the only place where an individual can truly embrace and experience life. In recent decades, mindfulness has gained popularity amongst scientists, healthcare practitioners, and the public more generally. An abundance of popular books has subsequently emerged providing different interpretations of how to practice mindfulness and apply it in daily-living contexts. However, most current approaches to mindfulness have removed it from its traditional spiritual context or overlook important scientific insights from research into this ancient contemplative technique. The Way of Mindful Warrior addresses this oversight and integrates the traditional Buddhist teachings on mindfulness with emerging insights from the scientific study of mindfulness, wellbeing and the human mind. This book is timely and presents a fresh, easily digestible, and structured path to using mindfulness not only as a tool for coping with the stresses and strains of contemporary living, but also as a means to cultivating unconditional wellbeing and for flourishing as a human being.

The Emptied Christ of Philippians
The Emptied Christ of Philippians

Author: John P. Keenan

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2015-12-15

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 1498221319

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Before the Gospels were written, long before the creeds of the Church were hammered out, Christ followers in Philippi sang a hymn of the Christ who, "although he was in the form of God . . . emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born as are all humans." But this emptied Christ never fit neatly into later theologies of the church, shaped by Greek thought, concerned with being and essence. In Philippians, Paul struggles, stumbling over his own awkward words to express his hope, his eschatological faith, that he might "gain Christ and be found in him . . . and participate in his sufferings by being conformed to his death, if in some way I may reach to what goes beyond the resurrection from the dead." Might we better comprehend Paul's inchoate, even mystical, faith in Jesus Christ with aid from a less empirical world of thought than our western heritage offers? Might the thinking of Mahā[set macron over a]yā[set macron over a]na Buddhism guide us toward an awareness of a truth in the Christian faith that is more profound than anything reducible to historical "facts," or even to human language?

Seeing That Frees
Seeing That Frees

Author: Rob Burbea

Publisher: Troubador Publishing

Published: 2014-10-10

Total Pages: 464

ISBN-13: 9780992848910

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In this ground-breaking and seminal work, esteemed Buddhist teacher Rob Burbea lays out an original and comprehensive approach to deepening insight. Starting from simple and easily accessible understandings of emptiness, Burbea presents a unique conception of the path along which he escorts the practitioner gradually, through the careful structure of the work, into ever more mystical levels of insight. Through its precise instructions, illuminating exercises and discussions that address the subtleties of both practice and understanding, Seeing That Frees opens up for the committed meditator all the profundity of the Buddha's radical teachings on emptiness. This is a book that will take time to digest and will serve as a lifelong companion on the path, leading the reader, as it does, progressively deeper into the territory of liberation. From the Foreword by Joseph Goldstein: "Rob Burbea, in this remarkable book, proves to be a wonderfully skilled guide in exploring the understanding of emptiness as the key insight in transforming our lives... It is rare to find a book that explores so deeply the philosophical underpinnings of awakening at the same time as offering the practical means to realize it."

Buddhist Foundations of Mindfulness
Buddhist Foundations of Mindfulness

Author: Edo Shonin

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2015-08-27

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 3319185918

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This book explores a wide range of mindfulness and meditative practices and traditions across Buddhism. It deepens contemporary understanding of mindfulness by examining its relationship with key Buddhist teachings, such as the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eight-Fold Path. In addition, the volume explores how traditional mindfulness can be more meaningfully incorporated into current psychological research and clinical practice with individuals and groups (e.g., through the Buddhist Psychological Model). Key topics featured in this volume include: Ethics and mindfulness in Pāli Buddhism and their implications for secular mindfulness-based applications. Mindfulness of emptiness and the emptiness of mindfulness. Buddhist teachings that support the psychological principles in a mindfulness program. A practical contextualization and explanatory framework for mindfulness-based interventions. Mindfulness in an authentic, transformative, everyday Zen practice. Pristine mindfulness. Buddhist Foundations of Mindfulness is an indispensable resource for clinical psychologists, and affiliated medical and mental health professionals, including specialists in complementary and alternative medicine as well as social work as well as teachers of Buddhism and meditation.

Naked Seeing
Naked Seeing

Author: Christopher Hatchell

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2014-09-03

Total Pages: 497

ISBN-13: 0199982929

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Buddhism is in many ways a visual tradition, with its well-known practices of visualization, its visual arts, its epistemological writings that discuss the act of seeing, and its literature filled with images and metaphors of light. Some Buddhist traditions are also visionary, advocating practices by which meditators seek visions that arise before their eyes. Naked Seeing investigates such practices in the context of two major esoteric traditions, the Wheel of Time (Kalacakra) and the Great Perfection (Dzogchen). Both of these experimented with sensory deprivation, and developed yogas involving long periods of dwelling in dark rooms or gazing at the open sky. These produced unusual experiences of seeing, which were used to pursue some of the classic Buddhist questions about appearances, emptiness, and the nature of reality. Along the way, these practices gave rise to provocative ideas and suggested that, rather than being apprehended through internal insight, religious truths might also be seen in the exterior world-realized through the gateway of the eyes. Christopher Hatchell presents the intellectual and literary histories of these practices, and also explores the meditative techniques and physiology that underlie their distinctive visionary experiences. The book also offers for the first time complete English translations of three major Tibetan texts on visionary practice: a Kalacakra treatise by Yumo Mikyo Dorjé, The Lamp Illuminating Emptiness, a Nyingma Great Perfection work called The Tantra of the Blazing Lamps, and a Bön Great Perfection work called Advice on the Six Lamps, along with a detailed commentary on this by Drugom Gyalwa Yungdrung.