The great Buddhist priest Kûkai (774-835) is credited with the introduction and establishment of tantric -or esoteric -Buddhism in early ninth-century Japan. In Ryûichi Abé examines this important religious figure -neglected in modern academic literature -and his profound influence on Japanese culture. Offering a radically new approach to the study of early religious history -c...(展开全部)

This is a remarkable book about one of the most remarkable figures in the history of Japanese Buddhism...Abe's book will certainly emerge and remain the primary examination of Kûkai's life and thought for many years to come. It is thus a crucial read for anyone interested in early Japanese religion and intellectual history... The Weaving of Mantra provides a very lengthy, detai...(展开全部)

The central actors in this book are some reclusive forest-dwelling ascetic meditation masters who have been acclaimed as 'saints' in contemporary Thailand. These saints originally pursued their salvation quest among the isolated villages of the country's periphery, but once recognized as holy men endowed with charisma, they became the radiating centres of a country-wide cult of...(展开全部)

Koichi Shinohara traces the evolution of Esoteric Buddhist rituals from the simple recitation of spells in the fifth century to complex systems involving image worship, mandala initiation, and visualization practices in the ninth century. He presents an important new reading of a seventh-century Chinese text called the Collected Dharani Sūtras, which shows how earlier rituals f...(展开全部)

Madness, sexuality, power, knowledge-are these facts of life or simply parts of speech? In a series of works of astonishing brilliance, historian Michel Foucault excavated the hidden assumptions that govern the way we live and the way we think. The Archaeology of Knowledge begins at the level of 'things said' and moves quickly to illuminate the connections between knowledge, la...(展开全部)

This book offers an integrated critical account of the career of myth in modernity. It takes as its starting point some crucial moments in the eighteenth-century reinvention of the concept and then follows the major branches of theorising as they appear in the work of theologians, philosophers, literary artists, political thinkers, folklorists, anthropologists, psychologists, a...(展开全部)

Jesse Prinz argues that recent work in philosophy, neuroscience, and anthropology supports two radical hypotheses about the nature of morality: moral values are based on emotional responses, and these emotional responses are inculcated by culture, not hard-wired through natural selection. In the first half of the book, Jesse Prinz defends the hypothesis that morality has an emo...(展开全部)

Jesse Prinz argues that recent work in philosophy, neuroscience, and anthropology supports two radical hypotheses about the nature of morality: moral values are based on emotional responses, and these emotional responses are inculcated by culture, not hard-wired through natural selection. In the first half of the book, Jesse Prinz defends the hypothesis that morality has an emo...(展开全部)

This treatise is a look at how social reality is constructed from sense impressions - at how, for example, a "five-pound note" is constructed, with all that implies in terms of value and social meaning, from the printed piece of paper that is seen and touched.

This short treatise looks at how we construct a social reality from our sense impressions; at how, for example, we construct a 'five-pound note' with all that implies in terms of value and social meaning, from the printed piece of paper we see and touch.