Product Description: Encountering Buddhism in Twentieth-Century British and American Literature explores the ways in which 20th-century literature has been influenced by Buddhism, and has been, in turn, a major factor in bringing about Buddhism's increasing spread and influence in the West...read more

Product Description: John Cage was among the first wave of post-war American artists and intellectuals to be influenced by Zen Buddhism and it was an influence that led him to become profoundly engaged with our current ecological crisis. In John Cage and Buddhist Ecopoetics, Peter Jaeger asks: what did Buddhism mean to Cage? And how did his understanding of Buddhist philosophy impact on his representation of nature? Following Cage's own creative innovations in the poem-essay form and his use of the ancient Chinese text, the I Ching to shape his music and writing, this book outlines a new critical language that reconfigures writing and silence...read more

Product Description: These translations of The Precious Scroll of the Three Lives of Mulian and Woman Huang Recites the Diamond Sutra are late-nineteenth-century examples of baojuan (literally, "precious scrolls"), a Chinese folk genre featuring alternating verse and prose that was used by monks to illustrate religious precepts for lay listeners...read more

Looks at a variety of Buddhist sacred writings as literature and includes insights from literary theory.Buddhist Scriptures as Literature explores the drama, lyricism, and compelling storylines in Buddhist sacred writings, while illustrating how rhetoric and ideology are at work in shaping readers’ reactions. Ralph Flores argues that the Buddha’s life story itself follows an archetypal quest-romance pattern: regal surroundings are abandoned and the ensuing feats are heroic. The story can be read as an epic, but it also has a comic plot: confusions and trials until the Prince becomes utterly selfless, having found his true element―nirvana. Making use of contemporary literary theory, Flores offers new readings of texts such as the Nikāyas, the Dhammapada, the Heart Sutra, Zen koans, Shantideva’s Way of the Bodhisattva, and the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Understanding these works as literature deepens our sense of the unfolding of their teachings, of their exuberant histories, and of their relevance for contemporary life.

The authors apply Buddhist principles to modern fantasy writing, including the works of J. R. R. Tolkien, Philip Pullman, and Ursula K. Le Guin, among others. Original.

Product Description: One of the more intriguing developments within medieval Japanese literature is the incorporation into the teaching of waka poetry of the practices of initiation ceremonies and secret transmissions found in esoteric Buddhism. The main figure in this development was the obscure thirteenth-century poet Fujiwara Tameaki, grandson of the famous poet Fujiwara Teika and a priest in a tantric Buddhist sect...read more

Product Description: While Tamil-speaking South India is celebrated for its preservation of Hindu tradition, other religious communities have played a significant role in shaping the region's religious history. Among these non-Hindu communities is that of the Buddhists, who are little-understood because of the scarcity of remnants of Tamil-speaking Buddhist culture...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Oriental Lawrence: The Quest for the Secrets of Sex explores D.H. Lawrence’s engagement with Eastern systems of thought, especially Buddhism and Yoga, which were his main sources of interest. It tracks their impact on his thinking and their influence on his fiction...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Reading Emptiness connects ancient Buddhist attitudes and ideas with postmodern theory and aesthetics, concluding that the closest thing in Western culture to the Middle Way of Buddhism is not any sort of theory or philosophy, but the practice of literature...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Embracing Illusion is an interdisciplinary study of a classic Korean novel. It argues that a work of narrative fiction can be taken seriously as Buddhist philosophical discourse. The capacity of fiction to speak on behalf of Buddhist truths is set in the larger context of how the literary imagination approaches the exploration of reality...read more

Product Description: This study analyzes nine Shakespearean dramatic texts as well as several examples of Western visual art drawn from the sixth to the seventeenth centuries from a Buddhist perspective.

Product Description: According to the contributors to this volume, the relationship of Buddhism and the arts in Japan is less the rendering of Buddhist philosophical ideas through artistic imagery than it is the development of concepts and expressions in a virtually inseparable unity...read more

Product Description: Bevis addresses the most puzzling and least studied aspect of Wallace Stevens’ poetry: detachment. Stevens’ detachment, often associated by readers with asceticism, bareness, or withdrawal, is one of the distinguishing and pervasive characteristics of Stevens’ poetic work...read more

Product Description: T.S. Eliot's deep interest in Indian philosophical systems has long been acknowledged, but surprisingly little exploration of their influence on his poetry and drama has been undertaken. In T.S. Eliot, Vedanta, and Buddhism, Sri juxtaposes the essential perceptions of Indian thought with Eliot's work to illuminate his vision of the human condition...read more