The Enlightened Will Shine

This book analyzes the use of symbolism and theurgy in two sections of the Zohar, the central text of the kabbalah. These compositions, Tiqqunei ha-Zohar and Ra'aya Meheimna have been particularly loved by kabbalists. Giller demonstrates the significance of their contributions to theosophical kabbalah.

A comprehensive treatment of visionary experience in some of the main texts of Jewish mysticism, this book reveals the overwhelmingly visual nature of religious experience in Jewish spirituality from antiquity through the late Middle Ages. Using phenomenological and critical historical tools, Wolfson examines Jewish mystical texts from late antiquity, pre-kabbalistic sources from the tenth to the twelfth centuries, and twelfth- and thirteenth-century kabbalistic literature. His work demonstrates that the sense of sight assumes an epistemic priority in these writings, reflecting and building upon those scriptural passages that affirm the visual nature of revelatory experience. Moreover, the author reveals an androcentric eroticism in the scopic mentality of Jewish mystics, which placed the externalized and representable form, the phallus, at the center of the visual encounter. In the visionary experience, as Wolfson describes it, imagination serves a primary function, transmuting sensory data and rational concepts into symbols of those things beyond sense and reason. In this view, the experience of a vision is inseparable from the process of interpretation. Fundamentally challenging the conventional distinction between experience and exegesis, revelation and interpretation, Wolfson argues that for the mystics themselves, the study of texts occasioned a visual experience of the divine located in the imagination of the mystical interpreter. Thus he shows how Jewish mystics preserved the invisible transcendence of God without doing away with the visual dimension of belief.

National Jewish Book Awards Finalist for the Nahum N. Sarna Memorial Award for Scholarship, 2016. From its first appearance, the Zohar has been one of the most sacred, authoritative, and influential books in Jewish culture. Many scholarly works have been dedicated to its mystical content, its literary style, and the question of its authorship. This book focuses on different issues: it examines the various ways in which the Zohar has been received by its readers and the impact it has had on Jewish culture, including the fluctuations in its status and value and the various cultural practices linked to these changes. This dynamic and multi-layered history throws important new light on many aspects of Jewish cultural history over the last seven centuries. Boaz Huss has broken new ground with this study, which examines of the reception and canonization of the Zohar as well as its criticism and rejection from its inception to the present day. His underlying assumption is that the different values attributed to the Zohar are not inherent qualities of the zoharic texts, but rather represent the way it has been perceived by its readers in different cultural contexts. He therefore considers not only the attribution of different qualities to the Zohar through time but also the people who were engaged in attributing such qualities and the social and cultural functions associated with their creation, re-creation, and rejection. For each historical period from the beginning of Zohar scholarship to the present, Huss considers the social conditions that stimulated the veneration of the Zohar as well as the factors that contributed to its rejection, alongside the cultural functions and consequences of each approach. Because the multiple modes of the reception of the Zohar have had a decisive influence on the history of Jewish culture, this highly innovative and wide-ranging approach to Zohar scholarship will have important repercussions for many areas of Jewish studies.

One of the greatest works created by any culture and overwhelmingly the most significant of all Tibetan Buddhist texts in the West, The Tibetan Book of the Dead has had a number of distinguished translations, but none encompassed the work in its entirety. Now, in one of the year's most important publishing events, the entire text has not only been made available in English but in a translation of quite remarkable clarity and beauty. With an introductory commentary by His Holiness The Dalai Lama, who calls this translation "an extraordinary accomplishment undertaken with great care over many years" this complete edition faithfully presents the insights and intentions of the original work. It includes one of the most detailed and compelling descriptions of the after-death state in world literature, exquisitely written practices that can transform our experience of daily life, guidance on helping those who are dying, and an inspirational perspective on coping with bereavement. Translated with the close support of leading contemporary masters, including HH Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, and learned scholars such as Khamtrul Rinpoche and Zenkar Rinpoche.

"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.

This collection on messianic expectations from biblical times to the present represents a fresh re-evaluation of a variety of religious, political and cultural phenomena. The focus is on Judaism, but aspects of messianism in Graeco-Roman, Christian, and Islamic worlds alongside modern political issues are considered.

In this book, two great Tibetan Buddhist masters of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries challenge us to critically examine our materialistic preoccupations and think carefully about how we want to spend the rest of our lives. At the same time, they provide practical guidance in following the Buddhist path, starting from the most basic motivation and culminating in the direct experience of reality beyond the reach of conceptual mind. The root text is a teaching in verse written in the nineteenth century by Patrul Rinpoche, one of the outstanding teachers of his day. In the accompanying commentary, Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche (1910–1991)—lineage holder of the Nyingma school and one of the great expounders of the Dharma in Europe and North America—expands upon the text with his characteristic compassion and uncompromising thoroughness. Patrul Rinpoche's fresh and piercing verses combined with Khyentse Rinpoche's down-to-earth comments offer a concise yet complete examination of the Buddhist path.