Thoughts On The East

The Eastern religious traditions, especially the varieties of Buddhism, were the last great passion in Thomas Merton's life. His participation in a monastic conference in Asia led to his premature, accidental death. He discoursed on equal terms with the Dalai Lama, and extracts from their interviews appear in this book. The introduction brings together extracts from Merton's "Asian Journal" (Hinduism and varieties of Buddhism), and other short works on Eastern religions written in the last few years of his life. They all combine to demonstrate the breadth of vision that is such an integral part of Merton's lasting appeal, his quest for a deeper unity underlying apparent fragmentation. They might be regarded as steps toward the great book on monasticism that Merton might have written but never did. As they stand, they provide Merton's essential definitions of the religions that so interested him in the last years of his life, and of which he became a skilful Western interpreter.

This book focuses on the interaction and mutual influences between the East and the West in terms of their legal systems and practices. In this regard, it highlights Professor Herbert H.P. Ma’s achievements and his efforts to bring Eastern and Western legal concepts and systems closer together. The book shows that, while there have been convergences between different legal regimes in many fields of law, diverse legal practices and approaches rooted in differing cultural, social, political and philosophical backgrounds do remain, and that these differences are not necessarily negative elements in the contemporary legal order. By examining different levels of the legal order, including domestic, regional and multilateral, it goes on to argue that identifying these diversities and addressing the interactions and mutual influences between different regimes is a worthwhile undertaking, not only in terms of mutual enrichment, but also with regard to intensifying the degree of desirable coordination between different legal systems. All chapters were written by leading experts, practitioners and scholars from different jurisdictions with expertise in various fields of law and different levels of the legal order, and discuss a number of issues with particular focus on either “one-way” or mutual influences between the Eastern and the Western legal systems, practices and philosophies.

Buddhists across Asia have often aspired to die with a clear and focused mind, as the historical Buddha himself is said to have done. This book explores how the ideal of dying with right mindfulness was appropriated, disseminated, and transformed in premodern Japan, focusing on the late tenth through early fourteenth centuries. By concentrating one’s thoughts on the Buddha in one’s last moments, it was said even an ignorant and sinful person could escape the cycle of deluded rebirth and achieve birth in a buddha’s pure land, where liberation would be assured. Conversely, the slightest mental distraction at that final juncture could send even a devout practitioner tumbling down into the hells or other miserable rebirth realms. The ideal of mindful death thus generated both hope and anxiety and created a demand for ritual specialists who could act as religious guides at the deathbed. Buddhist death management in Japan has been studied chiefly from the standpoint of funerals and mortuary rites. Right Thoughts at the Last Moment investigates a largely untold side of that story: how early medieval Japanese prepared for death, and how desire for ritual assistance in one’s last hours contributed to Buddhist preeminence in death-related matters. It represents the first book-length study in a Western language to examine how the Buddhist ideal of mindful death was appropriated in a specific historical context. Practice for one’s last hours occupied the intersections of multiple, often disparate approaches that Buddhism offered for coping with death. Because they crossed sectarian lines and eventually permeated all social levels, deathbed practices afford insights into broader issues in medieval Japanese religion, including intellectual developments, devotional practices, pollution concerns, ritual performance, and divisions of labor among religious professionals. They also allow us to see beyond the categories of “old” versus “new” Buddhism, or establishment Buddhism versus marginal heterodoxies, which have characterized much scholarship to date. Enlivened by cogent examples, this study draws on a wealth of sources including ritual instructions, hagiographies, doctrinal writings, didactic tales, courtier diaries, historical records, letters, and relevant art historical material to explore the interplay of doctrinal ideals and on-the-ground practice.

A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe, Volume II Part II examines the defeat of the vision of 'socialism with a human face' in 1968 and the political discourses produced by the various 'consolidation' or 'normalization' regimes. It closes with pertinent questions about the fragility of the democratic order globally.

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A “landmark book” (Robert J. Sternberg, president of the American Psychological Association) by one of the world's preeminent psychologists that proves human behavior is not “hard-wired” but a function of culture. Everyone knows that while different cultures think about the world differently, they use the same equipment for doing their thinking. But what if everyone is wrong? The Geography of Thought documents Richard Nisbett's groundbreaking international research in cultural psychology and shows that people actually think about—and even see—the world differently because of differing ecologies, social structures, philosophies, and educational systems that date back to ancient Greece and China. As a result, East Asian thought is “holistic”—drawn to the perceptual field as a whole and to relations among objects and events within that field. By contrast, Westerners focus on salient objects or people, use attributes to assign them to categories, and apply rules of formal logic to understand their behavior. From feng shui to metaphysics, from comparative linguistics to economic history, a gulf separates the children of Aristotle from the descendants of Confucius. At a moment in history when the need for cross-cultural understanding and collaboration have never been more important, The Geography of Thought offers both a map to that gulf and a blueprint for a bridge that will span it.

Reproduction of the original. The publishing house Megali specialises in reproducing historical works in large print to make reading easier for people with impaired vision.