The Tibetan Book of the Deadis the most famous Buddhist text in the West, having sold more than a million copies since it was first published in English in 1927. Carl Jung wrote a commentary on it, ...Timothy Leary redesigned it as a guidebook for an acid trip, and the Beatles quoted Leary's version in their song "Tomorrow Never Knows." More recently, the book has been adopted by the hospice movement, enshrined by Penguin Classics, and made into an audiobook read by Richard Gere. Yet, as acclaimed writer and scholar of Buddhism Donald Lopez writes, "The Tibetan Book of the Deadis not really Tibetan, it is not really a book, and it is not really about death." In this compelling introduction and short history, Lopez tells the strange story of how a relatively obscure and malleable collection of Buddhist texts of uncertain origin came to be so revered--and so misunderstood--in the West.
The central character in this story is Walter Evans-Wentz (1878-1965), an eccentric scholar and spiritual seeker from Trenton, New Jersey, who, despite not knowing the Tibetan language and never visiting the country, crafted and namedThe Tibetan Book of the Dead. In fact, Lopez argues, Evans-Wentz's book is much more American than Tibetan, owing a greater debt to Theosophy and Madame Blavatsky than to the lamas of the Land of Snows. Indeed, Lopez suggests that the book's perennial appeal stems not only from its origins in magical and mysterious Tibet, but also from the way Evans-Wentz translated the text into the language of a very American spirituality.
This book explores knightly stories of medieval manners and is a commentary on what people in the middle ages wore, how they prayed and what they hoped for in this life and the next. These stories ...range from the shockingly bawdy to the deeply pious, and often end with morals about the ways women can avoid 'blame, shame, and defame'.
This sweeping survey of the history of Kabbalah in Italy represents a major contribution from one of the world's foremost Kabbalah scholars. The first to focus attention on a specific center of ...Kabbalah, Moshe Idel charts the ways that Kabbalistic thought and literature developed in Italy and how its unique geographical situation facilitated the arrival of both Spanish and Byzantine Kabbalah.
Idel analyzes the work of three major Kabbalists-Abraham Abulafia, Menahem Recanati, and Yohanan Alemanno-who represent diverse schools of thought: the ecstatic, the theosophical-theurgical, and the astromagical. Directing special attention to the interactions and tensions among these forms of Jewish Kabbalah and the nascent Christian Kabbalah, Idel brings to light the rich history of Kabbalah in Italy and the powerful influence of this important center on the emergence of Christian Kabbalah and European occultism in general.
The widespread acknowledgement of Kiarostami as a global auteur provides us with a background against which to reconsider one of his most local films as well as one of the most important ...representations of children in Iranian cinema. When interpreting Where Is the Friend’s House?, many critics and scholars see metaphysical references in the simple act of a child attempting to overcome obstacles put in his way by adults. But any mystical reading of the film runs the risk of closing off consideration of Kiarostami’s endeavour to offer a cognitive map of a crucial moment in Iranian history. This study aims to rethink the film, focusing on Kiarostami’s depiction of social conflicts through an exploration of quotidian spaces and a portrayal of simple objects such as doors, windows and homework notebooks. Abbas Kiarostami, in creating such a microcosmic space, was following great Iranian thinkers and poets such as Hafez in expressing his contestation of the dominant ideologies of post-1979 Iran.
Westphall examines Eadmer of Canterbury's Liber de excellentia Virginis Mariae and the Middle English translation of Meditationes Vitae Christi. Michigan State University Manuscript, produced ...probably around the middle of the fifteenth century, contains one text only, a Middle English translation of the widely-circulated Latin devotional text, the Meditationes vitae Christi (Meditationes). Through the earlier part of its transmission history, the Meditationes was attributed to Saint Bonaventure, but we believe today that it was produced by the Franciscan friar Johannes de Caulibus in the first quarter of the fourteenth century.
In his metaphysics Francis of Marchia (~1290-1344) introduces for the first time, on the basis of a freshly revised doctrine of the transcendentals, a systematic division of general and special ...metaphysics, a significant development for the subsequent history of metaphysics.
This commentary exists in two versions:The major version is contained in 17 manuscripts and the critical edition of it is being prepared by a team of specialists led by Prof. Tiziana Suarez-Nani of ...the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. A minor version is found in one Vatican manuscript and is being edited by Prof. Em. Girard J. Etzkorn. The texts edited in this volume all deal with creation, and investigate such central philosophical and theological issues as action, production, and causality, being and nothingness, the nature of time, Gods relation to the world he created, and the distinction between Gods creation and Gods conservation of the world. Typical of this section of Sentences commentaries is a discussion of the eternity of the world (q. 12), in which Marchia defends the (counterfactual) possibility of the worlds eternality as well as the possibility of an actual infinite. Somewhat more unusual for this part of a medieval Sentences commentary is Marchias highly detailed discussion of the problem of universals and the validity of syllogistic argumentation, all of this part of Marchias attempt to determine whether creation can be demonstrated about God (q. 1). Throughout these twelve questions, Marchia challenges the ideas of some of the later Middle Ages best minds, including Peter Auriol, Durand of St. Pourçain, John Duns Scotus, Henry of Ghent, and Giles of Rome.
This commentary exists in two versions: The major version is contained in 17 manuscripts and the critical edition of it is being prepared by a team of specialists led by Prof. Tiziana Suarez-Nani of ...the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. A minor version is found in one Vatican manuscript and is being edited by Prof. Em. Girard J. Etzkorn. The texts edited in this volume all deal with creation, and investigate such central philosophical and theological issues as action, production, and causality, being and nothingness, the nature of time, God’s relation to the world he created, and the distinction between God’s creation and God’s conservation of the world. Typical of this section of Sentences commentaries is a discussion of the eternity of the world (q. 12), in which Marchia defends the (counterfactual) possibility of the world’s eternality as well as the possibility of an actual infinite. Somewhat more unusual for this part of a medieval Sentences commentary is Marchia’s highly detailed discussion of the problem of universals and the validity of syllogistic argumentation, all of this part of Marchia’s attempt to determine whether creation can be demonstrated about God (q. 1). Throughout these twelve questions, Marchia challenges the ideas of some of the later Middle Ages’ best minds, including Peter Auriol, Durand of St. Pourçain, John Duns Scotus, Henry of Ghent, and Giles of Rome.
Reduced Price!Now only € 40,00 instead of € 80,00This commentary exists in two versions:The major version is contained in 17 manuscripts and the critical edition of it is being prepared by a team of ...specialists led by Prof. Tiziana Suarez-Nani of the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. A minor version is found in one Vatican manuscript and is being edited by Prof. Em. Girard J. Etzkorn. The texts edited in this volume all deal with creation, and investigate such central philosophical and theological issues as action, production, and causality, being and nothingness, the nature of time, God's relation to the world he created, and the distinction between God's creation and God's conservation of the world. Typical of this section of Sentences commentaries is a discussion of the eternity of the world (q. 12), in which Marchia defends the (counterfactual) possibility of the world's eternality as well as the possibility of an actual infinite. Somewhat more unusual for this part of a medieval Sentences commentary is Marchia's highly detailed discussion of the problem of universals and the validity of syllogistic argumentation, all of this part of Marchia's attempt to determine whether creation can be demonstrated about God (q. 1). Throughout these twelve questions, Marchia challenges the ideas of some of the later Middle Ages' best minds, including Peter Auriol, Durand of St. Pourçain, John Duns Scotus, Henry of Ghent, and Giles of Rome.
