Freedom from Extremes

Freedom from Extremes
Author: Jose Ignacio Cabezon
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 434
Release: 2013-02-08
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0861718577

What is emptiness? This question at the heart of Buddhist philosophy has preoccupied the greatest minds of India and Tibet for two millennia, producing hundreds of volumes. Distinguishing the Views, by the fifteenth-century Sakya scholar Gorampa Sonam Senge, is one of the most important of those works, esteemed for its conciseness, lucidity, and profundity. Freedom from Extremes presents Gorampa's elegant philosophical case on the matter of emptiness here in a masterful translation by Geshe Lobsang Dargyay. Gorampa's text is polemical, and his targets are two of Tibet's greatest thinkers: Tsongkhapa, founder of the Gelug school, and Dolpopa, a founding figure of the Jonang school. Distinguishing the Views argues that Dolpopa has fallen into an eternalistic extreme, whereas Tsongkhapa has fallen into nihilism, and that only the mainstream Sakya view - what Gorampa calls "freedom from extremes" - represents the true middle way, the correct view of emptiness. Suppressed for years in Tibet, this seminal work today is widely regarded and is studied in some of Tibet's greatest academic institutions. Gorampa's treatise has been translated and annotated here by two leading scholars of Tibetan Buddhist philosophy, and a critical edition of the Tibetan text on facing pages gives students and scholars direct access to Gorampa's own words. Jose Cabezon's extended introduction provides a thorough overview of Tibetan polemical literature and contextualizes the life and work of Gorampa both historically and intellectually. Freedom from Extremes will be indispensable for serious students of Madhyamaka thought.

The Paradoxes of Freedom

The Paradoxes of Freedom
Author: Sidney Hook
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 164
Release: 2023-11-10
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0520347285

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1962.

Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty

Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty
Author: Mustafa Akyol
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2011-07-18
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0393081974

“A delightfully original take on…the prospects for liberal democracy in the broader Islamic Middle East.”—Matthew Kaminski, Wall Street Journal As the Arab Spring threatens to give way to authoritarianism in Egypt and reports from Afghanistan detail widespread violence against U.S. troops and women, news from the Muslim world raises the question: Is Islam incompatible with freedom? In Islam without Extremes, Turkish columnist Mustafa Akyol answers this question by revealing the little-understood roots of political Islam, which originally included both rationalist, flexible strains and more dogmatic, rigid ones. Though the rigid traditionalists won out, Akyol points to a flourishing of liberalism in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire and the unique “Islamo-liberal synthesis” in present-day Turkey. As he powerfully asserts, only by accepting a secular state can Islamic societies thrive. Islam without Extremes offers a desperately needed intellectual basis for the reconcilability of Islam and liberty.

Searching for the Body

Searching for the Body
Author: Rae Erin Dachille
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2022-10-25
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0231556314

In the early fifteenth century, two Tibetan monks debated how to transform the body ritually into a celestial palace inhabited by buddhas. The discussion between Ngorchen Künga Zangpo and Khédrupjé Gélek Pelzangpo concerned the mechanics of this tantric ritual practice, known as body mandala, as well as the most reliable sources to follow in performing it. As representatives of the Sakya and emerging Geluk traditions respectively, these authors spoke for communities of Buddhist practitioners vying for patronage and prestige in an evolving Tibetan scholastic culture. Their debate witnessed clashes between imagination and deception, continuity and rupture, and tradition and innovation. Searching for the Body demonstrates the significance of the body mandala debate for understandings of Tibetan Buddhism as well as conversations on representation and embodiment occurring across the disciplines today. Rae Erin Dachille explores how Ngorchen and Khédrup used citational practice as a tool for making meaning, arguing that their texts reveal a deep connection between ritual mechanics and interpretive practice. She contends that this debate addresses strikingly contemporary issues surrounding interpretation, intertextuality, creativity, essentialism, and naturalness. Buddhist ideas about the construction of meaning and the body offer new ways of understanding representation, which Dachille illuminates in an epilogue that considers Glenn Ligon’s engagement with Robert Mapplethorpe’s photography. By placing Buddhist thought in dialogue with contemporary artistic practice and cultural critique, Searching for the Body offers vital new perspectives on the transformative potential of representations in defining and transcending the human.

Emptiness and Joyful Freedom

Emptiness and Joyful Freedom
Author: Greg Goode
Publisher: New Harbinger Publications
Total Pages: 229
Release: 2013-08-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1626257302

The pinnacle of Buddhism's understanding of reality is the emptiness of all things. Exploring reality towards the realization of emptiness is shockingly radical. It uncovers an exhilarating freedom with nowhere to stand, while engendering a loving joy that engages the world. This path-breaking book employs the emptiness teachings in a fresh, innovative way. Goode and Sander don't rely solely on historical models and meditations. Instead, they have created over eighty original meditations on the emptiness of the self, issues in everyday life, and spiritual paths. These meditations are guided both by Buddhist insights and cutting-edge Western tools of inquiry, such as positive psychology, neuroscience, linguistic philosophy, deconstruction, and scepticism. The result is a set of liberating and usable tools for Buddhists and non-Buddhists alike.

The Three Levels of Spiritual Perception

The Three Levels of Spiritual Perception
Author: Kun-dgaʼ-bstan-paʼi-ñi-ma (Sde-gźun Luṅ-rig Sprul-sku)
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 626
Release: 2003-06-15
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0861713680

The Three Levels of Spiritual Perception is a revised edition of the classic guide to the Lamdre, a key system of meditation of the Sakya tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. Written by one of the first Tibetan masters to live and teach in the United States, it is rendered in a lyrical style that entertains, inspires, and motivates the reader. A key work for all those who are eager to develop and deepen their meditation practice.

How to Remain Ever Free

How to Remain Ever Free
Author: M. K. Gupta
Publisher: Pustak Mahal
Total Pages: 165
Release: 2006
Genre: Anger
ISBN: 8122309291

In this book, the author takes you on a journey towards freedom and happiness. According to him, freedom is the very fragrance of life. Freedom and happiness are intimately linked. However, the author makes a clear distinction between real freedom and the so-called casual freedom of doing anything as per one's whims and fancies.

Extremes

Extremes
Author: Duncan Needham
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 187
Release: 2019-03-07
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1108457002

Essays by leading intellectuals and public figures explore extreme events, environments, and achievements.

Freedom's Embrace

Freedom's Embrace
Author: J. Melvin Woody
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 356
Release: 2010-11-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780271042534

To be free is to escape all limitations and obstacles&—or so we think at first. But if we probe further, we discover that freedom embraces its own necessities, a set of conditions without which it could not exist. Freedom's Embrace explores these necessities of freedom. J. Melvin Woody surveys competing conceptions of freedom and traces debates about the nature and reality of freedom to confusions about knowledge, humanity, and nature that are rooted in some of the most fundamental assumptions of modern Western thought. The preemption of freedom as an exclusively human privilege with all nature relegated to mechanical necessity is a fatal error that renders both humanity and nature equally unintelligible. What distinguishes human beings from other animals is not freedom but the use of symbols, which vastly extends the range of available options and enables us to envision freedom as an ideal by which customary institutions and norms may be judged and transformed. By carefully surveying its necessary conditions and limitations, Woody reconciles the salient competing conceptions of freedom and weaves them together into a richer and broader theory that resolves old controversies and opens the way toward an ethics of freedom that can meet the challenges of relativism and nihilism that arise from recognizing the historicity and malleability of culture.