What is Buddhist meditation? What is going on—and what should be going on—behind the closed or lowered eyelids of the Buddha or Buddhist adept seated in meditation? And in what ways and to what ends have the answers to these questions mattered for Buddhists themselves? Focusing on early medieval China, this book takes up these questions through a cultural history of the earliest traditions of Buddhist meditation (chan), before the rise of the Chan (Zen) School in the eighth century. In sharp contrast to what would become typical in the later Chan School, early Chinese Buddhists approached the ancient Buddhist practice of meditation primarily as a way of gaining access to a world of enigmatic but potentially meaningful visionary experiences. In Chan Before Chan, Eric Greene brings this approach to meditation to life with a focus on how medieval Chinese Buddhists interpreted their own and others’ visionary experiences and the nature of the authority they ascribed to them. Drawing from hagiography, ritual manuals, material culture, and the many hitherto rarely studied meditation manuals translated from Indic sources into Chinese or composed in China in the 400s, Greene argues that during this era meditation and the mastery of meditation came for the first time to occupy a real place in the Chinese Buddhist social world. Heirs to wider traditions that had been shared across India and Central Asia, early medieval Chinese Buddhists conceived of “chan” as something that would produce a special state of visionary sensitivity. The concrete visionary experiences that resulted from meditation were understood as things that could then be interpreted, by a qualified master, as indicative of the mediator’s purity or impurity. Buddhist meditation, though an elite discipline that only a small number of Chinese Buddhists themselves undertook, was thus in practice and in theory constitutively integrated into the cultic worlds of divination and “repentance” (chanhui) that were so important within the medieval Chinese religious world as a whole.
In the early 400s, numerous Indian and Central Asian Buddhist “meditation masters” (chanshi) traveled to China, where they established the first enduring traditions of Buddhist meditation practice in East Asia. The forms of contemplative practice that these missionaries brought with them, and which their Chinese students further developed, remained for several centuries the basic understanding of “meditation” (chan) in China. Although modern scholars and readers have long been familiar with the approaches to meditation of the Chan (Zen) School that later became so popular throughout East Asia, these earlier and in some ways more pervasive forms of practice have long been overlooked or ignored. This volume presents a comprehensive study of the content and historical formation, as well as complete English translations, of two of the most influential manuals in which these approaches to Buddhist meditation are discussed: the Scripture on the Secret Essential Methods of Chan (Chan Essentials) and the Secret Methods for Curing Chan Sickness (Methods for Curing). Translated here into English for the first time, these documents reveal a distinctly visionary form of Buddhist meditation whose goal is the acquisition of concrete, symbolic visions attesting to the practitioner’s purity and progress toward liberation. Both texts are “apocryphal” scriptures: Taking the form of Indian Buddhist sutras translated into Chinese, they were in fact new compositions, written or at least assembled in China in the first half of the fifth century. Though written in China, their historical significance extends beyond the East Asian context as they are among the earliest written sources anywhere to record certain kinds of information about Buddhist meditation that hitherto had been the preserve of oral tradition and personal initiation. To this extent they indeed divulge, as their titles claim, the “secrets” of Buddhist meditation. Through them, we witness a culture of Buddhist meditation that has remained largely unknown but which for many centuries was widely shared across North India, Central Asia, and China.
In the early 400s, numerous Indian and Central Asian Buddhist “meditation masters” (chanshi) traveled to China, where they established the first enduring traditions of Buddhist meditation practice in East Asia. The forms of contemplative practice that these missionaries brought with them, and which their Chinese students further developed, remained for several centuries the basic understanding of “meditation” (chan) in China. Although modern scholars and readers have long been familiar with the approaches to meditation of the Chan (Zen) School that later became so popular throughout East Asia, these earlier and in some ways more pervasive forms of practice have long been overlooked or ignored. This volume presents a comprehensive study of the content and historical formation, as well as complete English translations, of two of the most influential manuals in which these approaches to Buddhist meditation are discussed: the Scripture on the Secret Essential Methods of Chan (Chan Essentials) and the Secret Methods for Curing Chan Sickness (Methods for Curing). Translated here into English for the first time, these documents reveal a distinctly visionary form of Buddhist meditation whose goal is the acquisition of concrete, symbolic visions attesting to the practitioner’s purity and progress toward liberation. Both texts are “apocryphal” scriptures: Taking the form of Indian Buddhist sutras translated into Chinese, they were in fact new compositions, written or at least assembled in China in the first half of the fifth century. Though written in China, their historical significance extends beyond the East Asian context as they are among the earliest written sources anywhere to record certain kinds of information about Buddhist meditation that hitherto had been the preserve of oral tradition and personal initiation. To this extent they indeed divulge, as their titles claim, the “secrets” of Buddhist meditation. Through them, we witness a culture of Buddhist meditation that has remained largely unknown but which for many centuries was widely shared across North India, Central Asia, and China.
What is Buddhist meditation? What is going on—and what should be going on—behind the closed or lowered eyelids of the Buddha or Buddhist adept seated in meditation? And in what ways and to what ends have the answers to these questions mattered for Buddhists themselves? Focusing on early medieval China, this book takes up these questions through a cultural history of the earliest traditions of Buddhist meditation (chan), before the rise of the Chan (Zen) School in the eighth century. In sharp contrast to what would become typical in the later Chan School, early Chinese Buddhists approached the ancient Buddhist practice of meditation primarily as a way of gaining access to a world of enigmatic but potentially meaningful visionary experiences. In Chan Before Chan, Eric Greene brings this approach to meditation to life with a focus on how medieval Chinese Buddhists interpreted their own and others’ visionary experiences and the nature of the authority they ascribed to them. Drawing from hagiography, ritual manuals, material culture, and the many hitherto rarely studied meditation manuals translated from Indic sources into Chinese or composed in China in the 400s, Greene argues that during this era meditation and the mastery of meditation came for the first time to occupy a real place in the Chinese Buddhist social world. Heirs to wider traditions that had been shared across India and Central Asia, early medieval Chinese Buddhists conceived of “chan” as something that would produce a special state of visionary sensitivity. The concrete visionary experiences that resulted from meditation were understood as things that could then be interpreted, by a qualified master, as indicative of the mediator’s purity or impurity. Buddhist meditation, though an elite discipline that only a small number of Chinese Buddhists themselves undertook, was thus in practice and in theory constitutively integrated into the cultic worlds of divination and “repentance” (chanhui) that were so important within the medieval Chinese religious world as a whole.
A brilliant history of the land battles in the Pacific theater of World War II, with stirring personal accounts of the horrifying struggle between the Japanese and Allied forces. The horrors of WWII in the South Pacific extended far beyond the detonation of atomic bombs. In this revelatory portrayal of the lives of the regular infantrymen who struggled to contain the Japanese advance, Eric Bergerud has given us a compelling and chilling record of the incredible hardships endured by these soldiers, and the heroic efforts that resulted in the reversal of the course of the war. Bergerud spent hundreds of hours interviewing the last surviving veterans of this remarkable campaign, and he has placed their personal experiences at the center of his analysis of military strategy. “Aspires to do for the ground war in the South Pacific what Keegan achieved in Six Armies in Normandy.”—Los Angeles Times
First published in 1949 (this edition in 1968), this book is a dictionary of the past, exploring the language of the criminal and near-criminal worlds. It includes entries from Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa, as well as from Britain and America and offers a fascinating and unique study of language. The book provides an invaluable insight into social history, with the British vocabulary dating back to the 16th century and the American to the late 18th century. Each entry comes complete with the approximate date of origin, the etymology for each word, and a note of the milieu in which the expression arose.
This book is an attempt to address two struggles for “theistic educators” (e.g., those who approach their educational vocation from a religious perspective), whether they are working in secular or faith-based institutions. The first struggle is that, while numerous guidelines on teaching excellence have been compiled, the resulting checklists can contain more than a hundred criteria to consider. This book therefore identifies the evidence-based guidelines that are likely to have the highest impact on student achievement, thereby empowering educators to focus their efforts in more substantial ways. The second struggle is related to the lack of resources, which can help educators to view and approach their vocation from a theistic perspective. While there are texts that discuss the relationship of spirituality and/or theology to education, few to date have sought to bring evidence-based educational literature into dialogue with the western Christian tradition and thereby develop a “bottom-up” theology of education. This book addresses this historical and theological gap. Overall, this book is therefore intended to not only provide theistic educators with high-impact guidelines that can significantly improve the quality of education in their school systems, but it also strives to do so from a thoroughly theistic perspective.
One of the major contributions to scholarship on Marx, Engels and nineteenth-century science, Liedman’s work is here presented in English translation and with a new preface by the author.
Ecological crises have never been higher on the international political agenda. However, ecological thought and international relations theory have developed as separate disciplines. This ground-breaking study looks at the relationship between ecological thought and international relations theory arguing that there are shared concerns: peace, co-operation and security. The authors ask what ecological crisis can teach IR theorists as well as what ecological perspectives have been adopted by governments and international NGOs.
This is a new edition of the first comprehensive text to show how the advances in molecular and cellular biology and in the basic neurosciences have brought the revolution in molecular medicine to the field of psychiatry. The book begins with a review of basic neuroscience and methods for studying neurobiology in human patients then proceeds to discussions of all major psychiatric syndromes with respect to knowledge of their etiology, pathophysiology, and treatment. Emphasis is placed on synthesizing information across numerous levels of analysis, including molecular biology and genetics, cellular physiology, neuroanatomy, neuropharmacology, and behavior, and in translating information from the basic laboratory to the clinical laboratory and finally to clinical treatment. Editors Dennis Charney and Eric Nestle, along with their six section editors and over 150 contributors, have revised and updated all 80 chapters from the previous edition and have added new chapters on topics relating to, for example, genetics, experimental therapeutics, and late-life mood disorders. Both a textbook and a reference book, Neurobiology of Mental Illness is intended for psychiatrists, neuroscientists, and upper level students.
The new edition of this definitive textbook reflects the continuing reintegration of psychiatry into the mainstream of biomedical science. The research tools that are transforming other branches of medicine - epidemiology, genetics, molecular biology, imaging, and medicinal chemistry - are also transforming psychiatry. The field stands poised to make dramatic advances in defining disease pathogenesis, developing diagnostic methods capable of identifying specific and valid disease entities, discovering novel and more effective treatments, and ultimately preventing psychiatric disorders. The Neurobiology of Mental Illness is written by world-renowned experts in basic neuroscience and the pathophysiology and treatment of psychiatric disorders. It begins with a succint overview of the basic neurosciences followed by and evaluation of the tools that are available for the study of mental disorders in humans. The core of the book is a series of consistently organized sections on the major psychiatric disorders that cover their diagnostic classification, molecular genetics, functional neuroanatomy, neurochemistry and pharmacology, neuroimaging, and principles of pharmacotherapy. Chapters are written in a clear style that is easily accessible to practicing psychiatrists, and yet they are detailed enough to interest researchers and academics. For this second edition, every section has been thoroughly updated, and 13 new chapters have been added in areas where significant advances have been made, including functional genomics and animal models of illness; epidemiology; cognitive neuroscience; postmortem investigation of human brain; drug discovery methods for psychiatric disorders; the neurobiology of schizophrenia; animal models of anxiety disorders; neuroimaging studies of anxiety disorders; developmental neurobiology and childhood onset of psychiatric disorders; the neurobiology of mental retardation; the interface between neurological and psychiatric disorders; the neurobiology of circadian rhythms; and the neurobiology of sleep disorders. Both as a textbook and a reference work, Neurobiology of Mental Illness represents a uniquely valuable resource for psychiatrists, neuroscientists, and their students or trainees.
The object of interpretation is textual meaning in and for itself and may be called the meaning of the text. The object of criticism, on the other hand, is that meaning in its bearing on something else (standards of value, present concerns, etc.), and this object may therefore may be called the significance of the text. If textual meaning itself could change, contemporary readers would lack a basis for agreement or disagreement. No one would bother seriously to discuss such a protean object. The interpreter has to distinguish what a text implies from what it does not imply; he must give the text its full due, but he must also preserve norms and limits. For hermeneutic theory, the problem is to find a principle for judging whether various possible implications should or should not be admitted. By classifying the text as belonging to a particular genre, the interpreter automatically posits a general horizon for its meaning. The genre provides a sense of the whole, a notion of typical meaning components. Thus, before we interpret a text, we often classify it as casual conversation, lyric poem, military command, scientific prose, occasional verse, novel, epic, etc. The interpreter's job is to specify the text's horizon as far as he is able, and this means, ultimately, that he must familiarize himself with the typical meanings of the author's mental and experiential world. Hermeneutics must stress the reconstruction of the author's aims and attitudes in order to evolve guides and norms for construing the meaning of the text. Ambiguity or, for that matter, vagueness is not the same as indeterminateness. This is the crux of the issue. To say that verbal meaning is determinate is not to exclude complexities of meaning but only to insist that a text's meaning is what it is and not a hundred other things. Taken in this sense, a vague or ambiguous text is just as determinate as a logical proposition; it means what it means and nothing else.
The most clear, complete, and easy-to-understand review of emergency medicine procedures – enhanced by an animation library and more than 1,500 full-color photographs Doody's Core Titles for 2021! Reichman’s Emergency Medicine Procedures, Third Edition is written to provide a detailed, step-by-step approach to more than 200 procedures performed in an emergency or acute care setting. This trusted classic will provide medical students, residents, advanced practice clinicians, and the seasoned emergentologist with a reliable, one-stop procedural reference on which to base clinical practices and technical skills. The Third Edition is enhanced by added chapters, algorithms, clinical pictures, radiographs, tables, and coverage of cutting-edge technological advancements. Features: Organized into 16 sections, each representing an organ system, an area of the body, or a surgical specialty. Each chapter is devoted to a single procedure Chapters have a similar format that encompasses: Relevant anatomy and pathophysiology Indications and contraindications for the procedure Preparation for the patient, including consent, anesthesia, and analgesia Step-by-step description of the procedure Cautions that indicate common problems Alternative techniques and helpful hints Aftercare and follow-up Potential complications Summary of critical information More than 1,500 full-color photographs Companion online library of animations demonstrates approximately 40 common or difficult procedures. Includes both common and infrequently encountered procedures Important evidence-based recommendations throughout Helpful pedagogy includes key information, cautions, and important facts highlighted in bold The techniques presented in this book will dramatically expand your understanding of emergency medicine procedures, and most importantly, your ability to deliver positive patient outcomes.
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