A meditator's life of the Buddha

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Stephen R. Bokenkamp

"This innovative work on Chinese concepts of the afterlife is the result of Stephen Bokenkamp's groundbreaking study of Chinese scripture and the incorporation of Indic concepts into the Chinese worldview. Here he explores how Chinese authors, including Daoists and non-Buddhists, received and deployed ideas about rebirth from the third to the sixth centuries C.E. In his final chapter, Bokenkamp closely examines a body of fifth-century Daoist scriptures that endorsed a version of the Buddhist doctrine of rebirth, along with ideas of punitive hells and the possibility of a ritual transfer of merit to rescue the dead from them. In tracing the antecedents of these scriptures, Bokenkamp uncovers a stunning array of non-Buddhist accounts that shed light on the realms of the dead, their denizens; and human interactions with them."--book jacket.

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Pragati Sahni

"This book contains a logical and thorough examination of some metaphysical and ethical dimensions of early Buddhist literature to determine their environmental significance and demonstrates that early Buddhism can be recognized as an environmental virtue ethics."--Jacket.

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S. D. Tuck

"Chance St. Clair finds himself between the edge of magic and the edge of despair. Animal lovers will laugh and weep as people, dogs, a bear and a family of seals work out their differences."--Page [4] of cover.

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Hirakawa Akira

This comprehensive and detailed survey of the first six centuries of Indian Buddhism sums up the results of a lifetime of research and reflection by one of Japan's most renowned scholars of Buddhism. Relying on Pali and Sanskrit sources and on inscriptions from archaeological sites and Chinese translations of Indian texts, Hirakawa balances his review of early Buddhist doctrinal development with extensive discussion of historical background and the evolution of Buddhist institutions. The inclusion of Japanese and Western language bibliographies together with an extensive bibliographic essay by the translator should make this volume especially useful as an introduction to a large corpus of Japanese scholarship on Buddhism which is still not widely known in the West.