Ronald Y. Nakasone – författare

The Huayan scholar-monk Fazang (643-712) formulated, with the ‘Ten Subtle and Unimpeded Dharma-Gates’ of Pratītyasamutpāda, or ‘Ten Dharma-Gates,’ a series of cognitive and affective paradigms that describe how the Enlightenment-Mind apprehends reality. These patterns, in turn, model the way Buddhists understand, explain, configure, reflection, imagine, and engage the world. The basis for these paradigms is the truth and experience of pratītyasamutpāda, ‘dependent-co-arising,’ which the Buddha intuited.This book traces the origins and unfolding of the insight of an interdependent and multi-centered reality, which Fazang crystallizes with the ‘Ten Dharma-Gates,’ and employs that insight to reflect on modern ethical and moral concerns, curriculum design, and aesthetics. Examination of the presuppositions of Buddhist thought—distinguishing it from the certainty of absolute-centered ideologies that subsume all meaning and values—should be of interest to academics. Aestheticians, artists, and Buddhist devotees will appreciate the intuitive sources of Buddhism. This book opens new vistas for Buddhist studies.

A resource ideal for students as well as general readers, this two-volume encyclopedia examines the diversity of the Asian American and Pacific Islander spiritual experience.Despite constituting a fairly small proportion of the U.S. population—roughly 5 percent—Asian Americans are a widely diverse group with equally heterogeneous religious beliefs and traditions. This encyclopedia provides a single source for authoritative information on the Asian American and Pacific Islander religious experience, addressing South Asian Americans, such as Indian Americans and Pakistani Americans; East Asian Americans, including Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, and Korean Americans; and Southeast Asian Americans, whose ethnicities include Filipino Americans, Thai Americans, and Vietnamese Americans. Pacific Islanders include Hawaiians, Samoans, Marshallese, Tongan, and Chamorro. The coverage includes not only traditional eastern belief systems and traditions such as Buddhism, Confucianism, and Hinduism as well as Micronesian and Polynesian religious traditions in the United States, but also the culture and religious rituals of Asian American Christians.