Numata Center for Buddhist Translation & Research. – förlag

Translated by Francis H. Cook, this volume comprises three important texts of the Yogacara school. ""Demonstration of Consciousness Only"" is an in-depth commentary on Vasubandhu's ""Thirty Verses on Consciousness Only"" by Hsuan-tsang. It also includes the text of Vasubandhu's ""Thirty Verses"" and ""The Treatise in Twenty Verses on Consciousness Only"", which presents a logical defense of Yogacara doctrine.

Translated by Thomas Cleary, this collection of 100 koans is highly regarded by the Rinzai School of Zen as a model instructional text.

This fourth-century commentary on the Buddhabhûmi-sûtra is one of the earliest texts of the Yogâcâra tradition. It includes an introductory description of the setting in which it was preached by the Buddha; the main body of the text, which treats the five factors that constitute a Buddha land, i.e., the Pure Dharma Realm and the four wisdoms: mirror wisdom, equality wisdom, discernment wisdom, and duty-fulfillment wisdom; and a concluding section of two illustrative similes and four summary verses.The overall theme of these texts is that the Pure Land is not a physical location, but a symbol of the mind of wisdom - constituted by the five factors of the Pure Dharma Realm and the four wisdoms. These four wisdoms, grounded in the Pure Dharma Realm, present the varied structure of wisdom as conceived by Yogacara thinkers. Mirror wisdom and equality wisdom are nondiscriminative, while discernment wisdom and duty-fulfillment wisdom distinguish the nature of bodhisattva tasks and carry them out in the world. Thus the overarching context for these texts is the tension created between the critical awareness and "deliteralization" tendency of Yogacara, and the Pure Land cultus, with its veneration of many Pure Land Buddhas and its hopes of being born in the Pure Land.

This Volume is a collection of two titles.The Essentials of the Vinaya Tradition is a detailed account of the history and teaching of the Japanese Risshu school organized in a series of questions and answers on the precepts of morality, meditation, and wisdom.The Collected Teachings of the Tendai Lotus School introduces the doctrine and practice of this Buddhist school in the form of a catechism. It is divided into two sections, one on doctrine, and one on practice. The section on doctrine contains a discussion of the Four Teachings, the Five Flavors, the One Vehicle, the Ten Suchlikes, Twelvefold Conditioned Co-arising, and the Two Truths. The section on practice discusses the Four Samadhis and the Three Categories of Delusions.

Collection of Passages on the Nembutsu is the principle work by Honen.

The basic sutra of the Fa-hsian School, The Scripture on the Explication of Underlying Meaning expounds the thought of the Yogacara, or Mind-Only School (Vijnanavada), stating that all phenomena are manifestations of the mind. It belongs to the middle period of Indian Mahayana Buddhism and is considered to have been composed at the start of the fourth century A.D.

Contains biographies of three great Mahayana masters, sixty-five Chinese nuns from the fourth to sixth centuries, and an account of the life and travels in South Asia of the fifth-century Chinese monk, Faxian.

Shobogenzo: The True Dharma-eye Treasury (Taisho No. 2582) is the masterwork of the thirteenth-century Zen master Eihei Dogen, founder of the Soto sect of Japanese Zen Buddhism. This reprint edition presents Volume I of the exemplary translation by Gudo Wafu Nishijima and Chodo Cross of the complete ninety-five-chapter edition of the ""Shobogenzo"", compiled by the Zen master Hangyo Kozen in the late seventeenth century.

Shobogenzo: The True Dharma-eye Treasury (Taisho Number 2582) is the masterwork of the thirteenth-century Zen master Eihei Dogen, founder of the Soto sect of Japanese Zen Buddhism. This reprint edition presents Volume 2 of the exemplary translation by Gudo Wafu Nishijima and Chodo Cross of the complete ninety-five-chapter edition of the ""Shobogenzo"", compiled by the Zen master Hangyo Kozen in the late seventeenth century.

Shobogenzo: The True Dharma-eye Treasury (Taisho Number 2582) is the masterwork of the thirteenth-century Zen master Eihei Dogen, founder of the Soto sect of Japanese Zen Buddhism. This reprint edition presents the exemplary translation by Gudo Wafu Nishijima and Chodo Cross of the complete ninety-five-chapter edition of the ""Shobogenzo"", compiled by the Zen master Hangyo Kozen in the late seventeenth century.

Roger Corless (1938–2007) pursued his own path, one he described as a path with heart. This enabled him to bring new perspectives to the study of Buddhism in general and Pure Land in particular. Honoring his life and his contribution to the field, this collection brings together ten essays by his colleagues and friends. These articles cover a range of topics, from the practice of Pure Land to its historical transmission and its contemporary interpretation. Contributors include Harvey Aronson, Gordon Bermant, Alfred Bloom, Ruben Habito, Charles Jones, Charles Orzech, Richard Payne, Charles Prebish, James Sanford, and Kenneth Tanaka, as well as a remembrance by one of Corless’s students, Arthur Holder. As is only appropriate in memory of a pioneer in the field of Pure Land Buddhist studies, this work itself contributes to the further development of research and interpretation of the tradition.

These essays from the fin de siècle Japanese Zen priest Uchiyama Gud?, provides entry into an aspect of Buddhist history that is otherwise little known, the relations that can be constructed between the buddhadharma and radical political critique and action.

Lewis Rosser Lancaster’s vision led to the establishment of the Group in Buddhist Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1972. The Group continues today as one of the most important programs for the academic study of Buddhism. Lancaster’s dissertation on the Chinese translations of the 8,000 Line Perfection of Wisdom sutra informed the program with a strong philological emphasis, and a focus on the detailed understanding the historical development of a text and the comparative study of different versions. His scholarly projects have included the creation of The Korean Buddhist Canon: A Descriptive Catalogue, which continues to serve as an important tool for research into the Buddhist canon. This work also relates to the contributions he made to Buddhist studies by bringing greater scholarly attention to Korean Buddhism. Much of his recent efforts have been devoted to integrating the power of data search procedures into the study of the history of the canon. These efforts include a challenge to traditional views of texts as self-contained autonomous entities with a clear and identifiable history. Instead texts emerge as events, that is, as nodes in networks, ones that have complex interconnections with one another.

Compiled by Vinaya Master Shi Sengyou, these writings (by laypeople as well as scholar-monastics) were intended to protect the Buddha Dharma from criticisms by Confucians and Daoists and the political powers of the time. As noted in the Translator's Introduction, Sengyou believed that ""The Way is propagated by people, and the teaching is clarified by literature.”The work is widely known as an invaluable source to examine the early development of Chinese Buddhism and how this foreign religion was accepted and adopted in Chinese society. A notable aspect of this work is that Buddhist tenets are explained using Confucian and Daoist terminology. While the Collection is a Buddhist work from chiefly the fourth and fifth centuries, it also serves well as a primary source for studies of contemporary Daoism.Volume 2 completes the translation with fascicles 8-14 of the source text; Volume I (available separately) comprises fascicles 1-7.

The late Johan Frederik (known as Frits) Staal (November 3, 1930–February 19, 2012), was born in Amsterdam and said of his home country, “There was no religion there.” While his academic interests included philosophy, Staal’s education focused on the study of mathematics, physics, astronomy, and logic. His approach to the study of Vedic religion and ritual was informed by this background, expressed in his assertion that he was not interested in the humanities but in the human sciences. Staal’s studies led him to India, where he completed a dissertation, “Advaita and Neoplatonism: A Critical Study in Comparative Philosophy,” at the University of Madras. In this period he also pursued research on South Indian Vedic recitation, which culminated in the publication of his first book, Nambudiri Veda Recitation. This laid the groundwork for his massive study of the agnicayana ritual conducted in Kerala in 1975, and the 1983 publication of his two-volume Agni: The Vedic Ritual of the Fire Altar. Staal’s research and writings had a wide-ranging influence on many different academic fields, including Vedic studies, Sanskrit studies, linguistics, and ritual studies. In addition to his academic contributions in those fields, he was a founding member of the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He also contributed to the founding of the Group in Buddhist Studies, which from its advent was intended to balance South and East Asian languages and cultures. This reflects Staal’s methodological concern that East Asian Buddhism must be connected to Indian studies, and that Indian studies must also include Buddhism. He said of the Buddha that he “was either India’s greatest son or one of two the other being Panini” (“There is No Religion There,” in Jon R. Stone, ed., The Craft of Religious Studies).This collection brings together 32 contributions by personal friends and leading figures in the fields of Vedic, Sanskrit, Indian and ritual studies honoring the life and work of the late Frits Staal. The essays compiled here are by Greg Bailey, Dipak Bhattacharya, Kamaleswar Bhattacharya, Philo Bregstein, Johannes Bronkhorst, Jean Michel Delire, Madhav M. Deshpande, Silvia D’Intino, Finnian M. M. Gerety, Robert Goldman, Sally J. Sutherland Goldman, Phyliss Granoff, Stephanie W. Jamison, Joanna Jurewicz, P. Pratap Kumar, Jeffery D. Long, Thennilapuram Mahadevan, Boris Oguibénine, Carl Olson, André Padoux, Sudalaimuthu Palaniappan, Asko Parpola, Richard K. Payne, Alessandra Petrocchi, Peter M. Scharf, Arvind Sharma, Frederick M. Smith, Romila Thapar, George Thompson, Laurens van Krevelen, Michael Witzel, Hiram Woodward.

The Brahma’s Net Sutra plays an important niche role in the development of East Asian Mahayana Buddhism. It is the primary extant Vinaya text that articulates the precepts from a Mahayana perspective. That is, it takes its main audience to be “bodhisattva practitioners,” mainly householders who remain engaged with society rather than becoming renunciant monks or nuns.The Vinayas, and especially the discourse in this sutra, show monastic and lay Buddhist practitioners engaged at every level of society, from top to bottom. Buddhist practitioners were involved in military affairs, political intrigues, matchmaking, and every other sort of “mundane” social activity. The Vinaya texts reveal how the Buddhist community in its time judged and dealt with such matters.The Brahma’s Net Sutra was written in two fascicles, each radically different in structure, content, theme, grammar, etc., from the other. The first fascicle discusses the forty Mahayana stages: the ten departures toward the destination, the ten nourishing states of mind, the ten adamantine states of mind, and the ten bodhisattva grounds. The second fascicle explains the ten grave precepts and the forty-eight minor precepts. These came to be referred to as the “bodhisattva precepts,” the “great Brahma’s Net precepts,” the “buddha precepts,” and so forth. The second fascicle has been especially esteemed, studied, and circulated separately for more than a millennium as the scriptural authority for the Mahayana bodhisattva precepts. [Adapted from the Translators' Introduction.]

The Buddhist thinkers of medieval India addressed many of the issues that are still central to Buddhist praxis in the present. One of the most important of those thinkers is Bhāviveka, author of the work known as the Prajñāpradīpa. Over several years, William (Bill) Ames translated, carefully and precisely, the first twelve chapters of that work, which he has compiled and revised for consistency in this volume.The Prajñāpradīpa is a commentary on Nagārjuna’s famous, and in the view of many famously difficult, Mūlamadhyamakārikā—Root Verses on the Middle Way. Central to all Buddhist thought in one form or another is an understanding that the common entities of our experience are transitory and, therefore, unreliable as grounds upon which to base our own happiness, satisfaction, security, and even our own sense of self. As Ames explains in his Introduction, the Madhyamaka pursues this insight further, asserting that all existing entities are lacking in (empty of, śūnyatā) any "intrinsic nature (svabhāva)."As systematized by later Tibetan scholastics, the Madhyamaka school is understood to have developed into two different forms, the Svātantrika and the Prāsaṅgika, a textbook style simplification that has had lasting influence. In this intellectual historiography where movements require specific founders, Bhāviveka is identified as the founder of the Svātantrika.Part of the neo-Romantic rhetoric popular in the second half of the twentieth century was that meditation practice was by itself capable of leading to full awakening, or rather to an unimpeded, direct experience of the true and the real. That view has become increasingly untenable, as meditators have themselves attempted to understand the significance of their own experiences. Those who have turned to the teachings of the Buddhist tradition for that understanding are often confronted by the (only) apparent difficulty of understanding emptiness. Ames’ translation of this key work of the Madhyamaka school can contribute to untangling much of the confusion surrounding these ideas.

The nature of the Buddha’s speech, buddhavacana, has been discussed by Buddhist thinkers from soon after the Buddha’s lifetime. In modern Buddhist scholarship it seems natural to focus on the textual record of the Buddha’s teachings, but overemphasizing that aspect risks losing sight of the potency of the Buddha’s speech to effect liberation. Comparing Abhidharma and Chinese Buddhist conceptions of the Buddha’s word, Eun-su Cho’s study addresses the transmission and reinterpretation of theories of language and opens a doorway to Buddhist philosophical thought in East Asia. This is particularly important because technical Buddhist philosophical thought in East Asia has long been neglected, and has become overshadowed by academic and popular attention to Tibetan Buddhist philosophical thought. In contrast to the perception of greater legitimacy accorded to Tibetan thought through its association with Indian Buddhism, the doctrinally dense works of East Asian Buddhism have not been the object of equally intense study, yet such works exist and continue to deserve greater attention. Cho’s Language and Meaning offers an important pathway into these discourses.

This volume includes five texts by Kukai (""On the Differences between the Exoteric and Esoteric Teachings""; ""The Meaning of Becoming a Buddha in This Very Body""; ""The Meanings of Sound, Sign, and Reality""; ""The Meanings of the Word Hum""; and, ""The Precious Key to the Secret Treasury""), and two by Kakuban (""The Illuminating Secret Commentary on the Five Cakras and the Nine Syllables""; and ""The Mitsugonin Confession"").

Presents a fifth-century compilation containing 121 Buddhist parables from the time of Sakyamuni to King Kaniska.

Translated by Li Rongxi, this biographical text relates how King Asoka unified India for the first time in the third century BCE and, after his conversion, sent emissaries throughout his kingdom to spread Buddhism.

The Sutra on Upasaka Precepts sets forth the moral code to be observed by lay followers of Buddhism. It comprehensively elucidates the content, practice, and essence of the moral code to be observed by lay bodhisattvas and emphasizes the importance of the bodhisattva practice of lay Buddhists. The aspiration of the laity for enlightenment is said to be superior to the fruition of the practice of both sravakas and pratyekabuddhas. At the end of each chapter, the sutra concludes that lay bodhisattvas encounter more difficulties in following the precepts than ordained bodhisattvas. As such, their observance of the precepts is highly praised in the sutra.

Translated by Leo M. Pruden, ""The Essentials of the Eight Traditions"", composed by Gyonen, offers concise explanations of the eight major schools of Japanese Buddhism then in existence. Translated by Robert Rhodes, ""The Candle of the Latter Dharma"", composed by Saicho, founder of the Japanese Tendai school, discusses the state of monastic practice in the Age of the Latter Dharma (mappo). There are two titles in one volume.

A biography of the eminent seventh-century scholar-monk Xuanzang that records his travels to India and subsequent achievements on his return to China.

This is an account of the travels in Central Asia and India of the seventh-century Chinese scholar-monk Xuanzang. An epoch-making figure in the history of Chinese Buddhism, the Master had a strong impulse to solve theoretical uncertainties by searching for the missing, untranslated original Sanskrit texts, particularly the Yogacara-bhumi-sastra. Violating a government ban on emigration, he slipped out of the empire without official permission. During his sojourn of sixteen years in India, he studied the said sastra and other texts under the tutelage of the Venerable Silabhadra. He visited all the important Buddhist sites and ruins, enjoyed great popularity in India through his learning as an outstanding Buddhist scholar and won the support of the reigning monarchs such as Siladitya and others of India.Upon his return, he was requested by the Emperor to write a book about the journey for his reference. The Record was completed in 646 C.E., the year after his return to the capitol. It was appended some seven hundred years after the time of Xuanzang to include Zheng He's visit to Sri Lanka during the reign of Emperor Chengzu (r. 1403-24) of the Ming dynasty.The Record has been of great value to Western historians and archaeologists, who used it to fill in certain gaps in the history of India and locate the sites of India's former glories. With its exact descriptions of distances and locations of different places, the Record served as a guidebook for the excavation and rediscovery of such important ancient sites as the old city of Rajagrha, the Temple of the Deer Park at Sarnath, the grottoes of Ajanta, the ruins of the well-known Nalanda Monastery in Bihar, etc. Thus it is not merely a book to be studied by students of Buddhism, but also a substantial and interesting book of reference, providing rich information about medieval India for the general reader.

Tannisho sets out to refute deviations from the True Pure Land school teachings. ""Rennyo Shonin Ofumi"" is a collection of eighty pastoral letters written to True Pure Land school followers. This work presents two titles in one volume.

The Pratyutpanna Samadhi Sutra is one of the earliest Mahayana sutras and influenced the development of Prajnaparamita, Pure Land, and Yogacara philosophies. It propounds a particular samadhi, or meditation, called the “meditation in which one is brought face to face with the Buddhas of the present” or “the meditation of direct encounter with the Buddhas of the present.” This meditation is a developed form of the earlier practice of buddhanusmrti or “calling the Buddha to mind.” It also attempts to reconcile the vision of the Buddhas and Buddha-fields of the prsent with the insights of the Perfection of Wisdom school, or the Sunyavada (theory of emptiness) tendency in Mahayana Buddhism.The Surangama Samadhi Sutra expounds the essentials of this meditative practice as the key to attaining Buddhahood. It is written in narrative form, beginning with a grad assembly on Vulture Peak, where the Buddha is surrounded by great numbers of bhiksus, Bodhisattvas, and other beings. The dialogue begins with a question by a Bodhisattva named Resolute Mind, then proceeds involving a number of participants, including Bodhisattvas, Sravakas, gods, and goddesses. It also uses several different supernatural manifestations, such as the simultaneous offering of innumerable elaborate chairs for the Buddha by all the most highly ranked gods present. The grad climax is the Buddha's manifestation of all the innumerable Buddhas of the ten directions. This magnificent epiphany is presented as part of a dramatic hesitation toward the end of the dialogue, when some of the Bodhisattvas in Sakyamuni's assembly become discouraged by the apparent difficulty of the path of Buddhahood being described. Finally, there is the charge to Ananda to preach the Sutra, which is also carried up by one of the many Indra kings who appear in the text.Themes covered in this text include the question of how to account for the apparently dismal spiritual fates of Hinayanist practitioners, the Sravakas, Pratyekabuddhas, and Arhats, the description of innumerable other Buddha lands, the bestowal of the prediction of future Buddhahood and the spiritual identity and fate of women.

Three Chan Classics includes ""The Recorded Sayings of Linji"", ""Wumen's Gate"", and ""The Faith-Mind Maxim"".