Download or read book The Land of Bliss The Paradise of the Buddha of Measureless Light written by Luis O. Gomez and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 1996-05-01 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a free translation of two Buddhist texts on what is arguably the most popular of all Buddhist conceptions of an ideal world, the "Land of Bliss" of the Buddha Amitabha, the Buddha of Infinite Light. The two texts, known to Western students of Buddhism as the "Smaller" and "Larger" Sukhavatiyuha Sutra, explain the conditions that lead to rebirth in the Pure Land and the manner in which human beings are reborn there.
Download or read book A Buddhist Paradise written by Pratapaditya Pal and published by . This book was released on 1982 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Step Away from Paradise written by Thomas K. Shor and published by Penguin Books India. This book was released on 2011 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WHAT WOULD HAVE HAPPENED... If Lewis Carroll had proclaimed the reality of Alice's Wonderland? What if he had gathered a following & launched an expedition? THE TRUE STORY OF A JOURNEY TO A FANTASTIC LAND IT WAS THE EARLY 1960s. The place, a far-off corner of the Himalayas long fabled in Tibetan tradition to be hiding a valley of immortality among its peaks and glaciers--a real-life Shangri-La. They waited generations for the prophesied lama to come, the one with the secret knowledge of how to 'open' the Hidden Land. Then, one day, he came. His name was Tulshuk Lingpa. THIS BOOK TELLS THE TRUE STORY of this charismatic visionary lama and his remarkable expedition. Against the wishes of the kings of both Sikkim and Nepal, he and over three hundred followers ventured up the snowy slopes of the third highest mountain of the planet. Their aim: to open a crack in the very fabric of reality and go to a land we would all wish to inhabit if it were only there--a land of peace and concord. FORTY YEARS LATER, the author spends over five years tracking down the surviving members of this extraordinary expedition. He deftly weaves their stories together with humor, wisdom, and scholarly research into Tibetan traditions of Hidden Lands, all the while reflecting on what this means for the rest of us. "LIKE NO OTHER BOOK I have ever read...a riveting tale of adventure...honest to the real spirit of Tibet...both unique and intriguing...an engrossing read. Highly recommended." JETSUNMA TENZIN PALMO, from the Foreword From Tulshuk Lingpa's Guidebook to the Hidden Land: "DON'T LISTEN TO ANYBODY. Decide by yourself and practise madness. Develop courage for the benefit of all sentient beings. Then you will automatically be free from the knot of attachment. Then you will continually have the confidence of fearlessness and you can then try to open the Great Door of the Hidden Place." FIRST PUBLISHED BY PENGUIN 2011 CITY LION PRESS EDITION 2017 THIS EDITION IS NOT FOR SALE IN SOUTH ASIA, MALAYSIA, OR SINGAPORE
Download or read book Sukhavati Western Paradise written by Kiew Kit Wong and published by Cosmos Internet. This book was released on 2002 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sakyamuni Buddha taught the Amitabha Sutra over 2000 years ago. It is one of the most important Sutras in Mahayana Buddhism. It teaches how a person can be reborn in Sukhavati, also known as the Western Paradise of Eternal Bliss. In Sukhavati, Grandmaster Wong Kiew Kit, explains the principles and practice of Pure Land Buddhism. He introduces and comments on the various Sutras and Mantras that are important to Pure Land practitioners. The book includes: - Amitabha Buddha and the description of Sukhavati. - Majestic grandeur of Buddhism. - Other Buddhas and Bodhisattvas in every direction. - Heaven and enlightenment. - Methods to win rebirth in Sukhavati. - Settling doubts. - Commentaries from the classics.
Download or read book Paradise and Plumage written by Robert N. Linrothe and published by Serindia Publications, Inc.. This book was released on 2004 with total page 103 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Paradise in Plain Sight written by Karen Maezen Miller and published by New World Library. This book was released on 2014 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Reflections on finding peace, beauty, and fulfillment in everyday life, illustrated by the author's experiences with tending her new home's venerable but neglected Japanese garden"--
Download or read book Collecting Paradise written by Robert N. Linrothe and published by Serindia Publications. This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collecting Paradise features Buddhist objects, including manuscripts, paintings and sculptures in ivory, metal and wood, dating from the 7th to 17th centuries. With 44 objects, the exhibition presents an original and innovative look at art from the region of Kashmir and the Western Himalayas, as well as how it has been collected over time. The catalogue features essays by a leading scholar in the field, Robert Linrothe of Northwestern's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, with the support of Christian Luczanits of SOAS, University of London.
Download or read book Why Not Paradise written by and published by Empty Bowl Press. This book was released on 2019-10-10 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. Asian & Asian American Studies. Of all the Buddhists in China, Japan, and Korea, the vast majority follow teachings centered on rebirth in the Pure Land, or Western Paradise, of Amitabha Buddha. All Buddhist sutras are about the mind, the mind and the Buddha, and about reducing, if not eliminating, the apparent distance between the two. What the authors of the first Pure Land texts added was a stage on which that drama could take place. Their choice was an enclosed garden similar to the kind Persians called pairi-da?za- based on Biblical accounts of the Garden of Eden and from which we get the word 'paradise.' When Buddhists decided to imagine a better place to practice, it's not surprising they would conjure such a place, a place where devotees could return to Buddhist basics, a place no more than a thought away. In this small chapbook, Red Pine presents new translations of two of the three sutras sacred to Pure Land Buddhists and has added a preface and footnotes to help readers better understand this spiritual path followed by hundreds of millions of people in the world today.
Download or read book The Land of Bliss written by and published by Motilal Banarsidass Publishe. This book was released on 2002 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: BUDDHISM
Download or read book Explaining Pictures written by Ikumi Kaminishi and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2006-02-28 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Early Japanese Buddhism was patronized by the literate classes and remained a prerogative of the elite until the end of the twelfth century. With the fiscal and political decline of its aristocratic patrons, the Buddhist establishment turned increasingly to lay commoners for financial support, using paintings to accommodate its new, and often subliterate, audiences. One type of preaching, known as etoki (pictorial decipherment), helped bridge the worlds of esoteric Buddhism and lay practice and reveals much about the role of art in the context of didactic storytelling and proselytization. Beginning with the provocative claim that the popularization of Buddhism in the medieval period was a phenomenon of visual culture, Explaining Pictures reexamines the history (and historiography) of medieval Japanese Buddhism. With theoretical sophistication and a full appreciation of the power of imagery to convey and control religious meaning, it investigates a range of aspects of etoki, including the particularly active role of itinerant nuns, whose performances were especially edifying to female audiences, as well as the visual hagiography of the reputed founder of Japanese Buddhism, the pictorial projections of Buddhist paradise and hell, and the explanation, through visual imagery, of sacred mountains. Part One presents the social history of etoki as it appears in a broad variety of written sources from the tenth to fifteenth centuries and investigates how etoki helped establish the cult of Shotôku Taishi. Part Two covers the period between the late twelfth and fourteenth centuries with a focus on Pure Land Buddhist propaganda and its use in etoki practice. Etoki sermons on the Taima Mandala, the visual description of the Pure Land Buddhist canons, show how envisioning the land of bliss substitutes for meditative concentration to gain enlightenment. Ikumi Kaminishi next turns to the itinerant etoki proselytes and similar performing artists between the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries. These individuals preached on the road and through their missionary work reached out to commoners, turning etoki into an effective method of imparting religious beliefs and soliciting alms. In the late medieval period, audiences regarded itinerant preachers much like traveling artists and vendors, which has led modern scholars to conclude that etoki priests desecrated religious rituals. Kaminishi reconsiders this historiographical problem in relation to the social meaning of itinerant performing artists of the period. Finally, the she examines etoki’s effect on the popularization of sacred mountain worship (in particular Kumano and Tateyama)during the seventeen through nineteenth centuries. Chapters focus on the Kumano propaganda image used by nuns, how Christian religious imagery was exploited in seventeenth-century Buddhist propaganda, and the ways in which etoki campaigns made the remote Tateyama a popular pilgrimage site in early modern times. Explaining Pictures is an important groundbreaking work, the first book-length study devoted to the phenomenon of Buddhist art as religious propaganda and pictorial storytelling as a form of popular culture in medieval Japan. A truly interdisciplinary study, it suggests fruitful avenues of discussion between art historians and historians of Japanese Buddhism. Scholars and students with an interest in Japanese Buddhism, art, and social and cultural history will find its examination of significant issues fresh and stimulating. It will also find an appreciative audience among those concerned with the relationship between art and religion, the mechanics of proselytization, and Asian visual culture.
Download or read book The Heart of the World written by Ian Baker and published by Thames & Hudson. This book was released on 2020-08-13 with total page 658 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The legend of Shangri-La emerged from the Tibetan Buddhist belief in beyul, or hidden lands. Tibetan prophecies proclaim that the greatest of these mythical sanctuaries lies at the eastern edge of the Himalayas, veiled by a colossal waterfall at the heart of the forbidding Tsangpo gorge. After years of research and investigation, Buddhist scholar and world-class climber Ian Baker and his team made worldwide news by reaching the bottom of the Tsangpo gorge and finding a magnificent 108-foot-high waterfall the legendary grail of both Western explorers and Tibetan seekers. The Heart of the World recounts one of the most captivating stories of exploration and discovery in recent memory an extraordinary journey into one of the wildest and most inaccessible places on earth, a meditation on our place in nature, and a pilgrimage to the heart of Tibetan Buddhism.
Download or read book Pure Land Real World written by Melissa Anne-Marie Curley and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2017-02-28 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For close to a thousand years Amida’s Pure Land, a paradise of perfect ease and equality, was the most powerful image of shared happiness circulating in the Japanese imagination. In the late nineteenth century, some Buddhist thinkers sought to reinterpret the Pure Land in ways that would allow it speak to modern Japan. Their efforts succeeded in ways they could not have predicted. During the war years, economist Kawakami Hajime, philosopher Miki Kiyoshi, and historian Ienaga Saburō—left-leaning thinkers with no special training in doctrinal studies and no strong connection to any Buddhist institution—seized upon modernized images of Shinran in exile and a transcendent Western Paradise to resist the demands of a state that was bearing down on its citizens with increasing force. Pure Land, Real World treats the religious thought of these three major figures in English for the first time. Kawakami turned to religion after being imprisoned for his involvement with the Japanese Communist Party, borrowing the Shinshū image of the two truths to assert that Buddhist law and Marxist social science should reinforce each other, like the two wings of a bird. Miki, a member of the Kyoto School who went from prison to the crown prince’s think tank and back again, identified Shinran’s religion as belonging to the proletariat: For him, following Shinran and working toward building a buddha land on earth were akin to realizing social revolution. And Ienaga’s understanding of the Pure Land—as the crystallization of a logic of negation that undermined every real power structure—fueled his battle against the state censorship system, just as he believed it had enabled Shinran to confront the world’s suffering head on. Such readings of the Pure Land tradition are idiosyncratic—perhaps even heretical—but they hum with the same vibrancy that characterized medieval Pure Land belief. Innovative and refreshingly accessible, Pure Land, Real World shows that the Pure Land tradition informed twentieth-century Japanese thought in profound and surprising ways and suggests that it might do the same for twenty-first-century thinkers. The critical power of Pure Land utopianism has yet to be exhausted.
Download or read book Chinese Pure Land Buddhism written by Charles B. Jones and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2019-09-30 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chinese Pure Land Buddhism: Understanding a Tradition of Practice is the first book in any western language to provide a comprehensive overview of Chinese Pure Land Buddhism. Even though Pure Land Buddhism was born in China and currently constitutes the dominant form of Buddhist practice there, it has previously received very little attention from western scholars. In this book, Charles B. Jones examines the reasons for the lack of scholarly attention and why the few past treatments of the topic missed many of its distinctive features. He argues that the Chinese Pure Land tradition, with its characteristic promise of rebirth in the Pure Land to even non-elite or undeserving practitioners, should not be viewed from the perspective of the Japanese Pure Land tradition, which differs greatly. More accurately contextualizing Chinese Pure Land Buddhism within the landscape of Chinese Buddhism and the broader global Buddhist tradition, this work celebrates Chinese Pure Land, not as a school or sect, but as a unique and inherently valuable “tradition of practice.” This volume is organized thematically, clearly presenting topics such as the nature of the Pure Land, the relationship between “self-power” and “other-power,” the practice of nianfo (buddha-recollection), and the formation of the line of “patriarchs” that keep the tradition grounded. It guides us in understanding the vigorous debates that Chinese Pure Land Buddhism evoked and delves into the rich apologetic literature that it produced in its own defense. Drawing upon a wealth of previously unexamined primary source materials, as well as modern texts by contemporary Chinese Pure Land masters, the author provides lucid translations of resources previously unavailable in English. He also shares his lifetime of experience in this field, enlivening the narrative with personal anecdotes of his visits to sites of Pure Land practice in China and Taiwan. The straightforward and nontechnical prose makes this book a standby resource for anyone interested in pursuing research in this lively, sophisticated, and still-evolving religious tradition. Scholars—including undergraduates—specializing in East Asian Buddhism, as well as those interested in Buddhism or Chinese religion and history in general, will find this book invaluable.
Download or read book Buddha in Paradise written by Glenn H. Mullin and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the Pure Lands are all around us -- The world and beyond -- Tushita Pure Land and the theater of the 1,000 Buddhas -- Padma Sambhava and the five Pure Lands of Bliss -- The Tantric Pure Lands -- A few more Buddhafields, just for fun -- Tushita revisited -- Powa, Niguma, and the Tibetan book of the dead -- Paradise found / Heather Stoddard.
Download or read book Aspiring to Enlightenment written by Richard D. McBride II and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2020-08-31 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Centered on the practice of seeking rebirth in the Pure Land paradise Sukhāvatī, the Amitābha cult has been the dominant form of Buddhism in Korea since the middle of the Silla period (ca. 300–935). In Aspiring to Enlightenment, Richard McBride combines analyses of scriptural, exegetical, hagiographical, epigraphical, art historical, and literary materials to provide an episodic account of the cult in Silla times and its rise in an East Asian context through the mutually interconnected perspectives of doctrine and practice. McBride demonstrates that the Pure Land tradition emerging in Korea in the seventh and eighth centuries was vibrant and collaborative and that Silla monk-scholars actively participated in a shared, international Buddhist discourse. Monks such as the exegete par excellence Wŏnhyo and the Yogācāra proponent Kyŏnghŭng did not belong to a specific sect or school, but like their colleagues in China, they participated in a broadly inclusive doctrinal tradition. He examines scholarly debates surrounding the cults of Maitreya and Amitābha, the practice of buddhānusmṛti, the recollection of Amitābha, the “ten recollections” within the larger Mahāyāna context of the bodhisattva’s path of practice, the emerging Huayan intellectual tradition, and the influential interpretations of medieval Chinese Pure Land proponents Tanluan and Shandao. Finally, his work illuminates the legacy of the Silla Pure Land tradition, revealing how the writings of Silla monks continued to be of great value to Japanese monks for several centuries. With its fresh and comprehensive approach to the study of Pure Land Buddhism, Aspiring to Enlightenment is important for not only students and scholars of Korean history and religion and East Asian Buddhism, but also those interested in the complex relationship between doctrinal writings and devotional practice “on the ground.”
Download or read book Visions of Sukh vat written by Julian F. Pas and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 1995-08-17 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Pure Land movement focuses on the worship of one particular Buddha, Amitabha or Amitayus who created a paradise named Sukhavati, Land of Extreme Bliss. The scriptures of this school promise rebirth in that Land to the devotees of that Buddha. It was considered to be an "easy way" to gain salvation in contrast with the "arduous path" of self-sacrifice recommended in original Buddhism. T'ang monk Shan-tao was instrumental in the propagation and popularity of this devotional school. He was an ascetic and serious meditator who followed the techniques of visualization explained in the Sutra on Visualizing Buddha Amita, and his commentary on this text was later considered to be his most outstanding work. Western authors, however, misrepresent Shan-tao because they follow the lead of Japanese Jodo Shinshu masters who deemphasized meditative practices. With the hope that old stereotypes will be dropped, this book lets the Chinese texts speak for themselves.
Download or read book Paradise written by Joanna Nadin and published by Candlewick Press. This book was released on 2012-10-09 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A move to a small seaside town gives Billie a chance at a new lifand new love — until the underof the past pulls her toward a shocking secret. When sixteen-year-old Billie Paradise unexpectedly inherits her grandmother’s house, it couldn’t come at a better time. With her stepdad abroad and her mom starting to lose it, moving from their cramped London apartment to an old house by the sea seems serendipitous. Maybe Billie, as she navigates the small-town social scene and falls for a certain intriguing older boy, can even find the father she never met. But her mom’s remote childhood home, which she left in haste before Billie was born, harbors hints of suspicious long-ago deaths and family secrets. As Billie’s story unfolds, flowing back and forth in time and through alternate points of view, it becomes clear that while people may die, the past lives forever.
