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$62.50 Hardcover - 244 pages
ISBN: 0-7914-5259-X
$19.95 Paperback - 244 pages
ISBN: 0-7914-5260-3
Summary
A Buddhist interpretation of Western history that shows civilization
shaped by the self's desire for groundedness.
Buddhism teaches that to become happy, greed, ill-will, and delusion
must be transformed into their positive counterparts: generosity,
compassion, and wisdom. The history of the West, like all histories,
has been plagued by the consequences of greed, ill-will, and delusion.
A Buddhist History of the West investigates how individuals have
tried to ground themselves to make themselves feel more real. To
be self-conscious is to experience ungroundedness as a sense of
lack, but what is lacking has been understood differently in different
historical periods. Author David R. Loy examines how the understanding
of lack changes at historical junctures and shows how those junctures
were so crucial in the development of the West.
"This book expands the dialog, enlarges the vocabulary, takes instruction
from other cultural traditions, and throws light on our own Occidental
problems. I like its clarity in a territory that is of critical
importance and is intrinsically difficult. The book has to do
with ways of coming to a better understanding of civilization, history,
politics, and our own human psyches, and how it is that certain
sets of problems-war and exploitation among them-keep arising. David
Loy is opening up new territory that is of great value. He is a
very exciting thinker." - Gary Snyder, author of The Gary Snyder
Reader: Prose, Poetry, and Translations, 1952-1998
David R. Loy is Professor in the Faculty of International Studies
at Bunkyo University, Japan. He is the author of Lack and Transcendence:
The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism,
and Buddhism and Nonduality: A Study in Comparative Philosophy.
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