Book Review The Buddhist Dead: Practices, Discourses, Representations, Jacqueline I. Stone co-edited with Bryan J. Cuevas

This book could be seen as a novel method of tracing the history of a scripture. Jacob P. Dalton does this by “tracing the vicissitudes of a single ritual system—that of the Gathering of Intentions Sutra (Dgongs pa ’dus pa’i mdo)—from its ninth-century origins to the present day” (xv). This tantra is referred to as the “root tantra” and i…[Read more]

Religious leaders often come together for a statement of their respective beliefs seeking a false satisfaction that they are working for world peace by a disparate series of talks meant to only emphasize differences among faith traditions. This book is a welcome departure from such meaningless exercises and hopes to create a tradition of…[Read more]

The argument against free will could as well have been eternal. In this short but incisive and analytical book, Alfred R Mele, a professor of philosophy, successfully and clearly critiques the rationale against free will put forward by psychologists and neuroscientists.

A book designed for children with attractive illustrations, this volume brings out the spirit of India through the recounting of an incident that happened in India; where a boy—not wealthy of resources—returns a wallet he found and cannot even think of accepting a reward for his good act. Awarded the ‘Mom’s Choice Best Educational Picture Book’,…[Read more]

Bodhisattvas of the Forest and the Formation of the Mahayana Daniel Boucher Book Review Prabuddha Bharata August 2014

The Mahabharata / Srimad Bhagavata – in the Poet’s Own Words by Pandit A M Srinivasachariar Book Review Prabuddha Bharata June 2010

A commentary of Yinming zhenglimen lun 因明正理門論 (A Chinese translation of Nyāya-mukha) written by Gesshu 月珠 (1795-1856), a scholar priest of Shin Buddhism.

Syllabus for my course 3UU3, Buddhism in East Asia planned for Winter term 2019

This is the version of the syllabus for Asian Meditation Traditions at the end of the first term in which I offered it–Fall 2018.

Draft version of syllabus for graduate seminar on Nirvana Sutra

This special issue of Religions of South Asia is born out of this expanding area of study and collaboration between contemporary practitioners and established academic methods of study. Most of articles in this volume were first presented at an international ‘Yoga Darśana, Yoga Sādhana’ conference hosted in Kraków, Poland in May 2016. The Krakow…[Read more]

This course is an introduction to the theory and practice of meditation systems in Asia taught at McMaster University in Fall 2018

This dissertation examines the idea of ethical revaluation — taking things we normally see as good for our flourishing and seeing them as neutral or bad, and vice versa — in the Mahāyāna Buddhist thinker Śāntideva. It shows how Śāntideva’s thought on the matter is more coherent than it might otherwise appear, first by examining the consistency…[Read more]

Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory insists that valid knowledge must be derived from paradigms: sets of injunctions and social practices that lead to replicable experiences. Wilber claims that the theory still includes the essentials of premodern traditions, because the essentials of those traditions consist of a phenomenological core of practices l…[Read more]

Syllabus for a graduate seminar on Chinese Religions at McMaster University Term II 2017-2018

This dissertation considers how Tantrism, a ritual tradition vanished in India and in China, but preserved in modern Japan and Tibet, became a component of the revival of Chinese Buddhism between the two World Wars. Tantrism became appealing to revivalists who, in China’s time of internal war and foreign invasion, sought to recover this lost t…[Read more]

In this dissertation I argue that print culture acted as a catalyst for change among Buddhists in modern China. Through examining major publication institutions, publishing projects, and their managers and contributors from the late nineteenth century to the 1920s, I show that the expansion of the scope and variety of printed works, as well as new…[Read more]

Graduate seminar in Buddhist Studies at McMaster University

Tibet – end of the legend