You may have to register before you can download all our books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Daisaku Ikeda, who offers spiritual leadership to 12 million Soka Gakkai Buddhists throughout the world, responds to the complicated issues facing American young people in a straightforward question-and-answer format. He addresses topics that include building individual character, the purpose of hard work and perseverance, family and relationships, tolerance, and preservation of the environment. Written from a Buddhist perspective, this collection of answers to life’s questions offers timeless wisdom to people of all faiths.
In this volume, Terrence Paupp critically describes the various dimensions of today's global crisis. Among other things, this volume analyzes nuclear weapons proliferation climate change, and international lawlessness in the form of wars of aggression. Paupp argues that much human conflict and environmental degradation is the direct consequence of poverty and inequality. Until these issues are addressed, many of the world's problems will remain. Paupp asserts that around the world, peoples and nations are becoming more open to a strategy and culture of peace that evolves through discovering a commonality of interests, the value of mutual cooperation, and the desirability of forging consensus. By using various road maps and remedies supplied by noted Japanese peace activist Daisaku Ikeda and his contemporaries, viable solutions will emerge. In this new endeavor, equipped with some of the proposed solutions and strategies that this book provides, humanity will collectively become engaged in remaking the character of global governance in order to build a global culture of peace.
"It is possible to say that resistance in education has always been resisted; the point, of course, is who is doing the resisting. Why they are resisting, what they are resisting, and whose interests are being served by these acts of resistance. David M. Moss and Terry A. Osborn's provocative collection of essays on educational resistance gives new scope and meaning to the term `resistance' in the context of today's challenges to and on behalf of social justice education. It is an important contribution to the field of critical education."---Peter McLaren, Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles --Book Jacket.
Who is Daisaku Ikeda? At one level, he is the leader of a religious movement - Soka Gakkai - which began in Japan, where it still has its headquarters, but which now claims 12 million adherents around the world. At another level, he is a globetrotting figure whose formal conversations with diverse writers, thinkers and diplomats - including Arnold Toynbee, Joseph Rotblat and Mikhail Gorbachev - have garnered him an international profile, as well as academic recognition. Perhaps above all else, Daisaku Ikeda is viewed as a campaigner for peace. And it is Ikeda's specific contribution to peacebuilding, notably through the central emphasis he has placed on the significance of dialogue, that thi...
Is there more to Buddhism than sitting in silent meditation? Is modern Buddhism relevant to the problems of daily life? Does it empower individuals to transform their lives? Or has Buddhism become too detached, so still and quiet that the Buddha has fallen asleep? Waking the Buddha tells the story of the Soka Gakkai International, the largest, most dynamic Buddhist movement in the world today—and one that is waking up and shaking up Buddhism so it can truly work in ordinary people’s lives. Drawing on his long personal experience as a Buddhist teacher, journalist, and editor, Clark Strand offers broad insight into how and why the Soka Gakkai, with its commitment to social justice and its egalitarian approach, has become a role model, not only for other schools of Buddhism, but for other religions as well. Readers will be inspired by the struggles and triumphs of the Soka Gakkai’s three founding presidents—individuals who staked their lives on the teachings of the Lotus Sutra and the extraordinary power of those teachings to help people become happy.
This book explores ‘nothingness’, the negative way found in Buddhist and Christian traditions, with a focused and comparative approach. It examines the works of Nagarjuna (c. 150 CE), a Buddhist monk, philosopher and one of the greatest thinkers of classical India, and those of John of the Cross (1542-1591), a Carmelite monk, outstanding Spanish poet, and one of the greatest mystical theologians. The conception of nothingness in both the thinkers points to a paradox of linguistic transcendence and provides a novel insight into via negativa. This is the first full-length work comparing nothingness (emptiness) in Nagarjuna (Mahayana Buddhism) and John of the Cross (Christianity) in any language. It augments the comparative approach found in Buddhist-Christian comparative philosophy and theology. This book is of especial interest to academics of Buddhist and Christian studies searching for avenues for intellectual dialogue.
This book introduces readers to the Buddhist-based philosophy of education of Daisaku Ikeda. Ikeda's philosophy of education offers human revolution, value creation, and dialogue as counterweights to the violence lurking in today's classrooms. Where education becomes wisdom-based, it transforms learners into keen assessors of their inner lives and establishes a foundation for global citizenship.
Gendun Chopel is considered the most important Tibetan intellectual of the twentieth century. His life spanned the two defining moments in modern Tibetan history: the entry into Lhasa by British troops in 1904 and by Chinese troops in 1951. Recognized as an incarnate lama while he was a child, Gendun Chopel excelled in the traditional monastic curriculum and went on to become expert in fields as diverse as philosophy, history, linguistics, geography, and tantric Buddhism. Near the end of his life, before he was persecuted and imprisoned by the government of the young Dalai Lama, he would dictate the Adornment for Nagarjuna’s Thought, a work on Madhyamaka, or “Middle Way,” philosophy. I...
Understanding Peace: A Comprehensive Introduction fills the need for an original, contemporary examination of peace that is challenging, informative, and empowering. This well-researched, fully documented, and highly accessible textbook moves beyond fixation on war to highlight the human capacity for nonviolent cooperation in everyday life and in conflict situations. After deconstructing numerous ideas about war and explaining its heavy costs to humans, animals, and the environment, discussion turns to evidence for the existence of peaceful societies. Further topics include the role of nonviolence in history, the nature of violence and aggression, and the theory and practice of nonviolence. ...