Ebook Buddha at the Apocalypse: Awakening from a Culture of Destruction, by Kurt Spellmeyer
Find the secret to enhance the quality of life by reading this Buddha At The Apocalypse: Awakening From A Culture Of Destruction, By Kurt Spellmeyer This is a type of book that you need currently. Besides, it can be your preferred book to check out after having this book Buddha At The Apocalypse: Awakening From A Culture Of Destruction, By Kurt Spellmeyer Do you ask why? Well, Buddha At The Apocalypse: Awakening From A Culture Of Destruction, By Kurt Spellmeyer is a book that has different characteristic with others. You may not have to understand who the writer is, how popular the job is. As smart word, never evaluate the words from which speaks, however make the words as your inexpensive to your life.
Buddha at the Apocalypse: Awakening from a Culture of Destruction, by Kurt Spellmeyer
Ebook Buddha at the Apocalypse: Awakening from a Culture of Destruction, by Kurt Spellmeyer
Learn the strategy of doing something from several resources. One of them is this book entitle Buddha At The Apocalypse: Awakening From A Culture Of Destruction, By Kurt Spellmeyer It is a very well understood book Buddha At The Apocalypse: Awakening From A Culture Of Destruction, By Kurt Spellmeyer that can be referral to read currently. This recommended publication is among the all terrific Buddha At The Apocalypse: Awakening From A Culture Of Destruction, By Kurt Spellmeyer collections that are in this website. You will additionally discover various other title and also motifs from numerous writers to search below.
Checking out behavior will consistently lead individuals not to completely satisfied reading Buddha At The Apocalypse: Awakening From A Culture Of Destruction, By Kurt Spellmeyer, a book, ten book, hundreds e-books, and more. One that will make them really feel completely satisfied is finishing reviewing this publication Buddha At The Apocalypse: Awakening From A Culture Of Destruction, By Kurt Spellmeyer as well as obtaining the notification of guides, then finding the other following publication to check out. It proceeds a growing number of. The time to finish reviewing an e-book Buddha At The Apocalypse: Awakening From A Culture Of Destruction, By Kurt Spellmeyer will be consistently various depending on spar time to invest; one example is this Buddha At The Apocalypse: Awakening From A Culture Of Destruction, By Kurt Spellmeyer
Now, just how do you recognize where to get this e-book Buddha At The Apocalypse: Awakening From A Culture Of Destruction, By Kurt Spellmeyer Never ever mind, now you may not visit guide establishment under the brilliant sunlight or evening to search guide Buddha At The Apocalypse: Awakening From A Culture Of Destruction, By Kurt Spellmeyer We right here consistently help you to find hundreds kinds of book. One of them is this book qualified Buddha At The Apocalypse: Awakening From A Culture Of Destruction, By Kurt Spellmeyer You might visit the link page given in this collection and afterwards go for downloading and install. It will not take more times. Simply link to your internet access and also you could access guide Buddha At The Apocalypse: Awakening From A Culture Of Destruction, By Kurt Spellmeyer on the internet. Of program, after downloading and install Buddha At The Apocalypse: Awakening From A Culture Of Destruction, By Kurt Spellmeyer, you could not publish it.
You can conserve the soft file of this e-book Buddha At The Apocalypse: Awakening From A Culture Of Destruction, By Kurt Spellmeyer It will depend upon your downtime and also tasks to open and review this e-book Buddha At The Apocalypse: Awakening From A Culture Of Destruction, By Kurt Spellmeyer soft data. So, you might not hesitate to bring this e-book Buddha At The Apocalypse: Awakening From A Culture Of Destruction, By Kurt Spellmeyer everywhere you go. Merely add this sot documents to your gizmo or computer disk to allow you read every single time and everywhere you have time.
Timely and audacious, Buddha at the Apocalypse challenges us to look directly at the devastating assumptions underlying the very mechanisms of the modern world - and offers a clarion call to awaken from a pervasive culture of destruction into a natural, sustainable, and sane peace. Kurt Spellmeyer references the Bible, popular culture, Zen, and Western philosophy in addressing two questions: how did we get here, and what can we do now. An answer to pervasive cynicism and decline, Buddha at the Apocalypse shows how to accept and connect with reality in dark times.
- Sales Rank: #1183537 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Wisdom Publications
- Published on: 2010-04-20
- Released on: 2010-04-20
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x .50" w x 6.00" l, .65 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 192 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
Review
"The self-centered dream from which Kurt Spellmeyer strives to awaken us is not simply the dream of our individual ego but the dream of history. We must awaken from time itself, from beginnings, from progress, from goals and from visions of the end of time. Buddha at the Apocalypse challenges our assumptions about who we are, where we come from and where we are going, in our life and in our practice." (Barry Magid, author of Ending the Pursuit of Happiness)
"Buddha at the Apocalypse is easy-going, well written, and solidly reasoned--and lively in the way it interweaves Biblical analysis, Zen literature, and Western philosophy and sociology with popular culture and deep wisdom. I am delighted to greet this important and meaningful work and wish its author and many readers a fruitful walk in its garden of perceptive insights and heartfelt advice." (Robert Thurman)
"Buddha at the Apocalypse is a bold investigation into the role of religion in the creation of the environmental crisis. Spellmeyer is refreshingly direct in his evaluations, writing a manifesto of environmentally concerned Buddhism. His writing is crisp and honest, raising hard questions that help us confront the highly politicized role of religion as an ecological force." (Richard K. Payne, editor of How Much is Enough?)
"So often we see the future as something that will save us from the present--but what if our attempts to 'save the world' are based on the very way of seeing that is destroying it? Spellmeyer invites the reader to look differently at the nature of time itself, especially our belief in the inevitable benefits of Progress. A challenging and provocative book." (David R. Loy, author of Money Sex War Karma and The World Is Made of Stories)
"Spellmeyer's Buddha at the Apocalypse opposes two conceptions of time: the endgame finality of the Western traditions, and the no-game now here-all of Buddhism. He speaks for a crucial shift in attitude towards the world and our human place in it. We are not, he asserts, bound for destruction, but bound by illusions obscuring an interpenetrating infinitely complex plenitude of miraculous being in which time and self are variables. This is no mystical diatribe, but a gentle reflection by the light of a Zen moon which shows how the whole show is alive, how we cannot save the world, nor fundamentally destroy it, but how with compassion we can embrace our shared being. How we connect with each other this moment and this day is the world, even as the static moment flows away in a march of moments, yet here still moment unending. Spellmeyer speaks for a profoundly simple ecology of mind, where world and mind are seamlessly one, and your acts and mine do make a difference." (Robert Langan)
"This book helped me to see our western culture more clearly, and inspired me to rebel against the Apocolyptic paradigm with renewed vigor." (Noah Levine, author of Dharma Punx and Against the Stream)
About the Author
Kurt Spellmeyer is an award-winning teacher and scholar in the English department at Rutgers University in New Jersey and a Rinzai Zen Master. He is the author of Arts of Living: Reinventing the Humanities for the Twenty-First Century and several other books.
Robert Thurman holds the Jey Tsong Khapa Chair in Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies at Columbia University. After education at Philips Exeter and Harvard, he studied Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism for almost thirty years as a personal student of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. He has written both scholarly and popular books, and has lectured widely all over the world. As President of the American Institute for Buddhist Studies, he convened the First Inner Science Conference with His Holiness the Dalai Lama at Amherst College in 1984. He is also a founding trustee of Tibet House New York.
Most helpful customer reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
Countering the Apocalyptic Mind -- but with what?
By Autonomeus
This is a frustrating book. Kurt Spellmeyer is a graceful writer, and it is easy to imagine him as a spellbinding lecturer. (He is a professor in the English Department at Rutgers University as well as leader of the Cold Mountain Sangha in New Jersey.) His critique of the apocalyptic thinking of the Judeo-Christian tradition is very strong.
Spellmeyer defines "apocalyptic history," which he calls the founding myth of the West, as the view of our existence as "...a road, a journey through the ages that will lead to the transcendence of time itself. The journey begins with the Creation and it ends with the Apocalypse." This world ends, the righteous go to Heaven and the wicked to Hell. It is what he calls a "world-despising" view -- this world is fallen, and what matters is what happens in the afterlife. No need to care for the ecosystem, it will all be destroyed soon enough. A twist on the other-worldly apocalypse is the idea of creating a utopia here on Earth, which he argues is also a view that despises the world as it is, leaving a path of destruction in the quest to create a perfect world as in the 20th century in Russia and Germany.
Buddhism, of course, sees impermanence as the bedrock reality. There is no teleological time, no End present in the Beginning, but rather an Eternal Now in constant flux. Time is not an arrow, but rather both cyclical and also at a deeper level an illusion. It is a world-embracing view that encourages living with uncertainty and impermanence and treating all sentient beings with compassion, for we are all connected.
However, Spellmeyer leaves the reader, despite his explicit arguments to the contrary, with the impetus to quietism rather than action. This is not unique to this writer or book, of course, it is endemic to the historic Buddhism of the East (monastic orders that were supported by royal patronage and in turn supported the status quo) and the contemporary Buddhism of the West (a spirituality of the comfortable classes who cultivate inner peace rather than social justice).
Nagarjuna, the great Mahayana philosopher, developed the understanding of absolute and relative truth. Spellmeyer focuses on the Absolute Truth of Emptiness -- not only are there no unchanging Selves, there are no unchanging Things in the Universe. This is not nihilism, but rather Everything Connected and Interpenetrating. He does say that with this realization one is moved to compassion. But he does not emphasize this enough. Socially engaged Buddhism emerged because so much of Buddhism is turned inward and is not socially engaged. If We Are One, then how can I see you harmed and not act?
If Spellmeyer had taken his one reference to the Boddhisattva Vow on page 120 ("I vow to liberate all sentient beings") and expanded on it he might have produced a different and better book. He quotes Te-Ching saying "...the '[T]hree [P]oisons of delusion, anger and greed have no beginning and no end, and yet the bodhisattva's vow is always to help people get free from them." This focus on compassionate action is at odds with the main argument of BUDDHA AT THE APOCALYPSE, which is that trying to change the world is part of the problem.
Yes, the Absolute Truth is that everything is already perfect and there is nothing that needs to be done. But there are many Relative Truths that we must pay attention to in order to make our way through the material world, not just for personal survival but for the liberation of all sentient beings. Ecocide is taking place and if we can act to stop it we have an ethical obligation to do so. It's hard to be liberated when you're dead from habitat destruction and catastrophic climate change -- relative truth. Carpe diem. If we are truly Awake as was the Buddha we will do no less.
For a better Buddhist book on our relationship to the Three Poisons on the level of society, I recommend David Loy's The Great Awakening: A Buddhist Social Theory.
Namaste.
(verified purchase from St. Mark's Bookshop in NYC)
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful.
Not just for students of Zen
By L. Sullivan
This book is not just for devotees of Zen Buddhism. I've have never had much interest in attending a Zen retreat or spending hours meditating, but I still found the book enlightening (in the traditional Western sense, anyway).
Written for a general audience of readers raised in Western culture and curious about their place in the universe, this book offers surprising insights and many "Aha!" moments. Moving through a series of vignettes about Western culture, history and current events as well as Zen teachings, Spellmeyer nimbly advances his view that reality extends beyond the limits imposed by traditional Western thought and religious belief.
The book is also a lively read. I'll never hear a sermon about the Prodigal Son or read about Paul Krugman's economic theories without thinking about Spellmeyer's take on both subjects.
10 of 12 people found the following review helpful.
An informative and serene read
By Tisha
Spellmeyer writes *Buddha at the Apocalypse* with a graceful lyricism, a soft and gentle voice, which seems to be directly speaking to each reader individually. He has the power, through profound and original observations, to make us re-examine our modus operandi, and in fact to re-think our every assumption, many of which we might have taken for granted. At the opening of this book, Spellmeyer cites the story of Creation, as told in the Book of Genesis, and points out how God and Time are inextricably interrelated, as alongside creation there is also destruction because of the sin of temptation. But Spellmeyer sees life in a different, more timeless way. As his book weaves through Zen teachings and tales, and beautiful Zen gardens, we come to appreciate how, as Spellmeyer says, "...we can plainly see existence as a circle of life and death, a circle that keeps turning for ever." There are many quotable moments such as this, which make us reflective, and make us feel serene. All told, this is a valuable and profound book.
Buddha at the Apocalypse: Awakening from a Culture of Destruction, by Kurt Spellmeyer PDF
Buddha at the Apocalypse: Awakening from a Culture of Destruction, by Kurt Spellmeyer EPub
Buddha at the Apocalypse: Awakening from a Culture of Destruction, by Kurt Spellmeyer Doc
Buddha at the Apocalypse: Awakening from a Culture of Destruction, by Kurt Spellmeyer iBooks
Buddha at the Apocalypse: Awakening from a Culture of Destruction, by Kurt Spellmeyer rtf
Buddha at the Apocalypse: Awakening from a Culture of Destruction, by Kurt Spellmeyer Mobipocket
Buddha at the Apocalypse: Awakening from a Culture of Destruction, by Kurt Spellmeyer Kindle
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar