Recommendations based on "Spirituous Journey A History of Drink, Book One"

This is a companion volume to The Koan and The Zen Canon, by the same editors. The first volume collected original essays on koan collections, recorded sayings of individual masters, histories of major schools, and compilations of monastic regulations. The second focuses on the early history of Zen in China, providing overview assessments of many of the most important canonical texts that set the Zen tradition in motion throughout East Asia. Zen Classics will follow that historical movement, focusing primarily on texts from Korea and Japan that brought this Buddhist movement to fruition. Although enormously diverse in style and structure all of the texts and genres of texts considered here were fundamental to the unfolding of Zen in East Asia. The range of genres reveals the varieties of Zen practice, from rules of daily practice to sermons and meditation manuals. The all new essays in this volume will be contributed by an international team of distinguished scholars of Buddhism. It is aimed at broad audience including college students, Zen practitioners, and scholars of East Asian history, religion, and culture, as well as specialists in Buddhist history.

Philosophers and theologians have long engaged in intense debate and introspection over the representation of the deity, its possibilities and its proscriptions. The Forbidden Image traces the dual strains of “iconophilia” and iconoclasm, the privileging and prohibition of religious images, over a span of two and a half millennia in the West.Alain Besançon’s work begins with a comprehensive examination of the status of the image in Greek, Judaic, Islamic, and Christian thought. The author then addresses arguments regarding the moral authority of the image in European Christianity from the medieval through the early modern periods. Besançon completes The Forbidden Image with an examination of how iconophilia and iconoclasm have been debated in the modern period.“Even the reader who has heard something of the Byzantine quarrels about images and their theological background will be surprised by a learned and convincing interpretation of the works of Mondrian, Kandinsky, and Malevich in terms of religiously inspired iconoclasm. . . . This is an immensely rich and powerful masterpiece.”—Leszek Kolakowski, Times Literary Supplement

The Roman statesman and philosopher Seneca (4 BCE–65 CE) recorded his moral philosophy and reflections on life as a highly original kind of correspondence. Letters on Ethics includes vivid descriptions of town and country life in Nero’s Italy, discussions of poetry and oratory, and philosophical training for Seneca’s friend Lucilius. This volume, the first complete English translation in nearly a century, makes the Letters more accessible than ever before.Written as much for a general audience as for Lucilius, these engaging letters offer advice on how to deal with everything from nosy neighbors to sickness, pain, and death. Seneca uses the informal format of the letter to present the central ideas of Stoicism, for centuries the most influential philosophical system in the Mediterranean world. His lively and at times humorous expositions have made the Letters his most popular work and an enduring classic. Including an introduction and explanatory notes by Margaret Graver and A. A. Long, this authoritative edition will captivate a new generation of readers.

An inspired gathering of religious writings that reveals the "divine reality" common to all faiths, collected by Aldous Huxley"The Perennial Philosophy, " Aldous Huxley writes, "may be found among the traditional lore of peoples in every region of the world, and in its fully developed forms it has a place in every one of the higher religions."With great wit and stunning intellect—drawing on a diverse array of faiths, including Zen Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Christian mysticism, and Islam—Huxley examines the spiritual beliefs of various religious traditions and explains how they are united by a common human yearning to experience the divine. The Perennial Philosophy includes selections from Meister Eckhart, Rumi, and Lao Tzu, as well as the Bhagavad Gita, Tibetan Book of the Dead, Diamond Sutra, and Upanishads, among many others.

Featuring a new introduction by Casey Nelson Blake, this classic text provides the essence of Mumford's views on the distinct yet interpenetrating roles of technology and the arts in modern culture. Mumford contends that modern man's overemphasis on technics has contributed to the depersonalization and emptiness of much of twentieth-century life. He issues a call for a renewed respect for artistic impulses and achievements. His repeated insistence that technological development take the Human as its measure -- as well as his impassioned plea for humanity to make the most of its "splendid potentialities and promise" and reverse its progress toward anomie and destruction -- is ever more relevant as the new century dawns.

Traces the evolution of the Romantic approach to literary criticism and compares it to the other methods which prevailed in the early nineteenth century.

A major new work by the philosopher and feminist thinker Adriana Cavarero, this is a fascinating and challenging account of the relationship between the structure of the self and the structure of narrative.

Leonardo is the greatest, most multi-faceted and most mysterious of all Renaissance artists, but extraordinarily, considering his enormous reputation, this is the first full-length biography in English for several decades. Prize-winning author Charles Nicholl has immersed himself for five years in all the manuscripts, paintings and artefacts to produce an 'intimate portrait' of Leonardo. He uses these contemporary materials - his notebooks and sketchbooks, eye witnesses and early biographies, etc - as a way into the mental tone and physical texture of his life and has made myriad small discoveries about him and his work and his circle of associates. Among much else, the book identifies what Nicholl argues is an unknown portrait of the artist hanging in a church near Lodi in northern Italy. It also contains new material on his eccentric assistant Tomasso Masini, on his homosexual affairs in Florence, and on his curious relationship with a female model and/or prostitute from Cremona. A masterpiece of modern biography.

At the end of the eighteenth century, scientists for the first time demonstrated what medieval and renaissance alchemists had long suspected; ice is not lifeless but vital, a crystalline revelation of vigorous powers. Studied in esoteric and exoterical representations of frozen phenomena, several Romantic figures - including Coleridge and Poe, Percy and Mary Shelley, Emerson and Thoreau - challenged traditional notions of ice as waste and instead celebrated crystals, glaciers, and the poles as special disclosures of a holistic principle of being. The Spiritual History of Ice explores this ecology of frozen shapes in fascinating detail, revealing not only a neglected current of the Romantic age but also a secret history and psychology of ice.

'Psychotic contents, especially in paranoid cases, show close analogies with the type of dream that the primitive aptly calls a 'big dream'. Unlike ordinary dreams, such a dream is highly impressive, numinous, and its imagery frequently makes use of motifs analagous to or even identical with those of mythology. I call these structures archetypes because they function in a way similar to instinctual patterns of behaviour.' The importance of this volume of Jung's writings on psychosis can scarcely be overrated both in historical terms and for the understanding of Jung's psychology. It begins with his famous work, 'The Psychology of Dementia Praecox'. It was this work that established his reputation as a psychiatric investigator of the first rank and it was this work also that engaged Freud's interest and led to their eventual famous meeting. The research in this work contains the seed of his theoretica divergence form psychoanalysis. Following on from this are a further nine papers on psychopathology and schizophrenia revealing Jung's original thinking in this area and providing valuable insight into the development of his later concepts such as the archetypes and the collective unconscious.