Buddhist literature as philosophy, Buddhist philosophy as literature /
Can literature reveal reality? Is philosophical truth a literary artifice? How does the way we think affect what we can know? Buddhism has been grappling with these questions for centuries, and this book attempts to answer them by exploring the relationship between literature and philosophy across t...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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Albany :
State University of New York Press,
[2020].
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| Summary: | Can literature reveal reality? Is philosophical truth a literary artifice? How does the way we think affect what we can know? Buddhism has been grappling with these questions for centuries, and this book attempts to answer them by exploring the relationship between literature and philosophy across the classical and contemporary Buddhist worlds of India, Tibet, China, Japan, Korea and North America. Written by leading scholars, the book examines literary texts composed over two millennia, ranging in form from lyric verse, narrative poetry, panegyric, hymn and koan, to novel, hagiography, (secret) autobiography, autofiction, treatise and sutra, all in sustained conversation with topics in metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics and the philosophies of mind, language, literature and religion. Interdisciplinary and cross-cultural, this book deliberately works across and against the boundaries separating three mainstays of humanistic pursuit, literature, philosophy and religion, by focusing on the multiple relationships at play between content and form in works drawn from a truly diverse range of philosophical schools, literary genres, religious cultures and historical eras. Overall, the book calls into question the very ways in which we do philosophy, study literature and think about religious texts. It shows that Buddhist thought provides sophisticated responses to some of the perennial problems regarding how we find, create and apply meaning, on the page, in the mind and throughout our lives. |
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| Physical Description: | xiii, 381 pages ; 23 cm. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 1438480717 9781438480718 9781438480701 1438480709 |