2. In the first place, the term "power" is used to refer to processes which are held to go on at particular times, and to be accessible to direct experience. It is not clear to me why our experiences of activity are not "explicit", or why they are not to be regarded as manifested to the senses ; but possibly these assertions could be defended on the ground that the experiences in question are phenomenologically distinctive in some way.

What is unique about China is the agreement on all sides that men are naturally equal. This is the second of our two central themes. ...

In this volume Donald Munro, author of important studies on early and contemporary China, provides a critical analysis of the doctrines of the Sung Neo-Confucian philosopher Chu Hsi (1130-1200). For nearly six centuries Confucian orthodoxy was based on Chu Hsi's commentaries on Confucian classics. These commentaries were the core of the curriculum studied by candidates for the civil service in China until 1905 and provided guidelines both for personal behavior and for official policy. Munro finds the key to the (...) complexities of Chu Hsi's thought in his mode of discourse: the structural images of family, stream of water, mirror, body, plant, and ruler. Furthermore, he discloses the basic framework of Chu Hsi's ethics and the theory of human nature that is provided by these illustrative images. As revealed by Munro, Chu Hsi's thought is polarized between family duty and a broader altruism and between obedience to external authority and self-discovery of moral truth. To understand these tensions moves us toward clarifying the meaning of each idea in the sets. The interplay of these ideas, selectively emphasized over time by later Confucians, is a background for explaining modern Chinese thought. In it, among other things, Confucianism and Marxism-Leninism co-exist. Originally published in 1988. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

This book tells the story of the Scientific Buddha, "born" in Europe in the 1800s but commonly confused with the Buddha born in India 2,500 years ago. The Scientific Buddha was sent into battle against Christian missionaries, who were proclaiming across Asia that Buddhism was a form of superstition. He proved the missionaries wrong, teaching a dharma that was in harmony with modern science. And so his influence continues. Today his teaching of "mindfulness" is heralded as the cure for all (...) manner of maladies, from depression to high blood pressure.In this potent critique, a well-known chronicler of the West's encounter with Buddhism demonstrates how the Scientific Buddha's teachings deviate in crucial ways from those of the far older Buddha of ancient India. Donald Lopez shows that the Western focus on the Scientific Buddha threatens to bleach Buddhism of its vibrancy, complexity, and power, even as the superficial focus on "mindfulness" turns Buddhism into merely the latest self-help movement. The Scientific Buddha has served his purpose, Lopez argues. It is now time for him to pass into nirvana. This is not to say, however, that the teachings of the ancient Buddha must be dismissed as mere cultural artifacts. They continue to present a meaningful challenge, even to our modern world. (shrink)

This essay examines two stories in Zhuangzi chapter 6 that provide detailsabout the formal, substantive, and applied features of friendship between daoadepts. Using a template of seven characteristics, dao adept friendship is thencompared with ren adept friendship, described in the Analects and theMencius. It is argued that dao living contains features of friendship that arecomparably robust. As unconventional as dao adept living may be, friendshipis not lacking but integral to such a life.

This book deals with the basic views of those philosophers and their influence on Chinese history and culture.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 23 (2003) 197-201 [Access article in PDF] An Interview with Donald Mitchell and James Wiseman The 2002 Fred Streng Book Award has been given to Donald W. Mitchell and James Wiseman for their edited collection, The Gethsemani Encounter: A Dialogue on the Spiritual Life by Buddhist and Christian Monastics. Donald W. Mitchell is professor of comparative philosophy at Purdue University and a member of (...) the editorial advisory board of Buddhist-Christian Studies. James Wiseman is a member of the Benedictine community of St. Anselm's Abbey in Washington, D.C., and is an associate professor of theology at the Catholic University of America. Following is an edited interview with both.DONALD MITCHELL How long have Buddhist and Christian monastics been in dialogue? In 1978 the Benedictine Confederation founded what is now named the Monastic Interreligious Dialogue (MID) in order to develop intermonastic dialogue, especially with Buddhism. MID has been in dialogue with Buddhism in Europe, Asia, Australia, and North America. Numerous MID spiritual exchanges and hospitality programs have taken place between Buddhist and Christian monastics over the years. How did the Dalai Lama get involved? His Holiness the Dalai Lama met with Thomas Merton in 1968, and from then on has been interested in Christian monasticism. He first got involved with MID when several of their members spoke with him at an East-West conference at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, in 1981. This was the beginning of a series of intermonastic hospitality exchanges, with Tibetan Buddhist monks and nuns visiting Christian monasteries in the United States and Christian monastics being hosted at Tibetan Buddhist sites in India. Years later, at the Parliament of World's Religions in 1993, MID hosted a Buddhist-Christian dialogue on "Emptiness and Kenosis." The Dalai Lama took part in the dialogue and afterward told MID that he felt its dialogue with Buddhism had matured to the point [where] it would be helpful to have a weeklong retreat dialogue on the spiritual life in Buddhism and Christianity. Where did Gethsemani enter the picture? The Dalai Lama asked if it would be possible to hold the spiritual dialogue at Gethsemani Abbey, home of his friend Thomas Merton. In 1994 MID sent a delegation [End Page 197] to Dharamsala to discuss the proposal in more depth with the Dalai Lama. An agreement was reached to hold a retreat dialogue at Gethsemani Abbey with Buddhist and Christian teachers of spirituality coming from around the world. You're not a monk. How did you get involved? Good question. A year later, Sister Mary Margaret Funk, executive director of MID, met with me to request that I help organize the encounter as a lay advisor to MID. MID had used my book, Spirituality and Emptiness: The Dynamics of Spiritual Life in Buddhism and Christianity, to prepare for the Parliament dialogue on kenosis and emptiness. I agreed to help with inviting the Buddhist participants, crafting the program, and editing the proceedings. What developments in the dialogue have you seen occurring over the years? Many developments. As you can imagine, the Gethsemani Encounter in 1996 was itself a spiritual experience. As Ewert Cousins put it, there seemed to be two treasure boxes—Buddhism and Christianity—set before us in a spiritual atmosphere that enabled us to appreciate the gems of spiritual living shared by the participants. So the encounter itself brought the dialogue to a new stage of trust, understanding, and appreciation. This development can be seen in the fact that Buddhist participants suggested a project be undertaken to produce a Buddhist commentary on the Rule of St. Benedict. The result is Benedict's Dharma: Buddhists Reflect on the Rule of Saint Benedict, edited by Patrick Henry and published by Riverhead Books in 2001. What else? A small group of American Buddhist leaders and MID members met in 1999 to discuss the possibility of holding a Gethsemani Encounter II. It was decided to bring the dialogue ahead by focusing on one of the major topics that came up again and again at Gethsemani I—namely, the... (shrink)

About a decade ago I noticed that when referring to quality health care, or financial pyramid schemes like the one in the Madoff affair, or weakness in the mortgage market, many American intellectuals and politicians talked about the "moral imperatives" or the "ethical bailout" that would be needed to correct the resultant problems. But no one identified what the moral imperatives were. So I decided to investigate what such imperatives might consist of if Chinese and American thinkers tried to work (...) out an answer. This essay attempts to show what I found.What first attracted me to classical Chinese philosophy was that it seemed to anchor morality not in the words of an anthropomorphic God but in some natural... (shrink)

The fact that a number of printed editions of Greek physicians appeared during the sixteenth century is clear evidence that publishing houses of the time believed that a substantial interest in such texts existed. What is most surprising is that, until the last decade of the fifteenth century, a prevailing shortage of Greek medical manuscripts had not at all troubled the scholarly and medical communities. This essay shows how minor a niche Galen and other Greek medical writers occupied in the (...) West for a long period of time, until some significant occurrences brought them to the forefront in the 1490s. (shrink)

A compilation of essays that cover the life and work of Masao Abe, one of the greatest Zen Buddhist communicators of the 20th century. Masao Abe has opened up a rich dialogue between Japan and the West. He is considered the leading living Zen figure in the Kyoto School of Buddhist thought and the successor of D.T. Suzuki, his early mentor, as the foremost exponent of Zen Buddhism in the West. In this volume, through stories and recollections, 35 (...) leading intellectual figures explore Abe's encounter with the West, incl'g. his work on interfaith dialogue as a basis for world peace, as well as his comparative philosophical scholarship over the past 30 years. "An extraordinary step ahead in the encounter between Zen and the West.". (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:J. H. Hexter 1910–1996Donald R. KelleyJ. H. Hexter, one of the leading intellectual historians of this century and a close associate of this Journal, died on 8 December 1996. Jack Hexter was a great scholar, talented writer and polemicist, devoted baseball fan, and authentic American humorist, who made wit and facetiousness part of his historiographical tool-kit. He was also an American character, as he made insistently clear in his (...) writings, especially his autobiographical account, “By Any Other Name,” which explained (among other things) why he came to be called “Jack,” why he resisted advice to change it, and other onomastic adventures.Jack taught at Queens College (N.Y., not, he pointed out, the one in South Carolina), 1939–57; Washington University (St. Louis, not Seattle or George Washington U.), 1957–64 and again 1978–86; and Yale University (one did not have to add, “New Haven”) 1965–85, where he was Director of the Center for Parliamentary History. At Washington University he was founding Director of the Center for the History of Freedom, which was devoted to a collaborative, multi-volume study of the history of liberty in the West that would realize the dream that Lord Acton called his “madonna of the future”—the difference being that Jack’s vision is already on the way to fulfillment, with the publication of the volume edited by him on Parliament and Liberty from the Reign of Elizabeth to the English Civil War (1992), followed by seven more volumes up to 1996, with more to come.Hexter published books and articles in a variety of fields, finding notoriety especially in his essay of 1958, “Storm over the Gentry,” and later in public jousts with Christopher Hill and others and more retrospective censures of (among others) A. W. Pollard and R. H. Tawney; and he was a master of the Macaulayan art of the review-essay (collected in On Historians, 1979). His article on “Braudel and le monde braudelien” was a mischievous masterpiece of satire which, according to a private communication to Jack, Braudel himself enjoyed in his Olympian way, including the good-natured charge of excessive appetite for facts—“Je vais me dire: ne joue pas trop au Rabelais, sois sage, ne mange pas tout, n’aie les yeux plus gros que le ventre!” (personal letter, 8 February 1973). Several generations of graduate students learned what was involved in doing history from his “The Historian and his Day” (1954), which (like “Storm”), he enjoyed recalling, was rejected by the AHR. He was amused, too, at learning that his article on “The Rhetoric of History” (written for the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences) was a harbinger of the rhetorical turn taken a few years later signalled by the historiographical work of Hayden White and others. He was a pioneer, too, in the intensive study of political languages (Visions of Politics on the Eve of the Reformation, 1973), though he lamented the fact that his work on Machiavelli’s and Seyssel’s political vocabulary had to be carried out before the age of computer technology.My first contact with Jack came through my mentor Garrett Mattingly, who was the contemporary historian Jack “most admired” (as he made plain in his contribution to Mattingly’s festschrift). In 1962 Mattingly told me that the plan to publish Hexter’s translation of Seyssel’s Monarchy of France for the Columbia Records Series had to be abandoned because of the first (I think) of Jack’s several heart attacks. I was able to use the mimeographed version for some years before Jack asked me to take over this project, originally visited on him by C. H. McIlwain. It was his suggestion that [End Page 349] we dedicate the collaborative volume, with nice ambiguity, to both McIlwain and Mattingly (who had also been a student of McIlwain) from “two of their deeply devoted students.”In this brief and perhaps overpersonal note (though nothing could be “too personal” for Jack) I will not add further to the store of Hexterian anecdotes, which I began collecting at Queens College, where Jack had already left the makings of a legend in the 1950s. I would just add... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Romanian Cultural and Political IdentityDonald R. KelleyThe Journal of the History of Ideas, in collaboration with other institutions, including the Universities of Bucharest and Budapest and the Soros Foundation, recently sponsored the second in a series of international conferences being planned on topics in current intellectual history. (The first, “Interrogating Tradition,” was held at Rutgers University, 13–16 November 1997.) The Romanian conference, which was held in the Elisabeta Palace (...) in Bucharest (27–31 May 1998), was devoted to “Culture and the Politics of National Identity in Modern Romania.” Over forty scholars, mainly from Romania but some also from the U.S., France, Germany, and Hungary, gathered to discuss a variety of questions about Romanian society, past, present, and speculative future; and they were joined by at least as many visitors, especially students, from the local area and beyond.Topics discussed included politics, language, economics, historiography, religion, education, philosophy, ideologies, intelligentsia, particular intellectuals, minorities, and women (though not Gypsies or gays). Under this riot of rubrics a wide range of questions were posed in interdisciplinary fashion, with frequent, sometimes impassioned interventions. What is—was, might have been, can be—Romania? Who is a Romanian (and who not)? What is Romania’s relation to the West and the East? (And what are the “West” and the “East”?) To modernity, to modernism, to modernization? What is—has been, should be—the function of intellectuals, of political and cultural elites, in understanding the Romanian past and in setting a course for the future? What, more generally, is the role of history in answering such questions? Or is history perhaps (as Karl Krause remarked of psychoanalysis) the disease for which it claims to be the cure?Keith Hitchens’s keynote address suggested that rehashing old essentialist debates might not be productive at millennium’s end, but the conference itself could not avoid some excursions down the paths of memory and myth. For historians, Western historians anyway, Romania seems to have too many pasts. Located at the juncture of four previous empires, Romania is a mosaic, or perhaps a pandemonium, of ethnic, religious, economic, and ideological groups that can only imagine, or invent, a nationality. Geographically (and in many ways culturally) remote from the West, Romania for a long time (as Sorin Antohi remarked) lacked both a public sphere and a civil society; and suffering “a Counter-Reformation without a Reformation” (Alexandru Dutu’s phrase), it has not enjoyed a tradition of religious or ethnic toleration. Nor have either the Germans or the Jews (as Glass said) found their own unity within the changing borders of the modern Romanian state. Not until the nineteenth century did Romania develop, out of its Boyar background (as Siupiur argued), an intellectual elite that could create a modern national history and help turn “peasants into Romanians” (Antohi’s phrase); and even then this elite seemed more attracted to conservative [End Page 735] (Herder, Savigny, Burke) than to liberal views of autochthonism. Many features of Western modernity, such as Newtonian science, reached Romania late, and indeed there was a retrograde movement against liberalism under the aegis by orthodox religion. In any case this intelligentsia has been as fragmented and multiform as the Romanian past itself. True, some Romanian scholars like to posit a mainstream tradition, “excesses aside,” as one speaker put it—but how, asked another, can historians put “excesses” aside from the devastating perspective of this century?Political and cultural self-examination was the dominant theme of this conference. Nationality, said Pippidi, depends on three factors, viz., name, language, religion, and territory. The Romanian name dates from the tenth century, indicating a separation of the Roman from the Greek tradition in Wallachia; and from the seventeenth century the idea of a mainly Roman provenance was given privilege. As a language, “Romanian” was spoken in the late Middle Ages, but the first written document is dated 1521. The principal religion in Romania was and is Greek orthodox, although there are also Roman Catholic, Jewish, Islamic, and German Protestant communities, as well as the Uniate church created in the eighteenth century. As for the territory, this has been a matter of change, conflict, and confusion throughout the tragic course... (shrink)

This reference guide covers the entire history of Japan and is limited to books dealing with the doctrines and histories of the religions of Japan. It includes all works concerning religious, ethical, moral, and, to some extent, even political and educational thinkers and movements.