This is the fruit of a weeklong intermonastic dialogue held at New Camaldoli Hermitage in Big Sur, California. Chinese traditions of Taoism, Confucianism, and Chan Buddhism are included, in addition to Zen Buddhism and Hinduism. Encounters between Christian and Hindu or Buddhist monastics have been occurring for several decades, most notably signalized in the 1998 book The Gethsemani Encounter. The themes purity of heart and contemplation are central to the monastic quest and they are also universal, offering a meeting point, an area of spirituality that is shared by all the traditions involved.

The Rule of St. Benedict illuminated by the texts and traditions of Hindu and Buddhist monasticism, as well as by the Desert Fathers and the spiritual giants of the western and oriental Christian traditions.

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

When the history of Christian monasticism is written for the twentieth century, it will include one surprising and revolutionary development that nothing in its previous history could have prepared it for: the living dialogue with Buddhism. Over the past thirty years, while Christian theologians were eagerly discussing their doctrinal traditions with their Buddhist counterparts and rethinking their characterization of the "non-Christian" world, men and women monastics East and West were sharing methods of meditation and experiencing life in one another's communities. All of this, in turn, was part of a larger pursuit among religious-minded people across the world for a revitalized spirituality, one open to the inheritance of traditions previously considered false or at least irretrievably foreign. As the essays gathered together in the book will show, with Buddhist and Christian populations almost evenly distributed and the preservation of community-based monasticism still living in both traditions, Korea is in a unique position to reflect on the ideals of a life of "self-renunciation" as they have been conceptualized and embodied in these two world religions, and to ask what meaning the monastic experience still has for society at large.

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Monasticism has a special position in the history of pastoral care. It produced innovations in various aspects of pastoral care despite, or more precisely, because of its isolation in legal or social terms from the secular world. The thirteen papers contained in this volume will reveal that there was a great variety in the ways pastoral care continued to be practised by monasticism, depending on time, space, and the nature of each religious order. Adopting a comparative approach, their historical and geographical range of investigation is not limited to medieval Europe but expands to the Americas and even to Japan in the early Modern Age. This volume bases on a conference held on 1 and 2 March 2019 at Okayama University, Japan, as part of the close collaboration between a Japanese research group on Christian/Buddhist religious movements and the Research Project "Monasteries in the High Middle Ages: Innovation Laboratories for European Life Designs and Regulatory Models" of the Saxon and the Heidelberg Academies of Sciences and Humanities, as well as the Research Center for Comparative History of Religious Orders (FOVOG, Dresden).

Explores the phenomenon of monasteries from antiquity to present day as cloister places of refuge where fundamental aspects of life are regimented and spirituality is practiced.