Sinceits founding by Jacques Waardenburg in 1971, Religion and Reason has been a leading forum for contributions on theories, theoretical issues and agendas related to the phenomenon and the study of religion. Topics include (among others) category formation, comparison, ethnophilosophy, hermeneutics, methodology, myth, phenomenology, philosophy of science, scientific atheism, structuralism, and theories of religion. From time to time the series publishes volumes that map the state of the art and the history of the discipline.

Recent thinking in Christian theology of religions has taken a “pneumatological turn” which asks how the doctrine of the Holy Spirit can contribute to the interreligious dialogue and to the emerging discourse of comparative theology. Pneumatology and the Christian-Buddhist Dialogue. Does the Spirit Blow through the Middle Way? tests the viability of this approach as applied to the Christian-Buddhist dialogue. Various Christian and Buddhist traditions are compared and contrasted within a pneumatological framework. Is the Holy Spirit to be found along the Buddha’s middle way? Some Christians say yes, while others demur. The thesis of this volume is that such a pneumatological perspective opens up possibilities for the deepening and transformation of Christian theology in the religiously plural world of the twenty-first century.

'Buddhism as Philosophy' does more than just report what Buddhist philosophers said: it presents their arguments and invites the reader to assess their overall cogency.

This is a critical and philosophical analysis and assessment of the teachings of Buddha as Found in the Early Stratum of the Pali Canon and those of Lord Krsna as embodied in the Bhagvadgita. It is the first time that the foundational works of the two most important traditions of Indian thought have been brought together for comperative treatment.The Widely prevalent openion among scholars that Hindu thought did not have any significant contact with Pali Buddhism, might perhaps be one of the reasons why no attempt has previously been made to undertake a comparative study of Bhagwadgita and early Buddhism. The author covers the whole field of epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics in detail and depth, and bases his conclusions throughout on the original texts, making careful examinations of, and paing due attention, to the commentatiorialexegeses and scholarly interpretations.

The 'Self' or 'Non-self' in Buddhism This book is a cogent reinterpretation of many of the key arguments of Mahāyāna philosophy, providing new insights in relation to the question of what a ‘self’ may or may not be, relativistically perceived as an I-consciousness in light of the doctrine of the Void (śūnyatā). The major classical logic relating to such things as the Two Truths, Dependent Origination, the Sevenfold Reasoning, are properly examined by presenting an esoteric view (the Dharmakāya Way) that represents the middle way between extremes. In doing so many concepts are modernised and inherent errors expunged via the presentation of a new valid hermeneutic.

The Buddha and Aristotle offer competing visions of the best possible life to which human beings can aspire. In this volume, Seth Zuihō Segall compares Theravāda and Mahāyāna accounts of enlightenment with Aristotelian and neo-Aristotelian accounts of eudaimonia, and proposes a syncretic model of eudaimonic enlightenment that, given prevalent Western beliefs about well-being and human flourishing, provides a credible new end-goal for modern Western Buddhist practice. He then demonstrates how this proposed synthesis is already deeply reflected in contemporary Western Buddhist rhetoric. Segall re-evaluates traditional Buddhist teachings on desire, attachment, aversion, nirvāṇa, and selfhood from the eudaimonic enlightenment perspective, and explores the perspective’s ethical and metaphysical implications.

What are we? Are we, for example, souls, organisms, brains, or something else? In this book, Andrew Brenner argues that there are principled obstacles to our discovering the answer to this fundamental metaphysical question. The main competing accounts of personal ontology hold that we are either souls (or composites of soul and body), or we are composite physical objects of some sort, but, as Brenner shows, arguments for either of these options can be parodied and transformed into their opposites. Brenner also examines arguments for and against the existence of the self, offers a detailed discussion of the metaphysics of several afterlife scenarios - resurrection, reincarnation, and mind uploading -- and considers whether agnosticism with respect to personal ontology should lead us to agnosticism with respect to the possibility of life after death.

This book explores the resonances between Deleuze’s philosophy and a range of philosophical concepts in Buddhism. Focusing on this rarely examined relationship, this book gathers perspectives from scholars around the globe to explore the continuities and discontinuities between Deleuze’s and Buddhist thought. They examine immanence, intensity, assemblages and desire, and the concepts of ethics and meditation. This volume will prove to be an important resource for readers and scholars interested in philosophy, critical theory and comparative studies. They will find this an engaging and invaluable examination of two different yet similar modes of thought.

This book investingates the teachings of emptiness in early Buddhism, as recorded in the Pali and Chinese version of the early Buddhist canon. In general, the findig is that these two version,although differently worded, record in common that the teaching of the historical Buddha as connected with emptiness. The general reader, with little or no prior knowledge of Buddhism, can discover in this book how early Buddhism provides a vision and a method to help in overcoming the ills of the mind.