Looks at the development, ideas, and image of the Zen school of Mahayana Buddhism in India and China and briefly discusses influential Zen teachers

Zen Buddhism a History (Nanzan Studies in Religion and Culture)

Religion & Spirituality

Heisig, James W.

Knitter, Paul F.

Dumoulin, Heinrich

Buddhism

Macmillan Pub. Co.

VOLUME 1; NEWLY REVISED AND GREATLY EXPANDED EDITION. THE FIRST OF A 2 VOLUME SET

Zen Buddhism: A History (Nanzan Studies in Religion & Culture)

MacMillan Publishing Company

To many scholars in the world of religious studies, Zen is a world apart from the world of politics, and the philosophy of the Kyoto school is a politically neutral blend of intellectual traditions East and West, Buddhist and Christian. This volume challenges those assumptions by focusing on the question of nationalism in the work of Japanese Buddhist thinkers during and after the Pacific War. Fifteen Japanese and Western scholars offer a variety of critical perspectives concerning the political responsibility of intellectuals and the concrete historical consequences of working within a religious or philosophical tradition. The first group of essays debates the role of Zen Buddhism in wartime Japan. A second group of essays examines the political thought and activities of Nishida Kitaro, the doyen of the Kyoto school. A third group of essays questions the complicity of other philosophers of the Kyoto school in the wartime spirit of nationalism and analyzes the ideas of modernity and the modern nation-state then current in Japan. This carefully documented volume offers a wealth of information and reflection for those interested in prewar and wartime history, Zen, Japanese philosophy, and the problem of nationalism today.

Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, & the Question of Nationalism (Nanzan Studies in Religion and Culture)

History

Univ of Hawaii Pr

Philosophers of Nothingness: An Essay on the Kyoto School (Nanzan Library of Asian Religion and Culture, 8)

The past twenty years have seen the publication of numerous translations and commentaries on the principal philosophers of the Kyoto School, but so far no general overview and evaluation of their thought has been available, either in Japanese or in Western languages. James Heisig, a longstanding participant in these efforts, has filled that gap with Philosophers of Nothingness. In this extensive study, the ideas of Nishida Kitaro, Tanabe Hajime, and Nishitani Keiji are presented both as a consistent school of thought in its own right and as a challenge to the Western philosophical tradition to open itself to the original contribution of Japan.

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

University of Hawaii Press

Univ. of Hawaii Press

Following on the phenomenal success of Remembering the Kanji, the author has prepared a companion volume for learning the Hiragana and Katakana syllabaries of modern Japanese. In six short lessons of about twenty minutes, each of the two systems of "kana" writing are introduced in such a way that the absolute beginner can acquire fluency in writing in a fraction of the time normally devoted to the task. Using the same basic self-taught method devised for learning the kanji, and in collaboration with Helmut Morsbach and Kazue Kurebayashi, the author breaks the shapes of the two syllabaries into their component parts and draws on what he calls "imaginative memory" to aid the student in reassembling them into images that fix the sound of each particular kana to its writing. Now in its third edition, Remembering the Kana has helped tens of thousands of students of Japanese master the Hiragana and Katakana in a short amount of time . . . and have fun in the process.

Remembering the Kana: A Guide to Reading and Writing the Japanese Syllabaries in 3 Hours Each

The aim of this book is to provide the student of Japanese with a simple method for correlating the writing and the meaning of Japanese characters in such a way as to make them both easy to remember. It is intended not only for the beginner, but also for the more advanced student looking for some relief from the constant frustration of how to write the kanji and some way to systematize what he or she already knows. The author begins with writing because--contrary to first impressions--it is in fact the simpler of the two. He abandons the traditional method of ordering the kanji according to their frequency of use and organizes them according to their component parts or "primitive elements." Assigning each of these parts a distinct meaning with its own distinct image, the student is led to harness the powers of "imaginative memory" to learn the various combinations that result. In addition, each kanji is given its own key word to represent the meaning, or one of the principal meanings, of that character. These key words provide the setting for a particular kanji's "story," whose protagonists are the primitive elements. 
In this way, students are able to complete in a few short months a task that would otherwise take years. Armed with the same skills as Chinese or Korean students, who know the meaning and writing of the kanji but not their pronunciation in Japanese, they are now in a much better position to learn to read (which is treated in a separate volume).

Remembering the Kanji, Vol. 1: A Complete Course on How Not to Forget the Meaning and Writing of Japanese Characters (English and Japanese Edition)

Remembering the Kanji, Vol. 2: A Systematic Guide to Reading Japanese Characters (Japanese and English Edition)

Reference

Words, Language & Grammar

Remembering the Kanji: Writing and Reading Japanese Characters for Upper-Level Proficiency (Japanese Edition)

Sienko, Tanya

At long last the approach that has helped thousands of learners memorize Japanese kanji has been adapted to help students with Chinese characters. Book 1 of Remembering Simplified Hanzi covers the writing and meaning of the 1,000 most commonly used characters in the simplified Chinese writing system, plus another 500 that are best learned at an early stage. (Book 2 adds another 1,500 characters for a total of 3,000.) Of critical importance to the approach found in these pages is the systematic arranging of characters in an order best suited to memorization. In the Chinese writing system, strokes and simple components are nested within relatively simple characters, which can, in turn, serve as parts of more complicated characters and so on. Taking advantage of this allows a logical ordering, making it possible for students to approach most new characters with prior knowledge that can greatly facilitate the learning process. Guidance and detailed instructions are provided along the way. Students are taught to employ "imaginative memory" to associate each character’s component parts, or "primitive elements," with one another and with a key word that has been carefully selected to represent an important meaning of the character. This is accomplished through the creation of a "story" that engagingly ties the primitive elements and key word together. In this way, the collections of dots, strokes, and components that make up the characters are associated in memorable fashion, dramatically shortening the time required for learning and helping to prevent characters from slipping out of memory.

Remembering Simplified Hanzi 1: How Not to Forget the Meaning and Writing of Chinese Characters

Richardson, Timothy W.

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Books by Heisig, James W.