Fool
Old 1970s work is a survey work that is encyclopedic in its coverage and very dense but covers virtually everything. Great for an overview. Divided into section for pure land schools, Zen, Nichiren and Lotus schools, then a nice final chapter on the activities of older Nara based schools and Shingon, Kegon, and Tendai.
Called a new translation of the Heart Sutra but Hanh offers his own innovations by, in a way, adding his own material to the sutra to avoid “misunderstandings”
His commentaries include fun anecdotes and this is a work very much aimed at practitioners but also includes engagement with Sanskrit and Chinese Buddhist terminology which vary from clear explanations of these terms to modern revisions of Buddhist ideas.
My newer edition has the new name, “The Other Shore”
Nice to have as a reference text if the text is important in your religious practice and the terms and concepts section is handy, but a rather strange book in terms of structure. The new translation of the sutra provided is informative but I'm not sure “boundless” is necessarily an improvement over “emptiness” and certainly reads less smoothly than either Suzuki or Conze translations. Still, I learnt a fair deal.
The translation reads smooth but I can't judge the quality. The afterward offers an interpretation quite far from the contents, and depends heavily on other Shinran texts and presumably more modern Shin views. Would have benefited from better overview of this text in context of Shinran as a historical figure.
Seen this cited often, but regret reading this instead of also heavily cited Sources of the Self. This seems like a more breezy take which risks not satisfying either the philosophers or the historians. On the plus side, it's accessibility probably makes it appealing for students and if you want to familiarize yourself with his overall approach.
Fascinating history of the art of memory. Links up a number of thinkers in refreshing and apparently when this came out, new ways. Some chapters on Lullism and Bruno and the hermetic tradition were a very heavy slog despite being the climax of the author's most original arguments and I confess to some skimming there. The early chapters through the chapter on Thomas Aquinas were a wonderful survey of mnemotechnics from Greek to medieval European (of course the discussion is limited to the European side of things) history of memory techniques.
Learned a lot from the book and there is broad coverage. The book is interesting throughout. Three areas that can frustrate readers: If you don't already read Scots well, the many and sometimes long Scots passages in block quotes can be extremely difficult. You can guess your way through some phrases but the assumption seems to be (confirmed by the concluding paragraph addressing the reader as someone Scottish) you can read Scots fluently. Only very occasionally are Scots words in quotes glossed. Secondly, pronunciation explanations never include phonetic alphabetic glosses and instead offer occasional comparisons which are ambiguous - “sounds like” comparisons depends a lot on whether the reader is Scottish, English, or American so that readers may be left wondering how many words are pronounced. Finally, while I'm certainly very sympathetic to the overall narrative of the tragic disregard for Scots as a serious idiom of study and promotion, there are moments when readers more familiar with sociolinguistics or of the histories of language and nationalism will find themselves uneasy to encounter extremely curt dismissals of any more troubling connections of the latter, and strange occasional passages (not uniform, as the author is more careful in some places than in others) where Scots is treated as special thanks to glories of Scotland's past, over and above languages/dialects within Scotland (Doric) or beyond (Northumbrian) etc. Languages are dialects and dialects are languages as he says, until they aren't, as he suggests elsewhere speaking of unbroken continuum's and the like. The deeply contested terrain here is not always carefully dealt with by highly normative tone of this work on Scots.
The goal of the work, to “de-center” China and see “what would Chinese history look like” if one looks at it from the perspective of the periphery is admirable and the work offers some gestures in that direction but I don't know if a new perspective on “Chinese history” is either the core of the work nor did it need to be. I think instead this work reaches in multiple directions at once: opening with a dense but very helpful summary of a massive amount of secondary historical research on the frontiers and interactions between the “central plains” states and other states and peoples around it, especially the peoples of the northeast of the continent, the Korean peninsula, and the Japanese archipelago. The second half of the book are three case studies: state rituals, succession, and civilized-barbian discourses that take us on a tour of how these practices and discourse were connected, similar, or unique in the early modern states of northeast Asia. Again, the strength throughout is massive synthesis of the secondary literature, and lots of integration of Korean language scholarship in particular. Was pretty shocked, however, to find that a book with hundreds of toponyms has two barely labeled maps - simply unacceptable.
