Reality Itself: Philosophical Challenges of Indian Mahāyāna

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Reality Itself is a set of fifteen essays exploring interactions between Buddhist and Western philosophy. The first section presents the two traditions as sharing a quest for reality itself and illustrates this in discussions of everyday life, forgiveness, and religion. The second section engages with central concepts of Mahāyāna Buddhism: emptiness in the Heart Sutra, nonduality in the Vimalakirti Sutra, and skillful means in the Lotus Sutra. The third section focuses on Nāgārjuna's Root Verses of the Middle Way, showing how their dialectical logic and their dyad of ultimate and conventional can be applied in discussing divine personality, time, and truth. The final section studies interactions between Buddhism and Western thinkers (Hume, Hegel, Husserl, and Sartre), chiefly on the topic of self and non-self. The book should be of interest to graduate students in philosophy and theology.