Juan Arnau

Anthropology of Buddhism

Original title:

Antropología del Budismo.

About the book:

Anthropology of Buddhism is a fascinating immersion in the conversation that his been ongoing within Buddhism over the last two thousand years or more. The author interprets the central points of this dialogue by means of nine points of entry showing Buddhists' way of life, their particular concept of the human, and paving the way to Buddhic awakening.

1) Existence: which includes all living beings, from larvae to gods. 2) Desire: sacred energy which moves nature and moves human beings.  3) Ideas: the inexhaustible wellspring of desire and of illusions. 4) Emptiness; the serening of ambition that arises out of conceptual representation. 5) Symbolic, hermetic language; words of liberation that seek the liberation of words. 6) Skilful means; oscillating between persuasive eloquence and the deployment of miracles and prodigies. 7) Meditation; which sets up a dialogue between body and mind and aspires to thinking without thought. 8) Nirvana; inseparable from the notion of power, which wakes beings from their lethargy. And, lastly, 9) The human ideal (Bodisattva) ; one who makes of discernment and compassion their daily breath, not by escaping from the world, but rather remaining in it to make it more habitable.

About the author:

Juan Arnau is an astrophysicist, a doctor of Sanskrit philosophy and lecturer at the universities of Michigan and Barcelona.  He is author of La Palabra frente al vacío (The word and the void), La filosofia del vacío (The philosophy of Nagarjuna) (2005),critiques of the principal works of Nagarjuna, Fundamentos de la vía media (Bases of the Middle Way) (2004) and Abandono de la discusión (Beyond Discussion) (2005).