Search results

Roger Jackson provides accurate, accessible translations of three classics of medieval Indian Buddhist mysticism: the "couplet-treasuries" of the great tantric masters Saraha, Kanha, and Tilopa. Since their composition around 1000 CE, these poems have exerted a powerful influence on spiritual life, as well as poetry and song, in India, Nepal, and Tibet. Jackson's fresh translations allow the poetry to shine through, capturing the sense and spirit of the poems in the original. Jackson offers a th...

A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. What are the pleasures of reading translations of South Asian literature and what does it take to enjoy them? This volume explores these questions by bringing together a whole set of new translations by David Shulman, noted scholar of South Asia. The translated selections come from a variety of Indian languages, genres, and periods, from classical to current. They are accompanied by short essays especially...

Between 300 and 600 CE, Chinese writers compiled thousands of accounts of the strange and the extraordinary. Some described weird spirits, customs, and flora and fauna in distant lands. Some depicted individuals of unusual spiritual or moral achievement. But most told of ordinary people's encounters with ghosts, demons, or gods; sojourns in the land of the dead; eerily significant dreams; and uncannily accurate premonitions. The selection of such stories presented here provides an alluring intro...

The British Empire is no more, but at its height colonial subjects regarded Britain as the centre, a place of pilgrimage, if not residence. This collection of original essays brings together the distilled experiences of fourteen very different writers from the Caribbean, Africa and the Indian subcontinent. All started life in the former colonies and have either spent extended periods in Britain or settled there - and all have enriched British literature with new themes and ways of seeing, and a...

One of India's greatest epics, the Ramayana pervades the country's moral and cultural consciousness. For generations it has served as a bedtime story for Indian children, while at the same time engaging the interest of philosophers and theologians. Believed to have been composed by Valmiki sometime between the eighth and sixth centuries BC, the Ramayana tells the tragic and magical story of Rama, the prince of Ayodhya, an incarnation of Lord Visnu, born to rid the earth of the terrible demon Rav...

A volume of key writings on the Buddha, collected from a variety of languages and traditions While Buddhism has no central text comparable to the Bible or Koran, there is a powerful body of scripture from across Asia that encompasses the dharma, or the teachings of the Buddha. In this rich anthology, eminent scholar Donald S. Lopez, Jr. brings together works from a broad historical and geographical range, and from such languages as Pali, Sanskrit, Tibetan, Chinese, and Japanese. There are tales...

Minae Mizumura’s An I-Novel is a semi-autobiographical work that takes place over the course of a single day in the 1980s. Minae is a Japanese expatriate graduate student who has lived in the United States for two decades but turned her back on the English language and American culture. After a phone call from her older sister reminds her that it is the twentieth anniversary of their family’s arrival in New York, she spends the day reflecting in solitude and over the phone with her sister about...

This anthology presents new translations of Korean prose works from the tenth to the nineteenth century. It offers insight into past Korean societies by highlighting genres that have largely not been translated, such as diaries, short fictional biographies, erotic tales, oral narratives, and novellas, all of which illustrate the depth and variety of premodern Korean writings. The selections are intended to show what literate people of the premodern period enjoyed reading and demonstrate the cult...

Over the course of the twentieth century, Mongolian life was transformed, as a land of nomadic communities encountered first socialism and then capitalism and their promises of new societies. The stories collected in this anthology offer literary snapshots of Mongolian life throughout this tumult. Suncranes and Other Stories showcases a range of powerful voices and their vivid portraits of nomads, revolution, and the endless steppe. Spanning the years following the socialist revolution of 1921...

Japanese no theatre or the drama of 'perfected art' flourished in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries largely through the genius of the dramatist Zeami. An intricate fusion of music, dance, mask, costume and language, the dramas address many subjects, but the idea of 'form' is more central than 'meaning' and their structure is always ritualized. Selected for their literary merit, the twenty-four plays in this volume dramatize such ideas as the relationship between men and the gods, brother an...

Following the success of earlier facsimile collections (Lake District Tours: A Collection of Travel Writings and Guide Books in the Romantic Era and Picturesque Wales: Facsimile Reprints of ''Pennant's Tours'' and ''Wales Illustrated''), this is the third Edition Synapse collection of travel writing and guidebooks written during the period of 'picturesque tours'. Scotland became a popular destination for eighteenth-century writers. Samuel Johnson's A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1...