Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Nirvana and other Buddhist felicities

I finally got a hold of a copy of Nirvana and Other Buddhist Felicities: Utopias of the Pali Imaginaire, By Steven Collins. This is a fairly expensive scholarly book and luckily I was able to borrow it using my state's interlibrary loan system.

The first part of the book is about "What is Nirvana?" which is of course less of a unique subject than the second part of the book which "explores other Buddhist utopias and relates Buddhist utopianism to studies of European and American utopian writing." Of particular interest to me is "Chapter 6: The perfect moral commonwealth? Kingship and its discontents" which talks about the political implications of the Pali texts.

Anyway, I'm going to read the interesting parts of the book and attempt to post some of its more interesting points here as I get time.

2 comments:

အရွင္ေမတၱာစာရ said...

A Nice Blog for Burma. I am a 27 years old Buddhist monk from Burma. Come and visit: http://ashinmettacara-eng.blogspot.com/

Robert said...

Thanks! I'm creating a blog post about your blog and will link to you in my blogroll.