The Heart of Buddhist Philosophy

Kenneth Inada calls this last book in Nolan Pliny Jacobson' s trilogy on Buddhist philosophy and process thought "not only timely, but urgent." "The message contained in the book," he notes, "should be released immediately." Seizo Ohe, Japan' s most distinguished philosopher of science, captures the essence of that message when he cites Jacobson' s understanding that Buddhism is "a new global cultural movement in which Japan and America are going to have a common world-historical mission-- respectively as the eastern and western ends of the eastern and western branches of human civilization." Jacobson convincingly demonstrates that Buddhism (particularly as expressed in the thought of Nagajuna, the Plato of the Buddhist tradition) and the Western philosophies of Heraclitus and of modern thinkers such as Dewey, Whitehead, and Hartshorne have developed a reason truer to authentic experience than the reason so prevalent in traditionally dominant Western philosophy.