Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook (Nanzan Library of Asian Religion and Culture, 5)

This is not just and in depth narrative of Japanese philosophy. It is also an excellent account of historical view and way of life throughout the last 800 years of this beautiful country

For anyone really wanting to read primary source material from Japanese philosophy, there is nothing better in the English language. Not a book for the timid or the dilatant. Well over 1000 pages of materials: a great wealth of reading.

Came just in time for class. No damage at all. Thanks!🙏🏾

Informative and well researched. This book was a required text for a class but it is one that I will keep.

Everything you want to know about Japanese philosophy but don't know how to ask.

Perfect book for the price and it helped me very, very much in class. Thank you very much for the sale

One of the difficulties that an English speaker might have in approaching Japanese philosophy is not really knowing where to start and who to work on. As one can see from the table of contents, Japanese philosophy is broad. There are communitarian thinkers like Watsuji Tetsuro, and there are individualist liberals like Fukuzawa Yukichi. There are the Zen Buddhist thinkers like Dogen and Shinran, and severe critics of Zen like Ichikawa Hakugen (who was in himself an incredible Zen man). There are both nationalists and people who got thrown in jail for their views against Japan. Oh and there are female thinkers too. So clearly, Japan outside travel guides is a complex place, difficult to reduce to stereotypes about nothingness, no-self, community, and nihonjinron (Japanese ethnocentrism). But where does one start? Even if one can read Japanese, a non-native speaker would have a hard time just randomly going through dozens of thinkers trying to find who one finds really worth studying. And that is where I think this book is excellent. If you come across a name in a book or in a lecture, in minutes you can have a grasp of the basic approach of that person and his/her historical context. This book covers almost anyone of note in the history of thought. Spare half an hour and you can read a few selections from key works, translated in excellent and readable English. If you are convinced this person is worth reading, then you can head off to primary sources--likely in Japanese as many of the people taken up in the sourcebook have never been translated to English before. The Japanese language is difficult, so is the philosophy, and put those two elements together and you have a very forbidding field in Japanese Philosophy. But it is the publication of books like these that make it possible both to research and to teach this subject in English.

The problem I had with the book is that as soon as I open the book the binding of the book broke. It was very dissapointing that it was so poorly made. I have no comments about the content.

Una buen primer paso para conocer la filosofía japonesa. No sólo las traducciones, sino también la organización. Una excelente herramienta, una excelente obra de referencia.

No lo he leído todo aún pero me ha ayudado a entender muchísimas cosas, así como las que he aprendido. Como es muy largo y contiene mucha información, lo iré leyendo lentamente. Muy recomendable. Gracias

This is a great anthology of Japanese Philosophy. There is a lot of information in this book and good for those who want an overview of Japanese Philosophy. I particularly liked that there was a brief introduction to the philosophers before showing their writings. I bought this book hoping to gain information about Japanese Confucian scholars (and I did), but I was pleasantly surprised to learn about the Kyoto School.

English is not my native language but there is no equivalent of this book in French. I do not understand all the subtleties of the text, but I think the key is there.

So far so very good. I have found the navigation on the Kindle to be faultless. The various selections appear to be comprehensive and well chosen. Though I am already familiar with some of the names cited ( especially those on zen and Pure Land Buddhism ) I have yet to dip in in any serious way. This simply because I am finding the Introduction/explanation of the Framework so interesting; I am now reading it closely for the second time. Yes, quite expensive, but then it is very large and would run to well over 1000 printed pages. All in all an excellent production. Thank you.