At one time, the worldwide fame of the ruins at Baalbek drew huge numbers of tourist crowds. In the present day, a trip to Baalbek is extremely difficult and considerably dangerous. Luckily, the former curator of the site, Michel M. Alouf, made his years of research available in this heavily illustrated work. ...

Chinese Gleams of Sufi Light investigates, for the first time in a Western language, the manner in which the Muslim scholars of China adapted the Chinese tradition to their own needs during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The book surveys the 1400-year history of Islam in China and explores why the four books translated from Islamic languages into Chinese before the twentieth century were all Persian Sufi texts. The author also looks ...

Here is the up-to-date guide to Buddhist centers, facilities, teachers, retreats, courses, and retail outlets throughout the United States and Canada. It includes thousands of listings -- from zendos to vegetarian restaurants -- that you will want to explore along the Buddhist path to nirvana. This directory also features a section that defines each section of Buddhism, plus a glossary of Buddhist terms unique to each tradition, making it an ...

In these five lectures given at Easter in 1923, Rudolf Steiner lays a foundation for celebrating the Christian festivals -- Christmas, Easter, St. John's, and Michaelmas -- in a fully conscious way. He describes how the festival year evolved over long ages from the cycle of inbreathing and outbreathing that the forces which are the Earth's soul element carry out in relation to the cosmos, and reveals the deep relationship of humankind to the ...

Believing that the healing of broken community between Blacks and Jews is "a moral necessity, humanistic imperative, and divine command", Samuel DuBois Cook convened a group of African-Americans and Jewish-Americans on January 24, 1989, at Dillard University in New Orleans. There a commitment was made to hold a National Conference on Black-Jewish Relations in the spring of 1989. The speeches and essays in Black-Jewish Relations/Dillard University ...

World-renowned Buddhist scholar Herbert V. Guenther here offers the first comprehensive study of the rDzogs-chen or Ati tradition of the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism. "Matrix of Mystery" explores man's ability to preserve as well as transmit essential insights into the structure of reality. Utilizing a key root Buddhist scripture, the "Guhyagarbha" ("Matrix of Mystery"), along with dozens of commentarial Tibetan textual sources, Guenther ...

'Religion and Practical Reason: New Essays in the Comparative Philosophy of Religions' is the third and culminating collection of essays generated by a series of nine international conferences on the comparative philosophy of religions. ...

This work in comparative philosophy uses the concept of Titanism to critique certain trends in both Eastern and Western philosophy. Titanism is an extreme form of humanism in which human beings take on divine attributes and prerogatives. The author finds the most explicit forms of spiritual Titanism in the Jaina, Samkhya, and Yoga traditions, where yogis claim powers and knowledge that in the West are only attributed to God. These philosophies ...

Generally regarded as one of the foremost works of philosophy in any language, this important book by a brilliant Chinese philosopher and one of Taoism's founding fathers has exerted a profound influence on Chinese thought and led to the development of Zen Buddhism. This new edition contains a number of the most relevant and accessible selections from that great classic.<BR> ...

The Tao of Loss and Grief provides the reader with a gentle philosophy of life and living based upon Lao Tzu's classic Tao Te Ching. The Tao of grieving acknowledges the mysteries of life and its many difficulties and surprises.<P>Loss and the responding emotional response of grief are part of the mysterious whole of life. In this experience are also hope, love, forgiveness, and recovery from the loss.<P>The book is written to be read ...