4 comments about Paramhansa Swami Yogananda: Life-portrait and Reminiscences.

1. Paramhansa Yogananda swami - more data.
   
   The actual source of data or person who wrote this book was in competition with Yogananda in as much as he made himself out to be a chosen one to spread Kriya Yoga possibly without true authority.
   This often happens in new religious movements.
   
   A well known disciple of his in Canada, has also been attempting to do the same thing, while attempting to insult Yogananda.
   Can the claims of such persons be trusted?
   I have met this person and was not impressed.
   There are so many that want to be powerful and famous, that want to appear as if they really
   Know something special, in religion this goes on very often .
   I would not recommend reading this work either...



2. The original Autobiography of a Yogi is uniformly positive and inspiring, with institutions and initiatives simply popping into being.
   
   In this book, written by a close associate and contemporary in India, more insight is given into what it took (warts and all) to make Yogananada's early projects happen on a human level, with the teams of characters assisting, particularly Swamis Dhirananda and Satyananda.
   
   It also sets the context of a Calcutta profoundly influenced by the Babaji line of gurus as well as the Ramakrishna/Vivekananda line.
   
   I do not believe this book diminishes Yoganandaji, quite the opposite it shows his ultimate success with the challenges of team and project building on a human level, as well as the divine level, already so beautifully encapsulated in the Autobiography itself.



3. First of all, I must warn future readers who revere Yogananda and consider him as their guru, would find this book quite difficult to read. The author, who is a disciple of Sri Yukteshvar, presents a very impartial and honest account of Paramhansa Yogananda. This account also includes unflattering behavior of the great guru while he visited India in 1935.
   
   Before I proceed further, one should realize that the author has great reverence for Yogananda and gives him credit where credit is due. However, the author also revels to the reader that Sri Yukteshvar was not always pleased by Yogananda's behavior when he returned to India. Of course, this new information was not available to the public in the "Autobiography of a Yogi" written by Yogananda himself.
   
   This is an important revelation as well. This shows that if a person is Self-Realized and has attained a high spiritual understanding, he/she will still be prone to errors of judgment, behavior and understanding.
   
   In conclusion, the reason why I gave this book a 5 star rating is because of the new and not always positive information about Yogananda. This shows that Yogananda is "human" after all. I would not recommend this book to most SRF members who view Yogananda as their guru as the information would be pretty hard to digest. However, if a person who admires Yogananda and reads this book with a deep sense of understanding and still revers Yogananda, then this book is for them.



4. FOR ANYONE WHO READ YOGANANDA'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND OTHER WRITINGS THIS BOOK GIVES A LOT OF INSIGHT INTO HIS EARLY LIFE IN INDIA AND WHAT HE EXPERIENCED WHEN HE FIRST CAME TO AMERICA. ONE OF THE MAIN REASONS I RECOMMEND THIS BOOK IS BECAUSE IT IS WRITTEN BY SOMEONE WHO KNEW YOGANANDA IN PERSON AND SOME OF THE INFORMATION CONVEYED FALLS OUTSIDE THE "PARTY LINE" PROMULGATED BY SELF REALIZATION FELLOWSHIP; I.E. IT SHOWS THAT YOGANANDA HAD A HUMAN SIDE WITH MANY PROBLEMS AND CONFLICTS TO RESOLVE AND HOW HE HELPED AND WAS HELPED BY OTHER PEOPLE.

No comments about The Philosophy of Jaakko Hintikka (Library of Living Philosophers).

5 comments about I Give You My Life.

1. I have read all of Ayya Khemas other books and many of her Dhamma talks on Buddhanet.net but this book is written from the heart of Ayya Khema descibing her and her family's incredible journey from Nazi Germany to Shanghai, to US then to South America and finally her journey to the far east and back to Germany where she established Buddha Haus. This is such a well written book that I simply could not put it down and felt her genuine sense wanting to give us her life on every page. I felt connected to sister Khema from the first to last page. I highly recommend it. Floyd in Idaho



2. Ilse Kussel's, life covers over half of this autobiographical book, the remainder is the life of Ayya Khema; both lives are well worth reading.
   
   The 'death' of Ilse (and the birth of Ayya Khema and the love for the children) is connected with letting go of her two children. She writes beautifully:
   
   "My love for them did not depend on their being alive; on their living the way I wanted them to; on from their side, feeling connected to me, on their being grateful to me, or on their being 'well-behaved'. All that no longer mattered."
   
   This for me is the highlight in the book; what follows in the life of Ayya with her teaching and with the establishment of various monasteries and centres was made possible by this kind of detatchment.



3. Ayya Khema (1923-1997)played an important role in the ongoing revival of Western interest in Buddhism. Her autobiography "I give you my Life" (1997), completed just before her death, tells the story of the development of her commitment to Buddhism and spirituality and of her decision at age 55 to become a Buddhist nun. Each chapter in her brief book is introduced by a verse from the Dhammapada, a seminal Buddhist scriptural text consisting of short poems, which illuminates in a telling way the portion of her life under discussion.

   Ayya Khema ("Ayya" is an honorific title for Buddhist nuns while "Khema" was the name of a nun during the Buddha's lifetime) was born Ilse Kussel in 1923 in Berlin to a prosperous, assimilated Jewish family. The family fled Germany before the Holocaust and Ilse, as a teenager, travelled by steamer to Glasgow, Scotland before joining her family shortly thereafter in Shanghai. She married in her late teens and travelled to California with her husband where she worked in a bank, had two children, and appeared settled into an American middle-class life. As a result, she tells us, of a deepening sense of spiritual unrest, she divorced her husband and married a childhood acquaintance named Gerd, whose family had also fled the Holocaust. She and Gern lived a wandering type of life in South America and Asia, where her husband was an engineer. The couple ultimately settled in Australia, bought a farm and raised shetland ponies. This marriage too ended with Ilse's, continued search for spiritual wisdom and her growing interest in meditation. Ilse became a Buddhist nun at the age of 55, helped establish three Buddhist convents in Sri Lanka, Australia, and Germany, became a meditation master, worked ceaselessly to revive the Buddhist order of nuns, and wrote prolifically about Buddhism.

   Ayya Khema lived an inspiring and full life on many levels and she tells her story well. Apart from her decision to become a nun, I learned a great deal from her willingness to make a radical change in mid-life. It is important to see how people may change and develop throughout their lives, and I was moved to see this realized in Ayya Khema's story.

   In many ways, Ayya Khema's autobiography radiates sincerity and purpose and fulfills its goal of speaking directly to the reader. This is especially true in her introduction and in the sections of her book following her ordination where she explains what the Buddhist path has meant to her. The final pages of the book, written when Ayya Khema knew she would soon die, have a rare immediacy and poignancy.

   Most autobiographies conceal as much about their subject as they reveal, and Ayya Khema's autobiography is no exception. The book gives a good picture of the externals of Ilse Kussel's life but, I thought, too little of what was going on inside. I found myself wanting to know more about Ilse's two marriages and the reasons for their failures. There is a brief discussion of Ilse's attempt to recover her spirituality through Judaism, and I would have liked to hear more. Beyond references to the suffering of life and to the inevitability of change, I would have liked more detail of Ilse's early study of spiritual texts. And I would have liked more details on the course she pursued during her meditation retreats and on what it was she learned from the Indian and Buddhist masters she reveres as her teachers.

   This autobiography shows effectively Ilse Kussel's transformation into Ayya Khema. It shows what was important to Ayya Khema when she became a nun and how she worked to realize herself as a Buddhist nun. We see Ilse Kussel/Ayya Khema througout her life as an intelligent strong-willed and determined woman. I still do not fully understand, after reading this inspiring story, the internal process by which Isle Kussel became transformed into Ayya Khema.




4. i've read some of her other instructional books and have always found them to be very helpful . that sort of piqued my interest in the person itself , which is why i bought this book .

   i hadn't quite expected to read about someone with such a florid history . i half expected her to be someone with a dreary life bordering on the mundane . she's really compressed a great deal into that life of hers .

   more importantly , she speaks of herself in a matter of fact manner . it is this detached manner that i found enlightening . i recommend this book to others because i think its inspirational . which one of us doesn't need some inspiration every now and then .




5. Easy to read and clearly written autobiography of a woman, who's life led here from nazi prosecution during the second world war through many intermediate states to finally becoming a buddhist nun of theravada buddhism. The english translation of the german original does not seem (to me) to be as good as it could be, but this should not be a reason not to read it. One might like to know, that half of the book describes Khema's regular life and that spiritual features are only showing up rather late. After she described so many details of her regular life, I was missing more information about her spiritual struggles after she became buddhist up to the point when she gained deeper meditative insights. The entire story is written from a very detached point of view. Maybe a buddhist ideal, but rather caused by Khema's experiences during the war. Nevertheless, the book is a great reading and one learns a lot about her times, herself and how a spiritual life can turn regular life upside down.

2 comments about Simone Weil: A Brief Introduction.

1. Philosopher, mystic, activist - all terms discussing one Simone Weil. "Simone Weil: A Brief Introduction" is a look at this remarkable woman who, despite never being a member of the church, is widely considered one of the most interesting religious figures of the past one hundred years. Interestingly, the author views Weil's life from both a subjective and objective viewpoint. Finely composed and compiled, "Simone Weil: A Brief Introduction" is highly recommended for community library biography collections.
   
   Diane C. Donovan
   California Bookwatch



2. Stephen Plant does a service to this interesting, yet frequently overlooked Christian thinker of the 20th century. Plant covers the life and thought of Simone Weil in this brief introduction. He writes in a lucid manner that is accessible to both the theological veteran and novice alike. If you have any interest in Simone Weil, but do not know where to start, this book may be your answer.

2 comments about Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life.

1. This book contains a great deal of information on the life of a sadly-neglected philosopher; one of the most brilliant Americans of the 19th century. Dr. Brent has a wonderful, at times even poetic, writing style, and he has "lived" with Peirce so long that he has excellent insight into the man behind the philosophy. Struggling through Peirce in a class? This book may not make his philosophy "easy"--but it will make him more human.



2. This is a very good biography of an overlooked great American thinker. Mr. Brent does a good job of recounting the life of Peirce without getting bogged down in the details of Peirce's philosophy which is well documented in several other books. The book also attempts to analyze Peirce's behavoir and why he failed as an academic, something that desperately needed to be done. As Peirce's reputation inevitatably increases, this biography will become a classic reference to this very interesting American.

2 comments about Descartes: A Biography.

1. Philosophy professor Desmond Clarke presents Descartes: A Biography, an exhaustively in-depth accounting of the life of mathematician, theologian, and philosopher Rene Descartes. Obscure during his life, yet famous after his death, Descartes was a crucial contributor to the Scientific Revolution, and even tried to prove the existence of God, though his contemporaries considered those attempts questionable at best. He is immortalized today in the name of the Cartesian coordinate system, and the transformation of thought he helped usher has left repercussions up to the modern day. Descartes: A Biography examines both Descartes' personal life and his great discoveries and achievements, and is highly recommended for library and biography shelves.



2. Let's make this short but sweet: Over the last few years there has been a spate of Descartes biographies, none of them satisfying. But now Cambridge U. Press has come out with what I feel will be the standard biography of Descartes, and it had better be, inasmuch as it's over 500 pages. Clarke's biography differs from the others in that he takes the full range of Descartes' interests into account (theology, philosophy and the science) as he traces Descartes' intellectual development and his ultimate role as midwife to the Scientific Revolution, a role he `inherited' from Kepler and Galileo and one which he expanded into a search for a theory that would link theology, science and philosophy. A recluse who spent much of his life in Holland and kept in touch with the intellectual currents of his day mainly by correspondence, Descartes was a fascinating character ands Clarke does an excellent job straddling the line between Descartes the man and Descartes the thinker.
   
   In addition, the book is quite well-written; a worthy addition to the Cambridge U. Press series of Philosophical Biographies. (Previous subjects include Spinoza, Hobbes, Hegel, Kant and Kierkegaard.) While demonstrating his mastery of his subject, Clarke does an excellent job of explaining Descartes' philosophy and intellectual interests without boring his readers, a trick more scholarly authors should learn.

5 comments about On Jesus (Wadsworth Philosophers Series).

1. A rigorous academic examination of Jesus as a philosopher, as recorded in the 4 canonical gospels. A great primer for those who would like to know what Jesus is reported to have said, the context in which he said it and what it meant at the time to his listeners. Topics include his styles of argument, epistemology, ethics, worldview and views on women. A cogent analysis. The author's premise is Jesus as an intellectual who reasoned with the best of them. After reading this little book, I agree Jesus warrants recognition in this way. Seeing the logic of Jesus' positions, it is much easier to understand why he has been so influential to so many intellectuals over the centuries



2. It is easy to fall into a rut in how we view Jesus of Nazareth, especially in an age of pop-culture takes on who he was. From Dan Brown's "The DaVinci Code" to Andrew Lloyd Weber's "Jesus Christ Superstar" to Joan Osborne's "What if God Was One of Us" we've become very used to looking at Jesus as just another guy.
   
   But if this is true, then why have people been fascinated or repulsed by the man and his teachings for centuries? Why did Red Communism ban the Bible? Why has modern scholarship been so divided over who he really was? Though he has inspired some of the greatest cultural reforms in the history of our country (abolition of slavery, Civil Rights, etc.), why is it that his name brings more "offense" today than that of any other religious icon (e.g., the buddha, Mohammed, or even Joseph Smith)?
   
   Perhaps Groothuis has something here. A good look at what the man taught and how he went about it makes a decision on who he really was unavoidable. The read is short, but Groothuis has a knack for packing large amounts of information into small amounts of text. The concepts are simple though the writing is academic, the vocabulary is well defined and the points are compelling and comprehensively documented. It's like rediscovering the goodness of fresh produce. And with that option available, why settle for fast-food pop-culture drivel?
   
   ALong



3. The beauty of this work is its concise, logical examination of the mind of Christ. It offers a refreshing way to understand the New Testament's record of Christ's words and deeds through the tools of philosophical inquiry. In the process, novel meaning emerges from old, familiar texts, and Jesus himself is cast in a new light--that of a shrewd and skillful logician. The author details numerous classical lines of argument that Jesus employed in his dealings with both friend and foe, revealing a surprising degree of contextualization for the message he came to deliver. Christ is shown to have "packaged" his gospel message in terms that were not only quite familiar to his listeners, but impeccably rational and ultimately irrefutable.
   
   Groothuis also unveils a seemless consistency between the words, actions, and self-proclaimed identity of Jesus, using New Testament passages to make his case. As the chapters unfold, it becomes more and more convincing that the metaphysics, ethics, and epistemology of Jesus formed a singular, consistent whole. That whole included a worldview in which women were considered (and treated)as perfectly equal to men--a very radical position for the time.
   
   The reader begins the book with the interesting question of whether Jesus legitimately fulfilled the definition of a philosopher. Several chapters later it is obvious from the material Groothuis presents that Jesus is a philosopher par excellence, despite claims to the contrary by other writers and philosophers who took up the issue. Groothuis presents the arguments of these detractors and one by one exposes their logical inconsistencies. Yet by the end of the book a more interesting question emerges for the reader: What to do with a philosopher who made absolute claims about his own divinity? The fearsome logic of Jesus, as Groothuis clearly points out in the concluding chapter, required that he be responded to as either a kook, a demonic incarnation, or who he claimed to be--Immanuel ("God with us"). Like Pilate, no one had the option of just washing their hands of the God-man and walking away. Jesus demanded a response of his listeners--not just to his logic, but to himself. And so the reader, of necessity, is left to ponder his or her own personal response to this ancient peasant philosopher.



4. I was surprised at how easy and enjoyable this little book was to read. This book looks at Jesus as a philosopher and goes over his philosophical method of dealing with the objectors He faced.



5. This is the first work I have come across that has seriously looked at Jesus as a philosopher. Groothuis begins this short introductory work, which is the format for each of the books in this series, by clearly defining what constitutes calling someone a philosopher and then just as clearly demonstrates that the historically verifiable Jesus is just as much a philosopher as the others in this series. He then discusses Jesus' use of argument, His metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and view of women. Any discussion of Jesus on any level must take into account the historicity of Jesus, an evaluation of His claims of deity as well as the historicity of the crucifixion and resurrection. Groothuis does an admirable job, in a short format, to give a good reason to at least consider each of these as worthy of further study.

   While most people know of, or know Jesus, to varying degrees, as the central figure in the Christian faith, this book will be of great benefit to anyone interested in studying Him as a philosopher as well as evaluate His teaching and claims as philosophical arguments.

2 comments about Reverence for Life: The Ethics of Albert Schweitzer for the Twenty-First Century.

1. If you've read Dr. Schweitzer's "Reverence for Life", you should enjoy this compilation of letters and papers regarding and reinforcding Schweitzer's ethic. The included writings are authored by everyone from Graduate students to correspondents and Albert Schweitzer himself. Very enjoyable reading.



2. Collaboratively and expertly edited by Marvin Meyer (Griset Professor of Bible and Christian Studies, Chapman University, Orange, California) and Kurt Bergel (Professor Emeritus, Chapman University and founder/co-director of the Chapman University Albert Schweitzer Institute), Reverence for Life: The Ethics Of Albert Schweitzer For The Twenty-First Century is an inherently impressive selection of profound essays by humanitarian Albert Schweitzer, enhanced with an eclectic variety of soul-searching commentaries on his thoughts and recommendations. Among Schweitzer's presented and scrutinized works are sermons, letters, as well as tidbits of his personal autobiography and deep philosophy. Reverence For Life is highly recommended as life-affirming, fundamental and thoughtfully constructed reading.

1 comments about The Humor of Kierkegaard: An Anthology.

1. The editor of this book says it is not meant to present a systematic , serious investigation of Kierkegaard's humor. Rather it is presented for the general reader as a kind of introduction to Kierkegaard, and his droll, imaginative humor which the editor believes is the greatest of any philosopher.
   Having read a fair amount of Kierkegaard in my time I would say that his humor is real, ironic and smile- raising. It will not get anyone rolling in the aisles.
   Yet the wit, again the irony do help make Kierkegaard an amusing writer- and this when his emotional range goes far beyond this.

2 comments about The Philosopher and His Poor.

1. Jacques Ranciere is one of the most important French philosophers writing today. This work deftly shows how sociologists have, over the years, taken control of Marxist thought away from the philosophers who once had (perhaps) too firm of a grip. Did the philosophers do this willingly? Should theorizing the poor go back into the hands of the philosophers? Do sociologists do a better job writing from the proletarian's perspective? You'll have to read the book to find out!



2. The belated arrival of this early book of Jacques Rancière in English is very welcome. Andrew Parker's Introduction, which tells the convoluted story of the book's prior aborted translation, is worth reading by itself. And Parker goes beyond this story to provide not only the most thorough bibliography on Rancière that an English reader will ever have seen, but a compelling explanation of the philosopher's place in relation to his, and our, contemporaries (Althusser, Balibar, Bourdieu), and of his importance. And the book itself is fascinating stuff: a journey through the philosophical tradition tracking the contempt-laden figure of the working man. Rancière finds his favorite example, the shoemaker, in so many texts from so many centuries that one almost needs to check the references, lest we start to think the whole piece is some kind of Borgesian joke; but this is, completely in earnest, a fascinating synthetic argument about the condescension philosophy, even leftist philosophy, shows toward "simple" workers. The tone of the book isn't as hard to pin down as some of Rancière's other work (e.g. the terrific "Ignorant Schoolmaster"), and it is a little more of a scholarly, historical effort, a little more humorous, and a little more accessible than you might expect, but it's still a difficult, intelligent, and rewarding text for the philosophical reader.