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From the library of renowned Sanskrit scholar and orientalist Judith M. Tyberg (1902-80), with her signed bookplate to the front flyleaf, largely covering another bookplate. In 1951, Tyberg was invited to join the faculty of the newly founded American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco. The AAAS was the first graduate university devoted to Asian culture and was considered one of the foundations of the San Francisco Renaissance. Tyberg held the professorship of Sanskrit alongside an international group of colleagues that included Alan Watts, Haridas Chaudhuri, and Dilipkumar Roy. The author's scarce second book. Although Watts (1915-73) distanced himself from this work in later years, as biographer Monica Furlong observes, "it reveals much about the way Watts's mind worked in the period immediately following The Spirit of Zen. In some ways, it is a response to the rather shallow arguments against Buddhism that his first book provoked, the sort of criticism of which Watts has been happily and unselfconsciously aware when he began to write. In his second book he felt obliged to tackle questions of whether Buddhism is 'impersonal,' whether it 'devalues' the individual, whether it lacks 'love' and social concern. Watts, however, took on a bigger task than defending Buddhism. He began to see every religion as having special gifts of its own to bring to mankind: Hinduism a very deep understanding of mysticism, Taoism a sense of oneness with the principles of life, Buddhism in all its forms, a developed method of freeing the mind from illusion." "Inevitably, Christianity, the traditional religion of most people he was writing for, had somehow to be rediscovered for his purposes . borrowing from Jung, Watts suggested that Christianity must learn to see itself much more in symbolic and mythical terms than in historical ones, so that, for example the Passion and Resurrection of Christ become the pain of the individual torn between the contradiction of the opposites, and achievement of their eventual resolution, or the birth of the Divine Child becomes the birth of intuitive love in every person. Watts also believed assimilating Asian wisdom - in particular the wisdom relating to the relativity of good and evil, and the recognition of the way mankind is torn by duality - gave a chance for escaping the alienation of duality" (Zen Effects: The Life of Alan Watts, p.64-5). An ink notation on the front flyleaf suggests this is a review copy. Small octavo: xviii, 187, [3] p. Original cloth binding, with gilt titles. Mild ex-library markings in the form of a blank label affixed to the rear flyleaf and an accession number to the spine. The spine is moderately sun faded.
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