A variety of crucial and still most relevant ideas about nothingness or emptiness have gained profound philosophical prominence in the history and development of a number of South and East Asian traditions—including in Buddhism, Daoism, Neo-Confucianism, Hinduism, Korean philosophy, and the Japanese Kyoto School. These traditions share the insight that in order to explain both the great mysteries and mundane facts about our experience, ideas of "nothingness" must play a primary role. This collection of essays brings together the work of twenty of the world’s prominent scholars of Hindu, Buddhist, Daoist, Neo-Confucian, Japanese and Korean thought to illuminate fascinating philosophical conceptualizations of "nothingness" in both classical and modern Asian traditions. The unique collection offers new work from accomplished scholars and provides a coherent, panoramic view of the most significant ways that "nothingness" plays crucial roles in Asian philosophy. It includes both traditional and contemporary formulations, sometimes putting Asian traditions into dialogue with one another and sometimes with classical and modern Western thought. The result is a book of immense value for students and researchers in Asian and comparative philosophy. Chapter 20 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

This contemplative and lyrical narrative of a journey from Copenhagen to Eastern Asia evades simple conclusions to vividly capture the conflicting emotional and intellectual responses of a stranger in distant lands, evoking both the exotic wonder and threatening otherness of unfamiliar cultures and repeatedly challenging mythic assumptions about the East. Via an abandoned hospital for lepers, a hallucinogenic mountain pilgrimage with shamans in Kathmandu, and the "beautifully odd" curiositiesof Tokyo's metropolis, Wolfgang Büscher takes his reader on a journey of enlightenment that is both troubling and beautiful. Wolfgang Büscher is an award-winning journalist who writes for theFrankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, among others. He won the Theodor-Wolff Prize for Reportage in 2002.

The first volume of its kind, focusing on the sociolinguistic and socio-political issues surrounding Asian Englishes The Handbook of Asian Englishes provides wide-ranging coverage of the historical and cultural context, contemporary dynamics, and linguistic features of English in use throughout the Asian region. This first-of-its-kind volume offers a wide-ranging exploration of the English language throughout nations in South Asia, Southeast Asia, and East Asia. Contributions by a team of internationally-recognized linguists and scholars of Asian Englishes and Asian languages survey existing works and review new and emerging areas of research in the field. Edited by internationally renowned scholars in the field and structured in four parts, this Handbook explores the status and functions of English in the educational institutions, legal systems, media, popular cultures, and religions of diverse Asian societies. In addition to examining nation-specific topics, this comprehensive volume presents articles exploring pan-Asian issues such as English in Asian schools and universities, English and language policies in the Asian region, and the statistics of English across Asia. Up-to-date research addresses the impact of English as an Asian lingua franca, globalization and Asian Englishes, the dynamics of multilingualism, and more. Examines linguistic history, contemporary linguistic issues, and English in the Outer and Expanding Circles of Asia Focuses on the rapidly-growing complexities of English throughout Asia Includes reviews of the new frontiers of research in Asian Englishes, including the impact of globalization and popular culture Presents an innovative survey of Asian Englishes in one comprehensive volume Serving as an important contribution to fields such as contact linguistics, World Englishes, sociolinguistics, and Asian language studies, The Handbook of Asian Englishes is an invaluable reference resource for undergraduate and graduate students, researchers, and instructors across these areas. Winner of the 2021 PROSE Humanities Category for Language & Linguistics

Ends of Empire examines Asian American cultural production and its challenge to the dominant understanding of American imperialism, Cold War dynamics, and race and gender formation.Jodi Kim demonstrates the degree to which Asian American literature and film critique the record of U.S. imperial violence in Asia and provides a glimpse into the imperial and gendered racial logic of the Cold War. She unfolds this particularly entangled and enduring episode in the history of U.S. global hegemony—one that, contrary to leading interpretations of the Cold War as a simple bipolar rivalry, was significantly triangulated in Asia.The Asian American works analyzed here constitute a crucial body of what Kim reveals as transnational “Cold War compositions,” which are at once a geopolitical structuring, an ideological writing, and a cultural imagining. Arguing that these works reframe the U.S. Cold War as a project of gendered racial formation and imperialism as well as a production of knowledge, Ends of Empire offers an interdisciplinary investigation into the transnational dimensions of Asian America and its critical relationship to Cold War history.

This volume brings together a group of authors that address the question of the first out of Africa into Asia c. 2 Ma. The scope of the book is comprehensive as it covers almost every major region of Asia. The primary goal of this volume is to provide an updated synthesis of the current state of the Asian paleoanthropological and paleoenvironmental records. Papers include detailed studies of the theoretical constructs underlying the move out of Africa, including detailed reconstructions of the paleoenvironment and possible migration routes. Other papers detail the Plio-Pleistocene archaeological and hominin fossil records of particular regions.

When considering the structure of New Englishes which have evolved in – multilingual, mostly post-colonial – contexts of Asia (thus, Asian Englishes), the significant factors to be considered are: 1) the variety/ies of the English lexifier that entered the local context; 2) the nature of transmission of English to the local population; and 3) the local, i.e. substrate, languages of the community in which the New English emerges. This third factor is the focus of the five papers in this volume: they investigate the structure of Asian varieties of English by exploring the relationship between the typological profile of substrate languages in the specific linguistic ecology and the grammatical features of the emerging contact variety of English.The contributions to this volume were originally published in English World-Wide 30:2 (2009).