Text, History, and Philosophy. Abhidharma Across Buddhist Scholastic Traditions discusses Abhidhamma / Abhidharma as a specific exegetical method. In the first part of the volume, the development of the Buddhist argumentative technique is discussed. The second part investigates the importance of the Buddhist rational tradition for the development of Buddhist philosophy. The third part focuses on some peculiar doctrinal issues that resulted from rational Abhidharmic reflections. In this way, an outline of the development of the Abhidharma genre and of Abhidharmic notions and concepts in India, Central Asia, China, and Tibet from the life time of the historical Buddha to the tenth century CE is given. Contributors are: Johannes Bronkhorst, Lance S. Cousins, Bart Dessein, Tamara Ditrich, Bhikkhu Kuala Lumpur Dhammajoti, Dylan Esler, Eric Greene, Goran Kardaš, Jowita Kramer, Chen-kuo Lin, Andrea Schlosser, Ingo Strauch, Weijen Teng and Yao-ming Tsai.

While the Origin of Life on Earth is explored by modern sciences based both on experimental and observational methods, a new biological principle is adopted in addition to the principles of physics and chemistry. The biosphere is explained by the biodiversity and coexistence amongst countlessly different species reminding us of the Buddha Nature. The book verifies the existence of a platform — dialogues between science and Buddhism — to contemplate these modern aspects of life.In the 2nd century BCE, western Greek philosophy encountered eastern Indian Buddhist philosophy, as captured in a Buddhist text, the Milindapanha (Questions of Milinda), resulting in the Greco-Buddhism, the cultural syncretism between Hellenistic culture and Buddhism. Some two thousand years later, in the modern era, the sciences have revolutionized ancient philosophies, as Buddhism by the philosophy of Emptiness, stimulating various new schools.Many scientists have written about science, and many Buddhists have explained Buddhism, but an in-depth analysis of both fields may be rare. The book reports on a recent project commemorating the founder and Indian monk of Zen Buddhism Bodhidharma. Imagine a Buddhist Eagle, soaring in the sky of Emptiness with both wings spreading out — one of Wisdom and another of Great Compassion — on all countlessly-many sentient beings.

The aim of this study is a comparative analysis of the role of semantics in the linguistic theory of four grammatical traditions, Sanskrit, Hebrew, Greek, Arabic. If one compares the organization of linguistic theory in various grammatical traditions, it soon turns out that there are marked differences in the way they define the place of ‘semantics’ within the theory. In some traditions, semantics is formally excluded from linguistic theory, and linguists do not express any opinion as to the relationship between syntactic and semantic analysis. In other traditions, the whole basis of linguistic theory is semantically orientated, and syntactic features are always analysed as correlates of a semantic structure. However, even in those traditions, in which semantics falls explicitly or implicitly outside the scope of linguistics, there may be factors forcing linguists to occupy themselves with the semantic dimension of language. One important factor seems to be the presence of a corpus of revealed/sacred texts: the necessity to formulate hermeneutic rules for the interpretation of this corpus brings semantics in through the back door.