On 19 September, the Center for Buddhist Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, announced this year’s winners of the Toshihide Numata Book Prize: Erik Braun, professor of Religious Studies at the University of Oklahoma, and John K. Nelson, professor of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of San Francisco. With a value of US$10,000, the Toshihide Numata Book Prize is awarded annually to writers of outstanding books in English on any area of Buddhist Studies.
Daniel Arnold giving a lecture at the 2013 Toshihide Numata Book Prize presentation ceremony.
From http://buddhiststudies.berkeley.edu
This year’s winners will receive their awards at the Jodo Shinshu Center in Berkeley on 14 November. Afterwards, there will be two keynote speeches and a symposium on the themes discussed in the books.
Erik Braun’s The Birth of Insight: Meditation, Modern Buddhism, and the Burmese Monk Ledi Sayadaw, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2013, explores, elaborates, and analyzes the contributions made to Buddhism by the Burmese monk Ledi Sayadaw. In the book, the writer also reflects on his experience of Venerable Ledi Sayadaw’s meditation technique, which he learned from the leader of the International Meditation Center (IMC) in Yangon, U Tint Yee: “I found myself distracted. Thoughts of other places, past events in my life, the intellectual interests that had brought me to the IMC, plans for later travel in Burma - they all crowed into my consciousness. It looked like it was going to be a long hour” (p. ix).
"The Birth of Insight: Meditation, Modern Buddhism, and the Burmese Monk Ledi Sayadaw,"
by Erik Braun. From Amazon
John K. Nelson's Experimental Buddhism: Innovation and Activism in Contemporary Japan, published by the University of Hawaii Press in 2013, highlights the complex interaction between long-established religious traditions and the rapid social, cultural, and economic changes in Japanese society. In the chapter on the future of Buddhism in Japan, Nelson writes: “When thinking about where Japanese Buddhism will be twenty or more years from now, it is important to recall that in whatever context it is found, ‘Buddhism’ is anything but a singular institution, religion, or philosophical system. We can, of course, find evidence within Japan’s Buddhist denominations for a basic set of religious ideas about spiritual awakening, salvation, and causality.”
"Experimental Buddhism: Innovation and Activism in Contemporary Japan," by John K. Nelson.
From Amazon
Members of the awards committee praised Nelson’s book as being “path breaking in its attention and quick work on very recent transformations of Japanese Buddhism,” and “full of fascinating details and vivid observations . . . a corrective to the usual books which tend to approach Buddhism through official forms and dogmas.”
Previous prize winners include Daniel Arnold, associate professor of Philosophy of Religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School, for Brains, Buddhas, and Believing: The Problem of Intentionality in Classical Buddhist and Cognitive-Scientific Philosophy of Mind (Columbia University Press, 2012); Todd T. Lewis and Subarna Man Tuladhar, for Sugata Saurabha: An Epic Poem from Nepal on the Life of the Buddha by Chittadhar Hridaya (Oxford University Press, 2009); and Professor James Robson of Harvard University, for Power of Place: The Religious Landscape of the Southern Sacred Peak (Nanyue) in Medieval China (Harvard University Asia Center, 2009).
Nominations are now open for the 2015 Toshihide Numata Book Prize. The deadline for nominations is 15 April 2015, and the book must have a 2014 copyright date.