Rev. Danny Fisher

Just a Buddhist Minister Trying to Benefit Beings

Tag: Charles Prebish

June 9, 2011

Sumeru Publishes Charles Prebish’s An American Buddhist Life: Memoirs of a Modern Dharma Pioneer

I’m very pleased to tell you that our friend Charles Prebish – the recently-retired Charles Redd Chair in Religious Studies at Utah State University, and author of (among many other important works) Luminous Passage: The Practice and Study of Buddhism in America – has a new book out: An American Buddhist Life: Memoirs of a Modern Dharma Pioneer. It’s available right now at Barnes & Noble and at Amazon.com. The official press release is below (click to enlarge the pages).

Congrats, Chuck! Can’t wait to read it!

March 17, 2011

Please Check Out My Latest Post for Buddhadharma: The Practitioner’s Quarterly Online: Remembrances of Dr. Leslie Kawamura by John Harding and Charles Prebish

Dr. Kawamura receiving the Order of the University of Calgary in June 2010.

Earlier in the week, I posted about the recent death of Dr. Leslie Kawamura — one of the titans of modern Buddhist Studies, Professor of Religious Studies and Holder of the Numata Chair in Buddhist Studies at the University of Calgary, and a significant figure in Jodo Shinshu Buddhism in North America. Today, over at Buddhadharma: The Practitioner’s Quarterly Online, I posted interviews I conducted with two men who knew him well: John Harding – Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Lethbridge, and a co-editor of Wild Geese: Buddhism in Canada — and our friend Charles Prebish — the recently-retired Charles Redd Chair in Religious Studies at Utah State University, and author of (among many other important works) Luminous Passage: The Practice and Study of Buddhism in America. Here’s a snippet of my exchange with Chuck:

You were telling me that during your time as Numata Chair, you two 
ate lunch together every day and that “during those hours [you] got
 possibly the best Buddhist education [you've] ever received.” What
 exactly did Dr. Kawamura offer in those hours? How did his teachings
 accentuate the tremendous learning and research you’d already done at 
that point?

The highlight of my time in Calgary was our daily lunches. Usually, around noon, Leslie and I would meet in his office, often with other faculty members and students included, and just brainstorm about all things Buddhist. Nothing was ever pre-planned. We just spontaneously discussed whatever came up on any specific day. It didn’t matter whether it was Vinaya or Vimalakirti, monasticism or meditation, the discussions were lively and free-spirited.

Read the rest here.

January 5, 2011

Charles Prebish and Damien Keown’s Buddhism–The eBook is Now Available in Its Fourth Edition

Buddhism--The eBook -- An Online IntroductionThis via our friend, the super-great Charles Prebish, at H-Buddhism (The Buddhist Scholars Information Network):

The Journal of Buddhist Ethics Online Books Project would like to announce the publication of the 4th edition of Buddhism-The eBook. This eTextbook is available from our website at www.jbeonlinebooks.org.

New features in Buddhism–The eBook, Fourth Edition include:

  • A new chapter structure
  • New versions of several chapters
  • More material on the different schools of Buddhism including explanations in graphic form, monastic life, popular religion, Buddhist ethics, ritual, the Bodhisattva Path, the Jatakas, the transmission of Buddhism, and class, gender and race
  • Improved illustrations, charts, and graphics
  • Updated internet links

We continue to offer eBooks on Hinduism (by Hillary Rodrigues), Chinese Religions (by Mario Poceski), Daosim (by Livia Kohn), Japanese Religions (by Robert Ellwood), traditional Western Religions (Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and American Religions), and World Religions.

As a courtesy to colleagues teaching Asian Religions survey courses, we have collected the Hinduism, Buddhism, Chinese Religions, and Japanese Religions eBooks into an “Asian Religions Bundle” which offers students a 20% discount over against the individual prices of the eBooks. We are also willing to create individualized “bundles” to meet other academic needs of our colleagues.

Get your copy at www.jbeonlinebooks.org.

| November 28, 2010

You Gotta Watch This…

Charles Prebish

I’ve blogged before about Utah State University’s wonderful Charles Prebish, who is (among many other things) effectively the Dean of the Study of Buddhism in North America. He is the author of more than twenty books, including the absolutely essential, must-reads Luminous Passage: The Practice and Study of Buddhism in America and Buddhist Monastic Discipline: The Sanskrit Prātimoksạ Sūtras of the Mahāsāmg̣hikas and Mūlasarvāstivādins. In addition, he is the co-founder of The Journal of Buddhist Ethics, the Buddhism Section of the American Academy of Religion, and Routledge’s “Critical Studies in Buddhism” series. Most recently, he was very deservedly honored with the “festschrift” Buddhist Studies from India to America: Essays in Honor of Charles S. Prebish in 2005, which acknowledges the tremendous debt our field owes him for all of his efforts.

Chuck, whom I had the great pleasure to meet at the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting in San Diego in 2007 and today enjoy a lovely e-mail correspondence with, is retiring in December. His last academic presentation as “an employed scholar” was the keynote address at last month’s “Buddhism in Canada: Global Causes, Local Conditions” conference at the University of British Columbia: “The Swans Came to Canada Too: Looking Backward and Looking Forward”. The video of that address is below, and it’s an exceptional “state of the union” kind of talk about past and present trends in the study of Buddhism in North America.

Among other things, Chuck looks seriously at Buddhist blogs. In doing so, he ends up saying some really lovely things about this blog. I’m incredibly honored and flattered by his comments, especially since he’s been such a hero of mine as a young academic situated firmly in the “scholar-practitioner” category he defined. Anyway, if you want to skip ahead to the section of his talk on Buddhist blogs, click this link. Otherwise the entirety of his talk is below — and I strongly encourage everyone to watch it and (if you’re a blogger) blog your thoughts about it.

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August 26, 2010

A Gift of Dharma for 8.26.10

Charles PrebishToday’s quote is from Utah State University’s wonderful Charles Prebish, author of more than twenty books including the absolutely essential, must-reads Luminous Passage: The Practice and Study of Buddhism in America and Buddhist Monastic Discipline: The Sanskrit Prātimoksạ Sūtras of the Mahāsāmg̣hikas and Mūlasarvāstivādins.  He is also co-founder of the following: The Journal of Buddhist Ethics, the Buddhism Section of the American Academy of Religion, and Routledge’s “Critical Studies in Buddhism” series. In addition, he was very deservedly honored with the “festschrift” Buddhist Studies from India to America: Essays in Honor of Charles S. Prebish in 2005, which acknowledges the tremendous debt our field owes him for all of his efforts.  This is it:

Over the thirty-five years that I’ve been investigating Buddhism in North America, both as a practitioner and a scholar, I’ve seen the landscape change dramatically. In the seventies, the groups were almost completely exclusive…and continued that way on into the eighties, at which point people studying American Buddhism argued heatedly in the literature about how to classify the many kinds of groups of people who were coming together to practice various kinds of Buddhism. Maybe some of the distinctions we are talking about between different types of people who practice the dharma may be starting to dissolve in a way that could be very efficacious for the evolution of a genuinely American Buddhism, one that is inclusive of all types of Buddhism and all types of people practicing Buddhism.