I was reading this thread over in GD and I realized that while I know a decent amount about Western religions and philosophy, I am woefully undereducated about Eastern thought.
Who wants to help me squash my ignorance?
The first must-read, in my opinion, is Fa-Tsang’s Essay on The Gold Lion (“Chin shih-tzu chang” if you’re fortunate enough to be able to read the original). It’s the Eastern equivalent of Aristotle’s Metaphysics or Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.
Boy, is that a big topic!
You can start off with introductions. Try The Peguin Handbook of Living Religions, or some other general, unprejudiced guide. Then you can focus on each faith by itself. I’ve got the Peguin books on each religion (actually, each is a Pelican book) and a few of the “Idiot’s Guides” and “…for Dummies” books. Then you can get more serious books on each. You can also get many different translations of the relevant texts – Peguin publishes translations of The Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads, the Analects, the Tao Teh Ching, Mencius, and a colllection of Buddhist Scriptures. Dover publishes Legge’s cantankerous and biased-footnorted translations of the texts of Confucianism and others. Get rondeau or Blofeld on Zen. Get Alice Getty’s The Gods of Northern Buddhism to help you navigate the confusions of Buddhist devotional art. Get books published (too expensively) by Ruttle on Shinto and things Japanese.
that’'s just for starters. I’ve got half a bookcase devoted to this stuff at home. and that’s not counting Islam.
This book is a decent primer on all the major world religions, and IIRC has a pretty good list of references. Of course, the primary holy documents are essential reading as well.
Not as trite as it sounds “The Tao of Pooh” puts things in concrete terms and so to my mind a good starter.
Good suggestions, thanks!
And my Amazon wish list grows ever longer…
My two favorites, worn old and sitting near me on my bookshelf: Confucius, The Analects , and The Bhagavad Gita . Wise. Inspirational.