Buddhist Spiritual Practices
Contributors
James B. Apple is Associate Professor of Buddhist Studies at the University of Calgary. He received his doctorate in Buddhist Studies from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has published many articles focusing upon the critical analysis of Mahāyāna sūtras and topics within Indian and Tibetan forms of Buddhism. His most recent books are Stairway to Nirvāṇa (SUNY, 2008) and A Stairway Taken by the Lucid: Tsong kha pa’s Study of Noble Beings (Aditya Prakashan, 2013).
Steven Collins (1951-2018) was Chester D. Tripp Professor in the Humanities at the University of Chicago. He was trained at Oxford University, where he took Honour Moderations in Literae Humaniores (Greek and Latin Literature) and Final Honours in PPP (Psychology and Philosophy) at Christ Church; he was a Graduate Student and Graduate Scholar at Wolfson College, and Junior Research Fellow in Oriental Languages at Exeter College. His publications include Selfless Persons: Imagery and Thought in Theravāda Buddhism (Cambridge, 1982), Nirvana and other Buddhist Felicities: Utopias of the Pali Imaginaire (Cambridge, 1998), A Pali Grammar for Students (Silkworm, 2006), Nirvana: Concept, Imagery, Narrative (Cambridge, 2010), and Self and Society: Essays on Pali Literature and Social Theory 1988-2010 (Silkworm, 2014), which collects a number of his most important essays into a single volume. He also edited and wrote an introduction to the volume Readings of the Vessantara Jataka (Columbia, 2016).
David V. Fiordalis is Associate Professor of Religion at Linfield College. He was educated at Carleton College (BA, Asian Studies), the University of Chicago Divinity School (AM, Philosophy of Religions), and the University of Michigan (MA, PhD, Asian Languages and Cultures). His scholarly interests include philosophical and narrative traditions of India and Tibet, Buddhist monastic code literature, meditation theory, and ritual practice. He has published on Buddhist conceptions of knowledge and power from mundane to miraculous.
Pierre-Julien Harter is Assistant Professor and the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Professor of Philosophy in Buddhist Studies at the University of New Mexico. He was educated at the University of Paris and the École Normale Supérieure before completing his doctorate at the University of Chicago. He specializes in the Buddhist philosophy of India and Tibet, as well as in Indian philosophy more broadly, with the intention to foster philosophical conversations with authors from Western as well as non-Western philosophical traditions.
Maria Heim is Professor of Religion at Amherst College. She was educated at Reed College and Harvard University (in Sanskrit and Indian Studies). She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005. Her most recent book is The Forerunner of All Things: Buddhaghosa on Mind, Intention, and Agency (Oxford, 2014), and she is currently working on emotions in classical Indian thought.
Sara L. McClintock is Associate Professor of Religion at Emory University. She was educated at Bryn Mawr College and Harvard University. Her interests include narrative, philosophy, and contemplative prac-tices, with particular focus on issues of rationality, rhetoric, reading, embodiment, emptiness, and ethics. She is author of Omniscience and the Rhetoric of Reason: Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla on Rationality, Argumentation, and Religious Authority (Wisdom, 2010) and co-editor with Georges Dreyfus of The Svātantrika-Prāsaṅgika Distinction: What Difference Does a Difference Make? (Wisdom, 2003).
Davey K. Tomlinson is completing his dissertation in Philosophy of Religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School. He is interested in the relationship between practice, religious commitment, and systematic philosophical argument in Indian and Tibetan Buddhist thought. His work is focused on the philosophy of mind of two eleventh-century Indian Buddhists, Ratnākaraśānti and Jñānaśrīmitra, and devotes special attention to the practical and buddhological context of their ideas.