New Books in Buddhist Studies

Apr 09 2025 371 ep. 61 mins 7.4k
New Books in Buddhist Studies Podcast artwork

Interviews with Scholars of Buddhism about their New Books

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  Religion & Spirituality
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Meditation Side-Effects and Other Altered States, with Miguel Farias

Apr 09 2025 75 mins  
In today’s episode, Dr. Pierce Salguero sits down with Miguel Farias, an experimental psychologist and researcher of religion, spirituality, and cognition. Together we try to get to the bottom of whether meditation is actually good for you through a comparison of Miguel's research on the adverse effects of meditation with my research on Asian notions of meditation sickness. Along

Peter D. Hershock, "Consciousness Mattering: A Buddhist Synthesis" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

Mar 23 2025 117 mins  
Consciousness Mattering (Bloombury, 2023) presents a contemporary Buddhist theory in which brains, bodies, environments, and cultures are relational infrastructures for human consciousness. Drawing on insights from meditation, neuroscience, physics, and evolutionary theory, it demonstrates that human consciousness is not something that occurs only in our heads and consists in the c

Mick Brown, "The Nirvana Express: How the Search for Enlightenment Went West" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Mar 18 2025 103 mins  
Mick Brown’s The Nirvana Express: How the Search for Enlightenment Went West (Oxford UP, 2023) is a riveting account about the West's engagement with Eastern spirituality across a century. It traces the life of multiple characters that intersected across time and space to create a network of interlinking stories about saints, salesmen and scoundrels all involved in spirituality.

Peter D. Hershock, "Buddhism and Intelligent Technology: Toward a More Humane Future" (Bloomsbury, 2021)

Feb 21 2025 72 mins  
Machine learning, big data and AI are reshaping the human experience and forcing us to develop a new ethical intelligence. In Buddhism and Intelligent Technology: Toward a More Humane Future (Bloomsbury, 2021), Peter Hershock offers a new way to think about attention, personal presence, and ethics as intelligent technology shatters previously foundational certainties and opens enti

Magic, Death, and Necromancy with Justin McDaniel

Feb 05 2025 58 mins  
**Warning: This episode contains potentially disturbing content!** On this episode of the Black Beryl, I sit down with Justin McDaniel, a scholar of Theravada Buddhist literature and art. Together we explore the darker side of Thai Buddhism, including meditation on decomposing bodies, fetus spirits, corpse oil, and the spectrum of white and black magic. We discuss the logics of rit

Roger R. Jackson, "Saraha: Poet of Blissful Awareness" (Shambhala, 2024)

Jan 16 2025 44 mins  
The life and works of the mysterious Indian yogin, Saraha, who has inspired Buddhist practitioners for over a thousand years. Saraha, “the Archer,” was a mysterious but influential tenth-century Indian Buddhist tantric adept who expressed his spiritual realization in mystic songs (dohās) that are enlightening, shocking, and confounding by turns. Saraha: Poet of Blissful Aware

Alastair Gornall, "Rewriting Buddhism: Pali Literature and Monastic Reform in Sri Lanka, 1157–1270" (UCL Press, 2020)

Jan 06 2025 56 mins  
Rewriting Buddhism: Pali Literature and Monastic Reform in Sri Lanka, 1157–1270 (UCL Press, 2020) is the first intellectual history of premodern Sri Lanka’s most culturally productive period. This era of reform (1157–1270) shaped the nature of Theravada Buddhism both in Sri Lanka and also Southeast Asia and even today continues to define monastic intellectual life in the regi

Nathan McGovern, "Holy Things: The Genealogy of the Sacred in Thai Religion" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Dec 19 2024 67 mins  
Scholars of religion have mostly abandoned the concept of "syncretism" in which certain apparent deviations from "standard" practice are believed to be the result of a mixture of religions. This is particularly relevant to Thailand, in which ordinary religious practice was seen by an earlier generation of scholars as a mixture of three religions: local spirit religion, Hinduism, an

Non Buddhist Mysticism: Performing Irreducible and Primitive Presence

Dec 11 2024 114 mins  
Glenn’s latest, Non Buddhist Mysticism: Performing Irreducible and Primitive Presence (Eyecorner Press, 2022), presents a radical reorientation to “spiritual” practice. Drawing from François Laruelle’s concept of future mysticism and the author’s own previous work on non-buddhism, Glenn Wallis galvanizes a materialist spirituality for the twenty-first century. Liberated

Adeana McNicholl, "Of Ancestors and Ghosts: How Preta Narratives Constructed Buddhist Cosmology and Shaped Buddhist Ethics" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Oct 09 2024 60 mins  
In Buddhist cosmology, pretas make up one of several categories of rebirth. They are best known as "hungry ghosts," pitiful beings with miniscule mouths and bloated stomachs whose state of extreme starvation is a result of stinginess and immorality in a former life. But they were not always portrayed in this way. Of Ancestors and Ghosts: How Preta Narratives Constructed Buddhist Co