New Books in Buddhist Studies

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 w

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 n

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

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 techno

**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

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