Timely and audacious, Buddha at the Apocalypse challenges us to look directly at the devastating assumptions underlying the very mechanisms of the modern world. We believe with certainty in the inevitable forward march of progress, in the natural rightness of humankind's control of the environment, and, most pervasively, in the idea of an epic struggle that requires righteousness to utterly destroy evil. These images of apocalypse and dominance pervade our language, our politics, and, with coming of 2012, even our escapist entertainment. In Buddha at the Apocalypse, Kurt Spellmeyer offers us an alternative view that comes like breath of cool, fresh air in these times. Drawing on the Buddha, Spellmeyer makes an impassioned clarion call to awaken from the culture of destruction — or perish within it.

Kurt Spellmeyer is an award-winning teacher and scholar in the English department at Rutgers University. He was also authorized to teach Zen by Kangan Glenn Webb in 1985, and now leads the Cold Mountain Sangha in New Jersey. He is the author of Arts of Living: Reinventing the Humanities for the Twenty-first Century and several other books.

	Contents: Buddha at the Apocalypse: Awakening From a Culture of Destruction
	Foreword by Robert A. F. Thurman	ix
	Preface	xi
	Introduction: Welcome to the Apocalypse	1
	PART I: WORLD DESPISING
1.	In the Beginning of History	19
2.	World Despising and the Origins of the Modern World	33
	PART II: WORLD EMBRACING
3.	An End to History, an End to Suffering	51
4.	One Body - The Hidden Ground of Liberation	69
5.	From Revolutionary Thinking to an Ecology of Mind	87
6.	Images of Order in a Complex World	105
7.	On and Off the Road of History	123
	Conclusion: Buddha at the Apocalypse	139
	Notes	151
	Index	167
	About the Author	179