Kenneth Inada calls this last book in Nolan Pliny
Jacobson's trilogy on Buddhist philosophy and process thought "not only
timely, but urgent." "The message contained in the book," he notes,
"should be released immediately."
Seizo Ohe, Japan's most
distinguished philosopher of science, captures the essence of that
message when he cites Jacobson's understanding that Buddhism is "a new
global cultural movement in which Japan and America are going to have a
common world-historical mission--respectively as the eastern and western
ends of the eastern and western branches of human civilization."
Jacobson
convincingly demonstrates that Buddhism (particularly as expressed in
the thought of Nagajuna, the Plato of the Buddhist tradition) and the
Western philosophies of Heraclitus and of modern thinkers such as Dewey,
Whitehead, and Hartshorne have developed a reason truer to authentic
experience than the reason so prevalent in traditionally dominant
Western philosophy.