About thirty years ago, before an international symposium in Kyoto, I had the chance to talk with a Catholic priest about the relation between the world and God. He said that the world was sacred insofar as God, the creator, has given grace to the world. I objected that Buddhists who do not believe in God consider the world to be the sacred. The priest immediately replied, "Without God, you cannot say that the world is sacred. God is the ground for believing that the world is sacred."

The discussion stopped there, because the symposium was about to begin. I have to confess that I could not have argued the point with confidence at that time. How to elucidate the sacredness of the world without God has been one of my main concerns ever since.

This book is a collection of articles I have published in various journals over the years, on a range of topics. The chapters are all, however, more or less concerned with the sacredness of the world, as reflected in the Representing the World as Sacred.

Representing the World as Sacred, Musashi Tachikawa, Vajra Publications, Vajra Publications, Paperback, 218 pages, $24.00

Musashi Tachikawa, Ph.D. (Harvard), is Professor Emeritus at National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka, Japan. His publications include The Structure of the World of Udayana's Realism (Reidel, 1980); Introduction to the Philosophy of Nagarjuna (Motilal, 1977); Five Hundred Buddhist Deities (Adroit, 2000); Three Hundred and Sixty Buddhist Deities (Adroit, 2001); A Ngor Mandala Collection (Vajra, 2006); and Mandala Deities in the Nispannayogavali (Vajra, 2016).

CONTENTS: Representing the World as Sacred
Preface		vii
Chapter 1	World Religion and Emptiness	1
Chapter 2	Emptiness Thought and Hindu Philosophy	11
Chapter 3	Time in Buddhism	25
Chapter 4	Transmigration and Nirvana	39
Chapter 5	Buddhism in Japan in a Climate of Animism	51
Chapter 6	The Path of Buddhist Practice: Enryo Inoue's Paradigm	67
Chapter 7	The Path-Effect Doctrine in Tibetan Buddhism	85
Chapter 8	Mandala Visualization and Possession	103
Chapter 9	Unorthodox Hindu Worship in Pune: Fundamental Elements of Religion	135
Chapter 10	Creation Myth in the Rgveda	149
Chapter 11	Hindu Thinking on Sakti: Historical Perspective	167
Chapter 12	Mandala-World and the Sacred	191