New Books in Buddhist Studies

Pierce Salguero joins us to discuss his new co-edited volume, Meditation Sickness: A Sourcebook on the Dangers of Buddhist Practice. While modern mindfulness frames meditation purely as a wellness tool, the Buddhist tradition has long recognized its inherent psychological and physical risks. We explore multi-tradition historical texts, the anatomy of practice crises, and the ethical responsibility of teachers and app developers to provide something along the lines of informed consent.

Key Discussion Points & Timeline

Contrasting modern wellness marketing with historical accounts of meditative danger; the book provides a sourcebook for Dharma teachers, clinicians, and serious practitioners.

Multi-Tradition Mapping throughout covers Pali, medieval Chinese, Japanese, and Tibetan sources, many of which we touch on.

Traditional sources diagnose destabilization and even offer a range of physical, energetic, and lifestyle remedies to mediate crisis: whether they would be a good fit for today’s practitioner is another matter.

Challenging the modern claim that adverse effects only happen to the unprepared or mentally fragile.

Classical lineages show that severe physical ailments and mental destabilization can happen randomly, even to advanced practitioners.

The hidden risks of unmonitored, commercialized meditation apps.

Why creators have an ethical duty to move past treating meditation as a risk-free panacea and offer clear safety guardrails.

How different cultures draw the line between a spiritual breakthrough and clinical pathology.

The ongoing project of integrating traditional remedies with modern psychology and neuroscience.

Links & Resources Mentioned

The Book: Meditation Sickness: A Sourcebook on the Dangers of Buddhist Practice.

Guest Website: here (Includes the book's introduction).

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What does it mean to connect with mind and space without the typical baggage of contemporary meditation trends? In this episode of the New Books Network, Matthew Joseph O'Connell sits down with author and practitioner Ronald E. Purser to discuss his timely new book, Mind Space: Discovering Meditation Without the Meditator (Dharma Publishing, 2026).

Drawing from his decades-long engagement with Tarthang Tulku’s seminal 1977 work, Time, Space, and Knowledge, Purser offers a refreshing, experimental, and surprisingly playful guide to understanding our structural realities. Rather than preaching a prescriptive self-help routine, Mind Space serves as an experiential commentary that invites readers into a radical, non-dualistic inquiry of how we inhabit our lives.

Key Themes from the Episode

Beyond McMindfulness: How Mind Space transitions away from corporate, present-moment-focused trends and pivots toward a deeper, more expansive territory of human freedom.

The Anatomy of Mind and Space: An etymological and philosophical breakdown of mind as our generative source of knowledge, and space not as a passive, empty container, but as an active, alive, and accommodating dimension.

The Myth of the Inner Manager: A critique of the reflexive, modern impulse to over-manage every facet of our internal lives, and how to cultivate a state of un-management.

Digital Colonization: Confronting the psycho-physical compression, social comparisons, and anxiety induced by modern screens, and how the acceleration of time flattens our capacity for deep meaning.

The Playfulness of Inquiry: Why true contemplative practice thrives on curiosity, experimentation, and humour rather than rigid, sombre discipline.

"Space is not a thing. It is what permits experience to be experienced at all. When we realize space is projecting space into space, our rigid focal settings begin to thaw." — Ronald E. Purser
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The Power of Publishing in Early Modern Tibetan Buddhism (Lexington Books, 2025) is a rich exploration of the history of Tibetan books during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Looking at this ‘golden age’ of book production, Benjamin Nourse focuses on two core topics: What was driving Tibetan publishing in the eighteenth century, and what happened as a result of that growth? How should we understand Tibetan Buddhist ideas and practices related to religious books?

Through individual chapters on publishing in Lhasa, Qing Beijing, Derge, Chone, and Labrang, Nourse shows how Tibetan books operated simultaneously as religious objects, political tools, and markers of cultural authority. Across each, we see books being used in different ways: as a way of cementing the authority of the Fifth Dalai Lama, as part of Beijing’s emergence as a major center for Tibetan Buddhist publishing, and as objects that people engaged with through reading, chanting, translation, and ritual practice.

This book should naturally appeal to those interested in Tibetan Buddhism, religion, and early modern Asia — but it is also a valuable contribution to book history, print culture, and the study of how the production of books can shape political authority and religious practice.
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Dr. Shirley's monograph, Religion, Gender, and Politics in Medieval Sri Lanka: The Reconstruction of Buddhist Kingship, ca. 1070-1215 (ARC Humanities Press, 2026), is now available open access, thanks to the generous support of the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation. This book offers a radical
reconsideration of the Poḷon-naruva period, long understood to be a
turning point in the history of Theravāda Buddhism. Histories of this
period have been overwhelmingly based on a series of literary accounts
written long after the fact. But by drawing on textual, inscriptional,
numismatic, and material evidence from within the period itself, the
book reveals how the intellectual and social histories of Buddhism,
politics, and gender were inextricably intertwined in Poḷon-naruva. In
particular, it argues that debates over what it meant to be a “good
Buddhist king” were intrinsically debates about Buddhist masculinity and
about the proper relationship of gender to power.

Link to purchase/download the book here.

Bruno M. Shirley is a lecturer in Buddhist Studies at
Heidelberg University, Germany. He completed his MA in Religious Studies
at Te Herenga Waka/Victoria University of Wellington, NZ, and then PhD
in Asian Literature, Religion, and Culture at Cornell University in New
York, USA.

Dr. Shirley is a historian of religion, gender, and
politics in early second-millennium Sri Lanka and beyond. As an
academic, he is interested in what it meant to understand oneself as
“Buddhist” in medieval South Asia. His research explores a wider range
of evidence—from royal inscriptions, to monastic disciplinary codes, to
elaborate poems—in order to expose the cracks and fissures between
competing visions of Buddhism.

Resources referred to in the interview: 

Alastair Gornall, Rewriting Buddhism: Pali Literature and Monastic Reform in Sri Lanka, 1157–1270. University College London Press, 2020.

Day, Tony. “Ties That (Un)Bind: Families and States in Premodern Southeast Asia.” The Journal of Asian Studies 55, no. 2 (1996): 384–409.

Gunawardana, R. A. L. H. Robe and Plough: Monasticism and Economic Interest in Early Medieval Sri Lanka. University of Arizona Press, 1979.

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Conceiving the Mother of Tibet: The Early Literary Lives of the Buddhist Saint Yeshe Tsogyel (Oxford UP, 2026) is the first comprehensive study dedicated to the literary tradition surrounding Yeshe Tsogyel, revered as the foremost matron saint of Tibetan Buddhism. It traces the emergence and development of a rich body of narratives about Yeshe Tsogyel during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, focusing on the Tibetan Nyingma Buddhist tradition. Through careful textual analysis, the book constructs an emic (insider) Tibetan Buddhist theory of gender and female religious eminence, examining how Yeshe Tsogyel's multifaceted identities--as a devoted disciple, tantric consort, sky-goer (dakini), and spiritual mother--embody a dialectic that shifts back and forth between Tibetan women's social and cultural marginalization and a Buddhist discourse of soteriological inclusivity.

Jue Liang queries these texts for their social and religious functions, especially where ambivalence and contradictions abound. However, these ambivalences do not necessarily disadvantage women in Tibetan Buddhism. Operating with ambivalent, sometimes competing, discourses on womanhood, Nyingma Buddhist theorists in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries created a space for a flexible treatment of gender, where they traverse between theological terms and embodied reality.

Ultimately, Conceiving the Mother of Tibet not only illuminates the unique position of Yeshe Tsogyel within Tibetan Buddhist literature but also offers a methodological framework for understanding localized theories of gender. This approach highlights alternative ways of being and acting in the world as embodied agents, providing valuable insights for the broader field of Buddhist studies.
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