An Offering of Leaves: A collection of writings on Buddhism

From the Introduction:

[This book in PDF format] contains a collection of compositions that have been written over the course of several decades of various kinds of Buddhist practice that has been flavored by the academic study of Indian Buddhist classics preserved in the Pali, Sanskrit and Tibetan languages.

These particular writings have been included in this collection because most of them are not easy to find any other way. Some were published in relatively obscure journals, others were chapters in books that have gone out of print or are difficult to find, and still others are lectures that were performed just once and never published except perhaps on a rarely visited website. They are therefore much like fallen leaves, reminders of a former vitality that might have been discarded but are now gathered as an offering whose only value lies in the mere fact of its being offered.

Table of contents:

A. Buddhism as philosophy

1. Did Buddhism anticipate Pragmatism?

2. Self: Delusion, fiction, or prerequisite?

3. Will the marriage between Pragmatism and Buddhism last?

B. Buddhism as psychology

4. Classical Buddhist model of a healthy mind

5. A Buddha and his cousin

6. Ritual, self-deception, and make-believe

C. Buddhism and other paths

7. No-self: The foundation of Buddhist identity

8. Conversion as repudiation

9. No faith please—we’re Buddhist

10. The Buddhist challenge: The experience of two Jewish women

11. Xenophobia: The Buddha’s prognosis

12. Pluralistic dharmacentricity

D. Buddhism and Scholasticism

13. Analysis of Vasubandhu’s theory of karma

14. Dharmakīrti on rebirth

15. Principled atheism in the Buddhist scholastic tradition

E. Buddhism and me

16. On being Dharmacentric

17. When a philosopher’s stone turns gold into base metal

18. Confession of an accidental academic