Self-awareness brings the person to deeper levels and within new realms of understanding social and emotional intelligences because the perception is focused on the contexts and meanings in which feelings or emotions arise. This chapter offers readers a multicultural perspective on what awareness means and how it can help to explore the social and emotional phenomena of a person’s world. Taoist and Buddhist perspectives open up the perspective on what awareness entails. This chapter explores how self-awareness is more than a cognitive endeavor, and is a phenomenal feature of the social and emotional intelligences.

The Epilogue argues that, during the first decades of the twenty-first century, the Buddha has become part of Western popular culture, on occasion little more than a commodity on the shelf in the modern supermarket of individual spiritualities. Thus, whether the story of the Buddha is history or legend, fact or fiction, he remains an exemplary human figure, whose life provides a ‘romantic’ ideal to be followed. As the Oriental ‘other’, now acceptably disenchanted, the Buddha is a symbolic antidote to the ills of modernity in the West. The disenchanted Buddha is thus able to serve as the foundation of a new Western naturalised Buddhism. Naturalised Buddhism provides technologies of self-formation for everyday life in this world. Here, the Buddha is a this-worldly sage and the philosopher of a new form of human consciousness focused upon the practices of meditation and mindfulness.

After a general survey attention is first paid to the transformations Shintoism has undergone over the centuries, with its present stress on the environment used to illumine tensions in Christianity between the transcendent and the immanent. With Buddhism two very different forms are contrasted, Zen and Pure Land. With the former modern American, English and European appropriations are first analysed, including the work of Jack Kerouac, Charles Johnson, D. T. Suzuki and Alan Watts. Thereafter, a positive value is assigned to Zen aesthetics (especially in its positive evaluation of impermanence), while a more critical assessment is offered of its ’emptiness’ doctrine. Various versions of Pure Land are then discussed. Not only is Karl Barth’s negative judgement firmly rejected but also its notions of grace treated as illuminating for Christianity’s own approach to the subject.

The twenty-four accessible and thought-provoking essays in this volume present innovative new scholarship on Japan’s modern history, including its imperial past and transregional entanglements. Drawing on the latest Japanese and English-language scholarship, it highlights Japan’s distinctiveness as an extraordinarily fast-changing place. Indeed, Japan provides a ringside seat to all the big trends of modern history. Japan was the first non-Western society to become a modern nation and empire, to industrialize, to wage modern war on a vast scale, and to deliver a high standard of living to virtually all its citizens. Because the Japanese so determinedly acted to reshape global hierarchies, their modern history was incredibly destabilizing for the world. This intense dynamism has powered a variety of debates and conflicts, both at home and with people and places beyond Japan’s shores. Put simply, Japan has packed a lot of history into less than two centuries.

This chapter considers Zen monastic memoirs that describe experiences in a Japanese monastery. Janwillem van de Wetering’s The Empty Mirror (1973) was one of the first extended autobiographical accounts of the quest for enlightenment. Van de Wetering wrote about experiences off as well as on the meditation cushion and emphasized failure, not the attainment of satori. Three later travel memoirs by Maura O’Halloran, David Chadwick, and Gesshin Claire Greenwood also depict a lengthy sojourn in a Zen monastery and a frustrating search for self-transformation. Yet all these authors experience a form of unselfing and an altered understanding of the Dharma and Buddhist practice. In each of these four narratives, the ambiguous failure of the quest for enlightenment reveals how the author’s life was nonetheless transformed by Zen monastic practice. Departure from the monastery means that selfless practice may take place anywhere and is not a matter of achievement or accomplishment.

Part III deploys the theories and approaches presented in Parts I and II, along with art historical texts, to develop a new interpretational framework for artworks that make rhythm and matter explicit.