Buddhism teaches that to become happy, greed, ill-will, and delusion must be transformed into their positive counterparts: generosity, compassion, and wisdom. The history of the West, like all histories, has been plagued by the consequences of greed, ill-will, and delusion. A Buddhist History of the West investigates how individuals have tried to ground themselves to make themselves feel more real. To be self-conscious is to experience ungroundedness as a sense of lack, but what is lacking has been understood differently in different historical periods. Author David R. Loy examines how the understanding of lack changes at historical junctures and shows how those junctures were so crucial in the development of the West.

Author Biography: David R. Loy is Professor in the Faculty of International Studies at Bunkyo University, Japan. He is the author of Lack and Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism and Nonduality: A Study in Comparative Philosophy.