From the Back Cover
This volume brings together diverse Asian religious perspectives to address critical issues in the encounter between tradition and modern western evolutionary thought. Such thought encompasses the biological theories of Charles Darwin, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Earnest Haeckel, Thomas Huxley, and later "neo-Darwinians," as well as the more sociological evolutionary theories of thinkers such as Herbert Spencer, Pyotr Kropotkin, and Henri Bergson. The essays in this volume cover responses from Hindu, Jain, Buddhist (Chinese, Japanese, and Indo-Tibetan), Confucian, Daoist, and Muslim traditions. These responses come from the decades immediately after publication of The Origin of Species up to the present, with attention being paid to earlier perspectives and teachings within a tradition that have affected responses to Darwinism and western evolutionary thought in general.
The book focuses on three critical issues: the struggle for survival and the moral implications read into it; genetic variation and its seeming randomness as related to the problems of meaning and purpose; and the nature of humankind and human exceptionalism. Each essay deals with one or more of the three issues within the context of a specific tradition.
C. Mackenzie Brown is professor emeritus of South Asian Religions and Religion and Science at Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas. He is author of Hindu Perspectives on Evolution: Darwin, Dharma, and Design (2012). Related articles include "Hindu and Christian Creationism: 'Transposed Passages' in the Geological Book of Life," Zygon 37:1 (2002); "The Conflict between Religion and Science in Light of the Patterns of Religious Belief Among Scientists," Zygon 38:3 (2003); "The Western Roots of Avataric Evolutionism in Colonial India," Zygon 42:2 (2007); "Colonial and Post-Colonial Elaborations of Avataric Evolutionism," Zygon 42:2 (2007); "The Design Argument in Classical Hindu Thought," International Journal of Hindu Studies 12:2 (2008); "Hindu Responses to Darwinism: Assimilation and Rejection in a Colonial and Post-Colonial Context," Science and Education 19 (2010); "Vivekananda and the Scientific Legitimation of Advaita Vedānta," in Handbook on Religion and the Authority of Science, edited by James R. Lewis and Olav Hammer, (2011); "Origins: The Hindu Case," in The Routledge Companion Reader to Religion and Science, edited by James Haag et al. (2012), "Science," Brill's Encyclopedia of Hinduism, 4 (2012); "An Illusion of Conciliation: Religion and Science in Debendranath and Rabindranath Tagore" in Asian Religions, Technology and Science, edited by István Keul, (2015); and "Jagadish Chandra Bose and Vedantic Science," in Science and Religion: East and West, edited by Yiftach J. H. Fehige (2016). Brown is a former Jennie Farris Railey King Professor of Religion at Trinity University, has chaired the Religion Department and the Faculty Senate at Trinity, and has won the senior scholarship award from Trinity and the John G. Gammie Distinguished Scholar Award from the Southwest Commission on Religious Studies.
