Jacobson, Nolan Pliny. The Heart of Buddhist Philosophy. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988. 

Abstract

Kenneth Inada calls this book "not only timely, but urgent," the last book in a trilogy of Buddhist philosophy and process thought. "The message contained in the book," he notes, "should be released immediately." Seizo Ohe, Japan's most distinguished philosopher of science, captures the essence of that message: "I believe you are understanding Buddhism as a new global cultural movement in which Japan and America are going to have a common world-historical mission - respectively as the eastern and western ends of the eastern and western branches of human civilization." In arriving at the heart of Buddhist philosophy, Jacobsen attempts to eliminate some of the confusion in the West [and perhaps in the East as well] concerning the Buddhist view of what is concrete and ultimately real in the world. Jacobson presents Nagarjuna, the Plato of the Buddhist tradition, as the major exemplar of the Buddhist expression of life. He examines Eastern and Western process philosophies. In his comparison of Buddhism and Western theology, he demonstrates that some efforts in Western religious thought approach the Buddhist empirical stance.