Choose Life: A Dialogue Between Arnold Toynbee & Daisaku Ikeda

This is one of the best debates I ever came across. Toynbee and Ikeda are both great scholars, but they approach historical issues from different perspectives--Toynbee from the west, and Ikeda from the east, with a more Buddhist perspective. They both have the same concerns and the similarities and differences between their philosophies makes for fascinating reading. This was a very welcome book given my intersest in the great F.S.C. Northrup's ideas, who was concerned himself with interpreting the meeting between east and west in his writings. As a result of reading Northrup, I now know that the meaning of life is that it consists of the infinitely regressive consciousness of the undifferentiated aesthetic continuum! (Yes, it's as simple as that). This book also sheds a great deal of light on the philosophical meeting of east and west. Altogether a fine book by two great scholars.