John Paraskevopoulos is an executive officer with the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs in Canberra. He studied philosophy at the University of Melbourne before receiving ordination in the Pure Land tradition of Mahayana Buddhism in Kyoto in 1994. He is the author of several articles on Shin Buddhism and a contributor to Sacred Web. His article, "The Absolute in the Mahayana and the Pure Land Way" appears in >Light from the East: Eastern Wisdom for the Modern West .