Buddhism is a major spiritual and ethical force in the world today--and certainly one of the fastest growing religions in the West. Its compelling insights into human existence offer an ancient and radical alternative to the materialism of the modern age. More and more people are turning to Buddhism to rediscover the human and the spiritual values they find lacking in traditional Western religions.
Now, in this strikingly illustrated and authoritative volume, general readers have an illuminating introduction of one of the world's great living faiths. Based on the most recent scholarship, Buddhism provides a vibrantly written and marvelously illustrated overview of this ancient and yet still vital religion. Each chapter is written by an acknowledged authority in the field. The book describes the origins and historic development of Buddhism as well as current trends. Perhaps most important, it explores the central, unifying principles of a religious and philosophical system that finds expression in an extraordinary diversity of forms, from the elaborate and esoteric rituals of Tantric Buddhism to the rarefied, minimalist refinement of Zen. A major section is devoted to an analysis of the religion's more important sacred writings. And throughout the book, magnificent illustrations capture the sacred art, architecture, daily practices, and symbols inspired by the Buddha and his teaching.
Buddhism in the United States has grown dramatically. Buddhism: The Illustrated Guide offers a wealth of reference information that will deepen one's understanding and appreciation of this ancient Eastern faith.

This little work is a digest of the pratyabhijna system of Kashmir Saiva philosophy, prepared by Ksemaraja, the illustrious disciple of Abhinavagupta. It avoids all polemics and gives in a very succinct form (20 sutras) the main tenets of the Pratyabhijna presentd by Utpala. Pratyabhijna means recognition. Jiva is Siva; by identifying himself with his body, Jiva has forgotten his real nature. This teaching is ment to enable Jiva to recognise his own real self i.e., Siva and to suggest to him the spiritual discipline needed to attain 'at-one-ment' with SIVA.

The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way (Mulamadhyamakakarika), a second-century philosophical text by the Buddhist saint Nagarjuna, is the foundational text of Mahayana, the Buddhist school that predominates in Tibet, China, Mongolia, Korea, Vietnam, and Japan. Nagarjuna is the founder of the Madhyamaka, or Middle Path, school of Mahayana. Jay Garfield's magisterial translation (with commentary) of this seminal text (OUP, 1995) has established itself as the definitive edition in the English language. Empty Words is intended as a companion to Garfield's translation to The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way, providing additional background, argument and context. It considers the work of philosophical rivals, and sheds important light on the relation of Nagarjuna's views to other Buddhist and non-Buddhist philosophical positions. Garfield is one of the leading scholars in this field, and this volume is the culmination of his work of the last decade.

This work is a critical analysis of Sikh literature from a feminist perspective. It begins with Guru Nanak's vision of Transcendent Reality and concludes with the mystical journey of Rani Raj Kaur, the heroine of a modern Punjabi epic. The eight chapters of the book approach the Sikh vision of the Transcendent from historical, scriptural, symbolic, mythological, romantic, existential, ethical and mystical perspectives. Each of these discloses the centrality of the woman, and show convincingly that Sikh Gurus and poets did not want the feminine principle to serve merely as a figure of speech or literary device; it was intended rather to pervade the whole life of the Sikhs. The present work bolsters the claim that literary symbols should be translated into social and political realities, and in so doing puts a valuable feminist interpretation on a religious tradition which has remained relatively unexplored in scholarly literature.

The story of Tenzin Palmo, an Englishwoman, the daughter of a fishmonger from London's East End, who spent 12 years alone in a cave 13,000 feet up in the Himalayas and became a world-renowned spiritual leader and champion of the right of women to achieve spiritual enlightenment.

Diane Perry grew up in London's East End. At the age of 18 however, she read a book on Buddhism and realised that this might fill a long-sensed void in her life. In 1963, at the age of 20, she went to India, where she eventually entered a monastery. Being the only woman amongst hundreds of monks, she began her battle against the prejudice that has excluded women from enlightenment for thousands of years.

In 1976 she secluded herself in a remote cave 13,000 feet up in the Himalayas, where she stayed for 12 years between the ages of 33 and 45. In this mountain hideaway she faced unimaginable cold, wild animals, floods, snow and rockfalls, grew her own food and slept in a traditional wooden meditation box, three feet square — she never lay down. In 1988 she emerged from the cave with a determination to build a convent in northern India to revive the Togdenma lineage, a long-forgotten female spiritual elite.

Written by the leading authority on Theravada Buddhism, this up-dated edition takes into account recent research to include the controversies over the date of the Buddha and current social and political developments in Sri Lanka. Gombrich explores the legacy of the Buddha's predecessors and the social and religious contexts against which Buddhism has developed and changed throughout history, demonstrating above all, how it has always influenced and been influenced by its social surroundings in a way which continues to this day.

A monumental work in the history of religion, the history of the book, the study of politics, and bibliographical research, this volume follows the making of the Chinese Buddhist canon from the fourth century to the digital era. Approaching the subject from a historical perspective, it ties the religious, social, and textual practices of canon formation to the development of East Asian Buddhist culture and enlivens Chinese Buddhist texts for readers interested in the evolution of Chinese writing and the Confucian and Daoist traditions. The collection undertakes extensive readings of major scriptural catalogs from the early manuscript era as well as major printed editions, including the Kaibao Canon, Qisha Canon, Goryeo Canon, and Taisho Canon. Contributors add fascinating depth to such understudied issues as the historical process of compilation, textual manipulation, physical production and management, sponsorship, the dissemination of various editions, cultic activities surrounding the canon, and the canon's reception in different East Asian societies. The Chinese Buddhist canon is one of the most enduring textual traditions in East Asian religion and culture, and through this exhaustive, multifaceted effort, an essential body of work becomes part of a new, versatile narrative of East Asian Buddhism that has far-reaching implications for world history.

In this book the author considers data from both early and later schools of Buddhism in an attempt to provide an overall characterization of the structure of Buddhist ethics. The importance of ethics in the Buddha's teachings is widely acknowledged, but the pursuit of ethical ideals has up to now been widely held to be secondary to the attainment of knowledge. Drawing on the Aristotelian tradition of ethics the author argues against this intellectualization of Buddhism and in favour of a new understanding of the tradition in terms of which ethics plays an absolutely central role. In the course of this reassessment many basic concepts such as karma, nirvana, and the Eightfold Path, are reviewed and presented in a fresh light. The book will be of interest to readers with a background in either Buddhist studies or comparative religious ethics.

Yogacara is an influential school of Buddhist philosophy and psychology that stems from the early Indian Mahayana Buddhist tradition. The Yogacara view is based on the fundamental truth that there is nothing in the realm of human experience that is not interpreted by and dependent upon the mind.
Yogacara Buddhism was unable to sustain the same level of popularity as other Buddhist schools in India, Tibet, and East Asia, but its teachings on the nature of consciousness profoundly impacted the successive developments of Buddhism. Yogacara served as the basis for the development of the doctrines of karma and liberation in many other schools.
In this refreshingly accessible study, Tagawa Shun'ei makes sense of Yogacara's subtleties and complexities with insight and clarity. He shows us that Yogacara masters comprehend and express everyday experiences that we all take for granted, yet struggle to explain. Eloquent and approachable, "Living Yogacara" deepens the reader's understanding of the development of Buddhism's interpretation of the human psyche.

By exploring lived ecological experiences across seven Buddhist worlds from ancient India to the contemporary West, Roaming Free Like a Deer provides a comprehensive, critical, and innovative examination of the theories, practices, and real-world results of Buddhist environmental ethics. Daniel Capper clarifies crucial contours of Buddhist vegetarianism or meat eating, nature mysticism, and cultural speculations about spirituality in nonhuman animals. Buddhist environmental ethics often are touted as useful weapons in the fight against climate change. However, two formidable but often overlooked problems with this perspective exist. First, much of the literature on Buddhist environmental ethics uncritically embraces Buddhist ideals without examining the real-world impacts of those ideals, thereby sometimes ignoring difficulties in terms of practical applications. Moreover, for some understandable but still troublesome reasons, Buddhists from different schools follow their own environmental ideals without conversing with other Buddhists, thereby minimizing the abilities of Buddhists to act in concert on issues such as climate change that demand coordinated large-scale human responses. With its accessible style and personhood ethics orientation, Roaming Free Like a Deer should appeal to anyone who is concerned with how human beings interact with the nonhuman environment.

This book provides a vivid and detailed picture of the daily life and religious practices of Buddhist monks and nuns in the classic period of Theravada Buddhism. The author describes the way in which the Buddha's disciples institutionalized and ritualized his teachings about food, dress, money, chastity, solitude, and discipleship. This tradition represents an ideal of religious life that has been followed in India and South Asia for more than two thousand years. The introduction by Steven Collins describes Theravada Buddhist literature, discusses the issue of the historical reliability of the texts, and offers extensive suggestions for further reading. The book will be of interest to scholars and students in Asian studies, religious studies, anthropology, and history.

This book explains the Buddhist doctrine of annattá ("not-self"), which denies the existence of any self, soul, or enduring essence in man. The author relates this doctrine to its cultural and historical context, particularly to its Brahman background. He shows how the Theravada Buddhist tradition has constructed a philosophical and psychological account of personal identity on the apparently impossible basis of the denial of self. Although the emphasis of the book is firmly philosophical, Dr. Collins makes use of a number of academic disciplines, particularly those of anthropology, linguistics, sociology, and comparative religion, in an attempt to discover the "deep structure" of Buddhist culture and imagination, and to make these doctrines comprehensible in terms of the western history of ideas.

Our current neoliberal capitalist economic system is based on unethical values. The twentieth century economist John Maynard Keynes recognized this and wrote of a time in the future when we could transcend those values. Unfortunately Keynes believed that this would somehow happen automatically, and did not grasp the necessity of the need now to directly challenge the values on which our society is based, instead of simply waiting for them to fade away. The Buddha identified the vital importance of working to uproot the poisons of greed and hatred in the human psyche and in human society, and to replace them with their counterparts of generosity and loving kindness, in order to allow a different society to come into being.

This book explores two influential intellectual and religious leaders in Christianity and Buddhism, Bonaventure (c. 1217-74) and Chinul (1158-1210), a Franciscan theologian and a Korean Zen master respectively, with respect to their lifelong endeavors to integrate the intellectual and spiritual life so as to achieve the religious aims of their respective religious traditions. It also investigates an associated tension between different modes of discourse relating to the divine or the ultimate-positive (cataphatic) discourse and negative (apophatic) discourse. Both of these modes of discourse are closely related to different ways of understanding the immanence and transcendence of the divine or the ultimate. Through close studies of Bonaventure and Chinul, the book presents a unique dialogue between Christianity and Buddhism and between West and East. In the examination of these two figures, religious traditions are explored not only from social, political, cultural, philosophical, and doctrinal perspectives, but also from a perspective that integrates both intellectual and spiritual aspects of religious life. Furthermore, the book presents unexplored models of integrating these two aspects of religious life.

In this busy world, our experiences of happiness are fleeting and short-lived, while inner peace eludes us completely. Our negative states of mind, such as uncontrolled desire and anger, create endless problems for us (and others) and prevent us from fulfilling our deepest wishes. Buddha's popular teaching on the Four Noble Truths offers a clear and simple solution, guiding us to an oasis of boundless peace within our hearts.

While indeterminacy is a recurrent theme in philosophy, less progress has been made in clarifying its significance for various philosophical and interdisciplinary contexts. This collection brings together early-career and well-known philosophers-including Graham Priest, Trish Glazebrook, Steven Crowell, Robert Neville, Todd May, and William Desmond-to explore indeterminacy in greater detail. The volume is unique in that its essays demonstrate the positive significance of indeterminacy, insofar as indeterminacy opens up new fields of discourse and illuminates neglected aspects of various concepts and phenomena. The essays are organized thematically around indeterminacy's impact on various areas of philosophy, including post-Kantian idealism, phenomenology, ethics, hermeneutics, aesthetics, and East Asian philosophy. They also take an interdisciplinary approach by elaborating the conceptual connections between indeterminacy and literature, music, religion, and science.

This work introduces the reader to the central issues and theories in western environmental ethics, and against this background develops a Buddhist environmental philosophy and code of ethics. It contains a lucid exposition of Buddhist environmentalism, its ethics, economics and Buddhist perspectives for environmental education. The work is focused on a diagnosis of the contemporary environmental crisis and a Buddhist contribution to positive solutions. Replete with stories and illustrations from original Buddhist sources, it is both informative and engaging.

Today's globalized society faces some of humanity's most unprecedented social and environmental challenges. Presenting inspiring and effective approaches to a range of these challenges, the timely volume before you draws upon individual cases of exemplary leadership from the world's Dharma traditions-Hinduism, Sikhism, Jainism, and Buddhism. The volume's authors refer to such exemplary leaders as "beacons of Dharma," highlighting the ways in which each figure, through their inspirational life work, provide us with illuminating perspectives as we continue to confront cases of grave injustice and needless suffering in the world. Taking on difficult contemporary issues such as climate change, racial and gender inequality, industrial agriculture and animal rights, fair access to healthcare and education, and other such pressing concerns, Beacons of Dharma offers a promising and much needed contribution to our global conversations. Seeking to help alleviate and remedy such social and environmental issues, each of the chapters in the volume invites contemplation, inspires action, and offers a freshly invigorating source of hope.

Preston provides both a first-hand account and a theoretical analysis of the way an American Zen community works. The form Zen practice takes in the United States is described in detail through close study of two Zen groups in southern California. Preston leads readers through the buildings and grounds of a Zen residential community and introduces them to the main forms of Zen practice, paying special attention to the styles and implications of meditation. The book's second half develops a theory of the nature of religious reality as it is shared by Zen practitioners. Prestonattempts to explain how this reality--based on a group's ethnography yet at the same time transcending it--relates to meditation and other elements of Zen practice by drawing on the notions of ritual, practice, emotions, and the unconscious found in the writings of Pierre Bourdieu, Randall Collins, Erving Goffman, and Emile Durkheim.

Husband and wife Kittisaro and Thanissara take turns coauthoring chapters in this deeply personal dharma book exploring the inner practice of meditation in support of awakening. Within the context of the life of the authors, both monastics in their youth, awakening unfolds as multifacted a process following the archetypal journey of the hero(ine). Traveling from innocence to disillusionment through the devastating fields of trials and despair that lead to depth and maturity and ultimately to inspiration and a blessed life, "Listening to the Heart" tells the story of two unconventional individuals who have together embraced spirituality as the keystone of their lives.
At the heart of the book, through teachings on the nondual nature of reality, we enter the "intimacy with all things" as revealed in core Buddhist texts. Without ending at the goal of personal freedom, Thanissara and Kittisaro encourage us to go beyond the experience of inner peace to embodying wisdom in acts of service within the world. With a realistic appraisal of our current global crisis in which sustainability is threatened by catastrophic climate change, the authors encourage a preparedness that enables a mindful balance of equanimity and passionate engagement whatever the outcome of our global evolutionary journey.
The guiding refuge for this journey is the Buddha, the historical teacher and--most profoundly--that immediate and direct pure awareness, which we all can access. The book also draws on teachings and stories of Buddhist masters who are fearless, funny, and challenging. Eventually we are led into the Mary-like presence of the goddess of mercy, Kuan Yin who, as a great archetype within Buddhist cosmology, reveals the deepest mystery of our own hearts and our capacity for merciful and compassionate response. As the inner process of awakening unfolds, it transforms seekers and their lives, as modeled by the authors. It both heals the personal self in its journey through its wounds and shadows, and yet at the same time dissolves identification with the self. The book then ends by returning to the simplicity of the authors' primary teacher, Ajahn Chah, with his encouragement to "Be the Dharma."

Why is it easier to ruminate over hurt feelings than it is to bask in the warmth of being appreciated?
Because your brain evolved to learn quickly from bad experiences but slowly from the good ones.
You can change this.
Hardwiring Happiness lays out a simple method that uses the hidden power of everyday experiences to build new neural structures full of happiness, love, confidence, and peace. Dr. Hanson's four steps build strengths into your brain-- balancing its ancient negativity bias--making contentment and a powerful sense of resilience the new normal. In mere minutes each day, we can transform our brains into refuges and power centers of calm and happiness.