Between 300 BCE and 200 CE, concepts and practices of dharma attained literary prominence throughout India. Both Buddhist and Brahmanical authors sought to clarify and classify their central concerns, and dharma proved a means of thinking through and articulating those concerns.
Alf Hiltebeitel shows the different ways in which dharma was interpreted during that formative period: from the grand cosmic chronometries of kalpas and yugas to narratives about divine plans, gendered nuances of genealogical time, royal biography (even autobiography, in the case of the emperor Asoka), and guidelines for daily life, including meditation. He reveals the vital role dharma has played across political, religious, legal, literary, ethical, and philosophical domains and discourses about what holds life together. Through dharma, these traditions have articulated their distinct visions of the good and well-rewarded life.
This insightful study explores the diverse and changing significance of dharma in classical India in nine major dharma texts, as well some shorter ones. Dharma proves to be a term by which to make a fresh cut through these texts, and to reconsider their own chronology, their import, and their relation to each other.

A new publication from the Buddhist Society bringing together twenty-one stories with over fifty color illustrations, accompanied by a map of the Old Silk Road and extensive glossary. In the Further Stories From The Old Silk Road the reader is transported to a world of flying monks and hidden jewels, where heroes undertake extraordinary quests across ancient empires. These remarkable stories, retold here by Eric Cheetham and illustrated by Roberta Mansell, contain within them an extraordinary degree of warmth and humour and provide a powerful insight into the Buddha's teachings.

Buddhism points out that emphasizing individuality and promoting the greatest fulfillment of the desires of the individual conjointly lead to destruction. The book promotes the basic value-choices of Buddhism, namely happiness, peace and permanence.

Happiness research convincingly shows that not material wealth but the richness of personal relationships determines happiness. Not things, but people make people happy. Western economics tries to provide people with happiness by supplying enormous quantities of things and today's dominating business models are based on and cultivates narrow self-centeredness.But what people need are caring relationships and generosity. Buddhist economics makes these values accessible by direct provision. Peace can be achieved in nonviolent ways. Wanting less can substantially contribute to this endeavor and make it happen more easily. Permanence, or ecological sustainability, requires a drastic cutback in the present level of consumption and production globally. This reduction should not be an inconvenient exercise of self-sacrifice. In the noble ethos of reducing suffering it can be a positive development path for humanity.

En esta obra los Seres de Luz intentaran lograr que un Alma que vive un 95% del tiempo en su Reino de Oscuridad, logre reintegrar todas las formas de su Alma en los 7 Niveles de Conciencia, para que de esta manera alcance la iluminacion, ya que si esta Alma logra alcanzar la iluminacion, La Conciencia de la Humanidad se expandira mas rapidamente. Hoy, aproximadamente el 5% de todas las Almas ya estan viviendo en la 4ta Dimension, el otro 95% continua viviendo en su mente tridimensional.

Buddhist and Taoist Systems Thinking explores a radical new conception of business and management. It is grounded on the reconnection of humans with nature as the new competitive advantage for living organizations and entrepreneurs that aspire to regenerate the economy and drive a positive impact on the planet, in the context of the Anthropocene. Organizations today struggle in finding a balance between maximizing profits and generating value for their stakeholders, the environment and the society at large. This happens in a paradigm shift characterized by unprecedented levels of exponential change and the emergence of disruptive technologies. Adaptability, thus, is becoming the new business imperative. How can, then, entrepreneurs and organizations constantly adapt and, at the same time, design the sustainable futures they'd like? This book uniquely explores the benefits of applying Buddhist and Taoist Systems Thinking to sustainable management. Grounded in Taoist and Zen Buddhist philosophies, it offers a modern scientific perspective fundamentally based on the concepts of bio-logical adaptability and lifefulness amidst complexity and constant change. The book introduces the new concept of the Gaia organization as a living organism that consciously helps perpetuate the conditions for life on the planet. It is subject to the natural laws of transformation and the principles of oneness, emptiness, impermanence, balance, self-regulation and harmonization. Readers will find applied Eastern systems theories such as the Yin-Yang and the Five Elements operationalized through practical methodologies and tools such as T-Qualia and the Zen Business model. They are aimed at guiding Gaia organizations and entrepreneurs in leading sustainable transformations and qualifying economic growth. The book offers a vital toolkit for purpose-driven practitioners, management researchers, students, social entrepreneurs, evaluators and change-makers to reinvent, create and mindfully manage sustainable and agile organizations that drive systemic transformation.

Intended as a methodological and theoretical contribution to the study of religion and society, this book examines Buddhist monasticism in Myanmar. The book focuses on the Shwegyin, one of the most important but least understood monastic groups in the country. Analyzing the group as a tradition constructed around ideas of continuity and disruption/rupture, the study illuminates key aspects of monastic and wider Burmese Buddhist thought and practice, and ultimately argues for the distinctiveness of elements of that thought and practice in comparison to the Buddhist cultures of Sri Lanka and Laos. After situating the Shwegyin within the history of Buddhist monasticism more generally, and within the vicissitudes of modern Burmese political history, the book proceeds along two scholarly avenues. It adopts an interdisciplinary method with attention to biographical, administrative, doctrinal, and ethnographic evidence. Theoretically, the book engages scholarly discussion about "traditions" and their "traditionalisms" and advances a specific type of interpretive approach built on bringing the viewpoints and practices of the Shwegyin into conversation with the enterprise of understanding larger historical and cultural patterns in the Buddhist societies of South and Southeast Asia.

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 ethics. Drawing material from original sources, there is 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 for positive solutions. Replete with stories and illustrations from original Buddhist sources, it is both informative and engaging.

We spend our lives protecting an elusive self - but does the self actually exist? Drawing on literature from Western philosophy, neuroscience and Buddhism (interpreted), the author argues that there is no self. The self - as unified owner and thinker of thoughts - is an illusion created by two tiers. A tier of naturally unified consciousness (notably absent in standard bundle-theory accounts) merges with a tier of desire-driven thoughts and emotions to yield the impression of a self. So while the self, if real, would think up the thoughts, the thoughts, in reality, think up the self.

The Kalacakratantra is the latest and most comprehensive Buddhist Tantra that is available in its original Sanskrit. This will be the first thorough academic work to be published on this Tantra. The Kalacakratantra's five chapters are classified into three categories: Outer, Inner, and Other Kalacakratantra. The present work concentrates on the Inner Kalacakratantra, which deals with the nature of a human being.

Four hundred million people call themselves Buddhists today. Yet most Westerners know little about this powerful, Eastern-spawned faith. How did it begin? What do its adherents believe? Why are so many Westerners drawn to it?
Essential Buddhism responds to these questions and many more, offering an accessible, global perspective on the religion's past, present, and future. It identifies how the principal concepts and practices originated and evolved through diverse cultural adaptations into three basic formats:

* Theraveda (including Vipassana, brought from Vietnam in the 1960s and including such practitioners as Jack Kornfield and Jon Kapat-Zinn)

* Mahayana (including Zen Buddhism, originally brought to America by Japanese teachers after World War II and popularized by Jack Kerouac and Thomas Merton)

* Vajrayana (including Tibetan Buddhism, from the teachers who fled the Chinese takeover of Tibet in the 1950s as well as the Dalai Lama, and embraced by Allen Ginsberg, Richard Gere, and countless others)

Essential Buddhism is the single best resource for the novice and the expert alike, exploring the depths of Buddhism's popularity and illuminating its tenets and sensible approach to living. Written in the lucid prose of a longtime professional storyteller, and full of Buddhist tales, scriptural quotes, ancient stories, and contemporary insights, Essential Buddhism is the first complete guide to the faith and the phenomenon.

This interdisciplinary study is the first book to provide a complete survey of Sri Nalanda Mahavihara from the perspective of its educational curricula as well as its religious influence. It provides detailed descriptions of the origin, growth, management, and academic and cultural life of Nalanda, with particular attention to its pedagogy, curriculum, teachers, and students. It also presents an alternative interpretation of nationalist and popular notions about Sri Nalanda as an international university and proves that it was, at its core, a Buddhist monastery and an institution of Buddhist learning focused on the study and promotion of Buddhism.

Pamela D. Winfield offers a fascinating juxtaposition and comparison of the thoughts of two pre-modern Japanese Buddhist masters on the role of imagery in the enlightenment experience. Kukai (774-835) believed that real and imagined forms were indispensable to his new esoteric Mikkyo method for ''becoming a Buddha in this very body'' (sokushin jobutsu), yet he deconstructed the significance of such imagery in his poetic and doctrinal works. Conversely, Dogen (1200-1253) believed that ''just sitting'' in Zen meditation without any visual props or mental elaborations could lead one to realize that ''this very mind is Buddha'' (sokushin zebutsu), but he too privileged select Zen icons as worthy of veneration. In considering the nuanced views of Kukai and Dogen, Icons and Iconoclasm in Japanese Buddhism updates previous comparisons of their oeuvres and engages their texts and images together for the first time in two decades. Winfield liberates them from sectarian scholarship, which has long pigeon-holed them into iconographic/ritual vs. philological/philosophical categories, and restores the historical symbiosis between religious thought and artistic expression that was lost in the nineteenth-century disciplinary distinction between religious studies and art history. Winfield breaks new methodological ground by proposing space and time as organizing principles for analyzing both meditative experience as well as visual/material culture and presents a wider vision of how Japanese Buddhists themselves understood the role of imagery before, during, and after awakening.

The most complete and important book on the early history of Shin Buddhism to appear in English.... No other work in English combines the biography of the founder with such a detailed study of the complex development of Shin Buddhism from its simple beginnings as a small, rural primarily lay Buddhist movement in the 12th century to its rapid growth as a powerful urban religion in the 15th century."" - Choice

Jane Austen wrote six books that were published at the beginning of the nineteenth century, all known for their happy endings. Yet below the courtship novels' sparkling wit and dance scenes flows an undercurrent of suffering. Austen had a deep understanding of the sources and cure for suffering that shares much in common with Buddhism. Though not intentionally writing through the lens of Buddhism, Austen intuitively understood the Buddha's most fundamental teaching of the Four Noble Truths: that life contains suffering, that we can discover the causes of suffering, and that we can stop suffering by following the Eightfold Path described by the Buddha. In this book, Austen fans or those who wish for a deeper understanding of how stories can alleviate suffering will discover a combination of psychology and Buddhism alongside accessible close readings of Austen. This unique approach offers insight into Austen's enduring popularity and lessons we might apply to our own lives to find happiness-just like Austen's heroines.

"Nature deficit disorder" has become an increasingly challenging problem in our hyper modern world. In "Awake in the Wild," Mark Coleman shows seekers how to remedy this widespread malady by reconnecting with nature through Buddhism. Each short (two to three pages) chapter includes a concrete nature meditation relating to such topics as Attuning to the Natural World, Reflecting the Rhythms of Nature, Walking with Compassion, Releasing the Inner Noise, Freeing the Animal Within, Coming into the Peace of Wild Things, Weathering the Storms of Life, and more. Incorporating anecdotes from the author's many nature retreats, Buddhist wisdom and teachings, important nature writings by others, and nature itself, the book invites readers to participate in, not just observe, nature; develop a loving connection with the earth as a form of environmental activism; decrease urban alienation through experiencing nature; embody nature's peaceful presence; and connect with ancient spiritual wisdom through nature meditations.

The Routledge International Handbook of Charisma provides an unprecedented multidimensional and multidisciplinary comparative analysis of the phenomenon of charisma - first defined by Max Weber as the irrational bond between deified leader and submissive follower. It includes broad overviews of foundational theories and experiences of charisma and of associated key issues and themes. Contributors include 45 influential international scholars who approach the topic from different disciplinary perspectives and utilize examples from an array of historical and cultural settings. The Handbook presents up-to-date, concise, thought-provoking, innovative, and informative perspectives on charisma as it has been expressed in the past and as it continues to be manifested in the contemporary world by leaders ranging from shamans to presidents. It is designed to be essential reading for all students, researchers, and general readers interested in achieving a comprehensive understanding of the power and potential of charismatic authority in all its varieties, subtleties, dynamics, and current and potential directions.

The six lectures that make up this book were delivered in March 2011 at London University's School of Oriental and Asian Studies as the Jordan Lectures on Comparative Religion. They revolve around the intersection of two ideas, nothingness and desire, as they apply to a re-examination of the questions of self, God, morality, property, and the East-West philosophical divide.

Dharma is central to all the major religious traditions which originated on the Indian subcontinent. Such is its importance that these traditions cannot adequately be understood apart from it. Often translated as "ethics," "religion," "law," or "social order," dharma possesses elements of each of these but is not confined to any single category familiar to Western thought. Neither is it the straightforward equivalent of what many in the West might usually consider to be "a philosophy". This much-needed analysis of the history and heritage of dharma shows that it is instead a multi-faceted religious force, or paradigm, that has defined and that continues to shape the different cultures and civilizations of South Asia in a whole multitude of forms, organizing many aspects of life. Experts in the fields of Hindu, Jain, Buddhist and Sikh studies here bring fresh insights to dharma in terms both of its distinctiveness and its commonality as these are expressed across, and between, the several religions of the subcontinent. Exploring ethics, practice, history and social and gender issues, the contributors engage critically with some prevalent and often problematic interpretations of dharma, and point to new ways of appreciating these traditions in a manner that is appropriate to and thoroughly consistent with their varied internal debates, practices and self-representations.

Why did some Buddhist translators in China interpolate terms designating an agent which did not appear in the original texts? The Chinese made use of raw material imported from India; however, they added some seasoningsA" peculiar to China and developed their own recipesA" about how to construct the ideas of Buddhism. While Indian Buddhists constructed their ideas of self by means of empiricism, anti-Brahmanism and analytic reasoning, the Chinese Buddhists constructed their ideas of self by means of non-analytic insights, utilising pre-established epistemology and cosmogony. Furthermore, many of the basic renderings had specific implications that were peculiar to China. For example, while shen in philosophical Daoism originally signified an agent of thought, which disintegrates after bodily death, Buddhists added to it the property of permanent existence. Since many Buddhists in China read the reinterpreted term shen with the implications of the established epistemology and cosmogony, they came to develop their own ideas of self. After the late 6C, highly educated Buddhist theorists came to avoid including the idea of an imperishable soul in their doctrinal system. However, the idea of a permanent agent of perception remained vividly alive even during the development of Chinese Buddhism after the 7C.

This book provides a philosophical account of the normative status of killing in Buddhism. Its argument theorises on relevant Buddhist philosophical grounds the metaphysical, phenomenological and ethical dimensions of the distinct intentional classes of killing, in dialogue with some elements of Western philosophical thought. In doing so, it aims to provide a descriptive account of the causal bases of intentional killing, a global justification and elucidation of Buddhist norms regarding killing, and an intellectual response to and critique of alternative conceptions of such norms presented in recent Buddhist Studies scholarship. It examines early and classical Buddhist accounts of the evaluation of killing, systematising and rationally assessing these claims on both Buddhist and contemporary Western philosophical grounds. The book provides the conceptual foundation for the discussion, engaging original reconstructive philosophical analyses to both bolster and critique classical Indian Buddhist positions on killing and its evaluation, as well as contemporary Buddhist Studies scholarship concerning these positions. In doing so, it provides a systematic and critical account of the subject hitherto absent in the field. Engaging Buddhist philosophy from scholastic dogmatics to epistemology and metaphysics, this book is relevant to advanced students and scholars in philosophy and religious studies.

This volume includes two memoirs. In the Sign of the Golden Wheel tells the story of the `middle period' of the fourteen years Sangharakshita was based in the Indian hill station, Kalimpong. It is a crucial time for Buddhism as the whole Asian world is preparing to celebrate 2,500 years of Buddhism, and Sangharakshita's abundant energies are brought into play in diverse ways. His commitment to spreading the Dharma as widely as he can and to serving the (few) existing Buddhists in India takes him far afield: from tea estates in Assam to a film studio in Bombay, from the Maha Bodhi Society in Calcutta - he becomes the inspired editor of the internationally read Maha Bodhi Journal - to Kasturchand Park in Nagpur where he speaks to hundreds of thousands of bereaved followers of the great Dr Ambedkar. Whether describing great events of international import or those of more local significance, such as the funeral of Miss Barclay's cat, the flowing prose descriptions of people, places and events bring it all vividly to life. And through it all the enlightening, inspiring and moving reflections on life, the Dharma, poetry, friendship - and himself. Precious Teachers covers the last period of Sangharakshita's time in Kalimpong. Here too are vivid encounters with people - a damsel in distress, a dakini, a transsexual and many others. At the forefront, though, are Sangharakshita's Buddhist teachers: the Tibetans Jamyang Khyentse Rimpoche, Dilgo Khyentse Rimpoche, Dudjom Rimpoche, Kachu Rimpoche, Chattrul Sangye Dorje and Dhardo Rimpoche, and Chinese Yogi Chen. He recalls their meetings, his abhisekas or initiations, and the friendship that developed with Dhardo Rimpoche. In the background are events of international significance: the Chinese in Tibet, and the oppression of Buddhists in Vietnam. The memoir concludes with a letter from the English Sangha Trust inviting Sangharakshita back to the West....