As its teachings spread from the Indian subcontinent in all directions across Asia, Buddhism influenced every culture it touched--from Afghanistan to Korea, from Mongolia to Java. Buddhist art is a radiant reflection of the encounter of the Buddha's teachings with the diverse civilizations that came under their sway. It is also an intriguing visual record of the evolution of Buddhist practice and philosophy over a period of more than two millennia.
More than two hundred photographs provide the visual context for this tour of the world of Buddhist art. Included in the rich variety of forms are architecture and monumental art, statuary, paintings, calligraphy, fresco, brushwork, and textile arts. Denise Leidy's guide is the perfect introductory text for all those intrigued by this splendid aesthetic tradition. It also an essential resource for all who seek to understand Buddhist art as teaching.

365 days of practical, powerful teachings from the beloved Zen teacher
Inspiring, joyful, and deeply insightful, this book offers daily contemplations and words of wisdom from one of today's most important spiritual teachers. Thich Nhat Hanh is, with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, the best-known Buddhist teacher in the world, and his teachings have touched millions.
These powerful and transformative words of wisdom, drawn from the works of this best-selling and prolific author, touch all apsects of our lives, from the personal to the global, and reflect the great themes of Thich Nhat Hanh's teachings: how the practice of mindfulness brings joy and insight into every moment of our lives; how to transcend fear and other negative emotions; how we can heal our inner wounds with gentleness and awareness; how to transform our relationships through love, presence, and deep listening; and how to practice peace for our world and caring for the earth.
Through Thich Nhat Hanh's great brilliance, this book presents these profound themes in short teachings that are practical yet powerful, and will uplift and inspire your day.

The third volume of this landmark series presents the vajrayana teachings of the tantric path. The vajrayana, or 'diamond vehicle', also referred to as tantra, draws upon and extends the teachings of the hinayana and mahayana.

The Heart Sutra is the most widely read, chanted, and copied text in East Asian Buddhism. Here Frederik L. Schodt explores his lifelong fascination with the sutra: its mesmerizing mantra, its ancient history, the "emptiness theory, and the way it is used around the world as a metaphysical tool to overcome chaos and confusion and reach a new understanding of reality--a perfection of wisdom. Schodt's journey takes him to caves in China, American beats declaiming poetry, speculations into the sutra's true origins, and even a robot Avalokitesvara at a Kyoto temple.

Many people have the compassionate wish to benefit others, but few understand how to accomplish this effectively in daily life. Bodhisattvas are friends of the world who have such strong compassion they are able to transform all their daily activities into methods to benefit others. The path of the Bodhisattva was exquisitely explained in the universally loved poem Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life by the 8th century master Shantideva. With this commentary by Venerable Geshe Kelsang Gyatso Rinpoche, the effectiveness and profundity of this way of life are clearly revealed and made practical for our modern world.

With such bestsellers as "A History of God and Islam," Karen Armstrong has consistently delivered apenetrating, readable, and prescienta ("The New York Times") works that have lucidly engaged a wide range of religions and religious issues. In "Buddha" she turns to a figure whose thought is still reverberating throughout the world 2,500 years after his death.

Many know the Buddha only from seeing countless serene, iconic images. But what of the man himself and the world he lived in? What did he actually do in his roughly eighty years on earth that spawned one of the greatest religions in world history? Armstrong tackles these questions and more by examining the life and times of the Buddha in this engrossing philosophical biography. Against the tumultuous cultural background of his world, she blends history, philosophy, mythology, and biography to create a compelling and illuminating portrait of a man whose awakening continues to inspire millions.

The phenomenon known as "Buddhism" embraces an uninterrupted process of communication through which the Buddha's followers have been guided and inspired for 25 centuries. Communication is a living, evolving thing, and for all its continuity the Buddhist tradition presents the modern student - and practitioner - with a bewildering array of cultural, philosophical and practical forms. This work describes and correlates these diverse manifestations - in Buddhism's homeland of India, and in its spread across Asia, from Mongolia to Sri Lanka and from Japan to the Middle East. Drawing on recent historical and literary research, the author explains the basic concepts of Buddhism from all periods of its development, and places them in an historical framework.

The rising population known as "nones" for its members' lack of religious affiliation is changing American society, politics, and culture. Many nones believe in God and even visit places of worship, but they do not identify with a specific faith or belong to a spiritual community. Corinna Nicolaou is a none, and in this layered narrative, she describes what it is like for her and thousands of others to live without religion or to be spiritual without committing to a specific faith. Nicolaou tours America's major traditional religions to see what, if anything, one might lack without God. She moves through Christianity's denominations, learning their tenets and worshiping alongside their followers. She travels to Los Angeles to immerse herself in Judaism, Berkeley to educate herself about Buddhism, and Dallas and Washington, D.C., to familiarize herself with Islam. She explores what light they can shed on the fears and failings of her past, and these encounters prove the significant role religion still plays in modern life. They also exemplify the vibrant relationship between religion and American culture and the enduring value it provides to immigrants and outsiders. Though she remains a devout none, Nicolaou's experiences reveal points of contact between the religious and the unaffiliated, suggesting that nones may be radically revising the practice of faith in contemporary times.

Beloved Western Buddhist master Kornfield makes known his personal, practical wisdom, garnered from 25 years of practicing and teaching the path of awakening, as he guides self-searchers to a simplicity of perception that brings alive spiritual practice, peace, and truth in their daily lives.

Originally published in 1976, Leon Hurvitz's monumental translation of the "Lotus Sutra" is the work scholars have preferred for decades. Hailed by critics as an "extraordinary" and "magnificent" achievement, Hurvitz's translation is based on the best known Chinese version of the text and includes passages of the original Sanskrit that were omitted from the Chinese.

Beloved for its mythology and literary artistry, the "Lotus Sutra" is one of the most popular and influential texts of Mahayana Buddhism, asserting that there is only one path to enlightenment, the bodhisattva path, and that all followers without exception can achieve supreme awakening. The text argues that the Buddha cannot be delimited by time and space and that a common intent underlies the diversity of Buddhist teachings. Through parables of the burning house, the wayward son, and other tales that have come to be known throughout East Asia, the sutra skillfully concretizes abstract religious concepts and clarifies bold claims about the Buddhist tradition. Urging devotees to revivify doctrine through recitation and interpretation, the sutra powered an organic process of remaking that not only kept its content alive in the poetry and art of premodern Asia but also introduced new forms of practice and scriptural study into contemporary Buddhism. Stephen F. Teiser's foreword addresses this vital quality of the sutra, discusses its background, and reflects on the enduring relevance of Hurvitz's critical work.

"Instant Zen" presents the teachings of Foyan, a twelfth-century Chinese Zen master recognized as one of the greatest masters of the Song dynasty Zen renaissance in China. Returning to the uncomplicated genuineness of the original and classical Zen masters, Foyan offers many simple exercises in attention and thought designed to lead to the awakening of Zen insight into the real nature of the self. These succinct teachings emphasize independence and autonomy, and show us how to open our own eyes and stand on our own two feet, to see directly without delusion and act on truth without confusion.
Translator Thomas Cleary provides an incisive introduction and extensive references from traditional Zen sources, placing the work in both historical and contemporary contexts. Newcomers to Zen will find this book a useful and sophisticated introduction to authentic inner Zen practices from an impeccable source, without cultural exoticism or religious cultism. Instant Zen sheds new light on this vital tradition, making available the immediacy of Zen practice and unveiling our innate potential for conscious awakening.

In a world of increasingly confused ethics, "Living Ethically" looks back over the centuries for guidance from Nagarjuna, one of the greatest teachers of the Mahayana tradition. Drawing on the themes of Nagarjuna's famous scripture, Precious Garland of Advice for a King, this book explores the relationship between an ethical lifestyle and the development of wisdom. Covering both personal and collective ethics, Sangharakshita considers such enduring themes as pride, power and business, as well as friendship, love and generosity.

A richly illustrated tapestry of interwoven studies spanning some six thousand years of history, Daemons Are Forever is at once a record of archaic contacts and transactions between humans and protean spirit beings--daemons--and an account of exchanges, among human populations, of the science of spirit beings: daemon-ology. Since the time of the Indo-European migrations, and especially following the opening of the Silk Road, a common daemonological vernacular has been shared among populations ranging from East and South Asia to Northern Europe. In this virtuoso work of historical sleuthing, David Gordon White recovers the trajectories of both the "inner demons" cohabiting the bodies of their human hosts and the "outer daemons" that those same humans recognized each time they encountered them in their enchanted haunts: sylvan pools, sites of geothermal eruptions, and dark forest groves. Along the way, he invites his readers to reconsider the potential and promise of the historical method in religious studies, suggesting that a "connected histories" approach to Eurasian daemonology may serve as a model for restoring history to its proper place, at the heart of the history of religions discipline.

'Karen Armstrong has been one of the most persistent and powerful voices in the eminently respectable task of popularising religious scholarship in the anglophone world' GUARDIAN 'Her work has a broad sweep and that is extremely important' TLS Buddhism is a faith that commands over 100 million followers throughout the world. Buddha stands with Christ, Confucius and Mohammed as someone who revolutionised the religious ideas of his time to advocate a new way of living. Since Buddhism promotes no personal god, Buddhism, writes Armstrong, 'is essentially a psychological faith'. In our own age of secular anxiety, she shows that it has profound lessons to teach about selflessness and the simple life. All that is known about Buddha comes from a collection of ancient writings that fuse history, biography and myth. Karen Armstrong distils from these the key events of Buddha's life: his birth as Siddhartha Gotama in the fifth century BC and his abandonment of his wife and son; his attainment of enlightenment under the Banyan tree (the moment he became a buddha, or enlightened one; his political influence; the divisions among his followers; and his serene death. Armstrong also introduces the key tenets of Buddhism: she explains the doctrine of anatta (no-soul) and the concepts of kamma (actions), samsara (keeping going), dhamma (a law or teaching that reflects the fundamental principles of existence) and the idealised state of nibbana (literally the 'cooling of the ego'). Karen Armstrong's short book is a magnificent introduction to the life and thought of this most influential of spiritual thinkers.

Inspiring teachings on what each of us can do to promote peace from the inside out--now available as a Shambhala Pocket Classic.
With war and violence flaring all over the world, many of us are left feeling vulnerable and utterly helpless. In this book Pema Chodron draws on Buddhist teachings to explore the origins of aggression, hatred, and war, explaining that they lie nowhere but within our own hearts and minds. She goes on to offer practical techniques any of us can use to work for peace in our own lives, at the level of our habits of thought and action. It's never too late, she tells us, to look within and discover a new way of living and transform not only our personal lives but our whole world.
This is a pocket-sized reissue of "Practicing Peace in Times of War."

Jung's Red Book, finally published only in 2009, is a highly ambiguous text describing a succession of extraordinary visions, together with Jung's interpretation of them. Red Book, Middle Way offers a new interpretation of Jung's Red Book, in terms of the Middle Way, as a universal principle and embodied ethic, paralleled both in the Buddha's teachings and elsewhere. Jung explicitly discusses the Middle Way in the Red Book (although this has been largely ignored by scholars so far) as well as offering lots of material that can be understood in its terms. This book interprets the Red Book in relation to the archetypes met in its visions - the hero, the feminine, the Shadow, God and Christ, and follows Jung's process of integrating these different internal figures. To do this Jung needs to find the Middle Way between absolutes at every point, in a way similar to the Buddha.

"Murmured Conversations" is the first complete and rigorously annotated translation of "Sasamegoto" (1463-1464), considered the most important and representative poetic treatise of the medieval period in Japan because of its thoroughgoing construction of poetry as a way to attain, and signify through language, the mental liberation ("satori") that is the goal of Buddhist practice. It is a fascinating document revealing the central place of Buddhist philosophy in medieval Japanese artistic practices. Shinkei (1406-1475), the author of the treatise, is himself a major poet, regarded as the most brilliant among the practitioners of linked poetry ("renga") in the Muromachi Period.
Along with the extensive annotations, Ramirez-Christensen's commentaries illuminate the significance of each section of the treatise within the context of "waka" and "renga" poetics, of the history of classical Japanese aesthetic principles in general and of Shinkei's thought in particular, and the role of Buddhism in the contemporary understanding of cultural practices like poetry. This is the most comprehensive presentation available in English of a major classical Japanese critical text.