This collection brings together scholarly contributions relating to the research of Lance Cousins (1942-2015), an influential and prolific scholar of early Buddhism. Cousins' interests spanned several related fields from the study of Abhidhamma and early Buddhist schools to Pali literature and meditation traditions. As well as being a scholar, Cousins was a noted meditation teacher and founder of the Samantha Trust. The influence of Cousin's scholarship and teaching is felt strongly not only in the UK but in the worldwide Buddhist Studies community. The volume is introduced by Peter Harvey and the following chapters all speak to the core questions in the field such as the nature of the path, the role of meditation, the formation of early Buddhist schools, scriptures and teachings and the characteristics and contributions of P?li texts. The volume is of interest to students and scholars in Buddhist Studies, Religious Studies and Asian Studies as well as Buddhist practitioners.

The teachings presented in As It Is, Volume I are primarily selected from talks given by the Dzogchen master, Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, in 1994 and 1995, during the last two years of his life. The unambiguous Buddhist perception of reality is transmitted in profound, simple language by one of the foremost masters in the Tibetan tradition. Dzogchen is to take the final result, the state of enlightenment itself, as path. This is the style of simply picking the ripened fruit or the fully bloomed flowers. Tulku Urgyen's way of communicating this wisdom was to awaken the individual to their potential and reveal the methods to acknowledge and stabilize that prospective. His distinctive teaching style was widely known for its unique directness in introducing students to the nature of mind in a way that allowed immediate experience. This book offers the direct oral instructions of a master who inspired admiration, delight in practice, and deep trust and confidence in the Buddhist way.

Consideration of children in the academic field of Religious Studies is taking root, but Buddhist Studies has yet to take notice. This collection is intended to open the question of children in Buddhism. It brings together a wide range of scholarship and expertise to address the question of what role children have played in the literature, in particular historical contexts, and what role they continue to play in specific Buddhist contexts today. Because the material is, in most cases, uncharted, all nineteen contributors involved in the project have exchanged chapters among themselves and thereby engaged in a kind of internal cohesion difficult to achieve in an edited project. The volume is divided into two parts. Part One addresses the representation of children in Buddhist texts and Part Two looks at children and childhoods in Buddhist cultures around the world. Little Buddhas will be an indispensable resource for students and scholars of Buddhism and Childhood Studies, and a catalyst for further research on the topic.

This annotated translation by Daisetz Suzuki (1870-1966) comprises the first four of six chapters of the Kyogyoshinsho, the definitive doctrinal work of Shinran (1173-1262). Shinran founded the Jodo Shin sect of Pure Land Buddhism, now the largest religious organization in Japan. Writing in Classical Chinese, Shinran began this, his magnum opus, while in exile and spent the better part of thirty years after his return to Kyoto revising the text. Although unfinished, Suzuki's translation conveys the text's core religious message, showing how Shinran offered a new understanding of faith through studying teachings before engaging in praxis, rather than the more common and far more limited view of faith in Buddhism as relevant to one just beginning their pursuit of Buddhist truth. Although Suzuki is best known for his scholarship on Zen Buddhism, he took a lifelong interest in Pure Land Buddhism. Suzuki's own religious perspective is evident in his translation of gyo as ''True Living'' rather than the expected ''Practice,'' and of sho as ''True Realizing of the Pure Land'' rather than the expected ''Enlightenment'' or ''Confirmation.'' This book contains the second edition of Suzuki's translation. It includes a number of corrections to the original 1973 edition, long out of print, as well as Suzuki's unfinished preface in its original form for the first time.

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.

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

Knowing Body, Moving Mind investigates ritualizing and learning in introductory meditation classes at two Buddhist centers in Toronto, Canada. The centers, Friends of the Heart and Chandrakirti, are led and attended by Western (sometimes called "convert') Buddhists: that is, people from non-Buddhist familial and cultural backgrounds. Inspired by theories that suggest that rituals impart new knowledge or understanding, Patricia Campbell examines how introductory meditation students learn through formal Buddhist practice. Along the way, she also explores practitioners' reasons for enrolling in meditation classes, their interests in Buddhism, and their responses to formal Buddhist practices and to ritual in general.
Based on ethnographic interviews and participant-observation fieldwork, the text follows interview participants' reflections on what they learned in meditation classes and through personal practice, and what roles meditation and other ritual practices played in that learning. Participants' learning experiences are illuminated by an influential learning theory called Bloom's Taxonomy, while the rites and practices taught and performed at the centers are explored using performance theory, a method which focuses on the performative elements of ritual's postures and gestures. But the study expands the performance framework as well, by demonstrating that performative ritualizing includes the concentration techniques that take place in a meditator's mind.
Such techniques are received as traditional mental acts or behaviors that are standardized, repetitively performed, and variously regarded as special, elevated, spiritual or religious. Having established a link between mental and physical forms of ritualizing, the study then demonstrates that the repetitive mental techniques of meditation practice train the mind to develop new skills in the same way that physical postures and gestures train the body. The mind is thus experienced as both embodied and gestural, and the whole of the body as socially and ritually informed.

This text is a collection of essays by noted curriculum scholar and philosopher of education, David W. Jardine. It ranges over twenty?five years of work with teachers and students in schools. The main purpose of these essays is to provide teachers with new ways of thinking about their circumstances that side step some of the panic and exhaustion that is all too typical of many school settings. Using ideas and images from Buddhism, ecological thinking, and hermeneutics, the author shows how these lineages help with the practical work of thinking and acting differently regarding the knowledge entrusted to teachers and students in schools. It offers the image of living fields of relations as an alternative to the fragmented, industrial?assembly machinations that drive much curriculum thinking and practice. It roots this alternative in solid scholarly work, both inside and outside of the orbit of educational literature. This book can provide encouragement and example to those working in schools who have sensed the shifting of human consciousness and conscience over the past decades towards issues of sustainability, interrelatedness, diversity, ancestry, ecological well?being, and dependent co?arising. It provides solid classroom?based examples coupled with substantial scholarly delving into the roots of such work in long?standing streams of thinking that are born outside of the usual orbits of educational theory and practice, but that provide that practice with a refuge and a relief and an alternative. This book can also provide examples to those doing graduate work in education of how interpretive research into classrooms can be conducted, and how this work is must be solid, well?rooted, scholarly and meticulously thought out. It is useful as a handbook and sourcebook for interpretive research or hermeneutic research, and provides a wide array of sources and themes for the conduct of such work.

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.

Since the early days of Buddhism in China, monastics and laity alike have expressed a profound concern with the past. In voluminous historical works, they attempted to determine as precisely as possible the dates of events in the Buddha's life, seeking to iron out discrepancies in varying accounts and pinpoint when he delivered which sermons. Buddhist writers chronicled the history of the Dharma in China as well, compiling biographies of eminent monks and nuns and detailing the rise and decline in the religion's fortunes under various rulers. They searched for evidence of karma in the historical record and drew on prophecy to explain the past. John Kieschnick provides an innovative, expansive account of how Chinese Buddhists have sought to understand their history through a Buddhist lens. Exploring a series of themes in mainstream Buddhist historiographical works from the fifth to the twentieth century, he looks not so much for what they reveal about the people and events they describe as for what they tell us about their compilers' understanding of history. Kieschnick examines how Buddhist doctrines influenced the search for the underlying principles driving history, the significance of genealogy in Buddhist writing, and the transformation of Buddhist historiography in the twentieth century. This book casts new light on the intellectual history of Chinese Buddhism and on Buddhists' understanding of the past.

This book examines some of the key elements of Buddhist education theory, in particular about educating for wisdom, the ultimate goal of Buddhist education. The teachings of Gautama Buddha have endured for thousands of years carried into the present era in schools, universities, temples, personal development courses, martial arts academies and an array of Buddhist philosophical societies across the globe. Philosophically, the ideas of the Buddha have held appeal across many cultures, but less is known about the underlying educational theories and practices that shape teaching and learning within Buddhist-inspired educational contexts. The chapters outline the development of the Buddha's teachings, his broad approach to education and their relevance in the 21st century. Subsequently, the book reviews the history of the evolution of the various schools of Buddhist thought, their teaching and learning styles and the dissemination among Asia and later also the Western countries. The book discusses education theories and devices embedded within the Buddhist teachings, examining the works found in the Tipitaka, the Buddhist canon.

Does "what we are doing"
have any spiritual value?

This intriguing book challenges common conceptions and misconceptions about traveling the Buddhist path to enlightenment. The author asks the questions that some dare not:
Is spiritual freedom gained through effort and struggle, or by giving up our need for things to be different?
How do we really know if our spiritual activities are moving us closer to our goal, or just keeping us from experiencing freedom in the here-and-now?
Does our need for spiritual guidance point us in the "right" direction, or is it simply an expression of our habitual and futile need to "know" what cannot be known?
Peter Fenner approaches these questions by first providing clear and illuminating summaries of the orthodox and unorthodox ways of the many different Buddhist traditions. He traces his own experiences with such practices as mindfulness meditation, Vipassana, the transformational tools of Tantra, and the natural meditations of the Dzogchen tradition. He contrasts the traditional approach of change-through-practice with the non-traditional,
Western need for immediacy. Fenner shows us how the paradoxes that emerge on the spiritual path can be used to deconstruct our fixations about "getting it" or "losing it": if I give up everything, will I gain fulfillment? Ultimately, he provides answers that are as proactive as his questions.

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.

The Tibetan Buddhist meditation practice known as Dzogchen is a pragmatic method for getting in touch with the pure, clear awareness that is hidden under our constant flow of anxious thoughts. Dzogchen Essentials makes available the methods to meet and utilize this rich spiritual path.
Marcia Binder Schmidt, a long time, close attendant to one of the foremost Dzogchen Masters of the last century, Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, has put together the most comprehensive and accessible collection of the essential instructions vital to this subject. She has organized them into a handbook for the genuine trainee of this tradition. The book includes a useful preface an introductory teaching by a leading Dzogchen Master as well as classical and original pieces that impart crucial explanations. This is a book for the layperson as well as the scholar.
For centuries, Dzogchen has been a secretly held and privately transmitted teaching, which was unknown beyond the confines of Tibetan culture. But that changed in the final decades of the last century, as many Tibetans saw the long-awaited unfolding of a famous ninth-century prophecy: "When the Dark Age is rampant, the Dzogchen teachings will blaze like wildfire."

In this unique book, His Holiness the Dalai Lama tells the full story of his 75-year struggle with China to save Tibet and its people.

The Dalai Lama has had to contend with the People’s Republic of China his entire life. He was 15 years old when communist China invaded Tibet in 1950, only 19 when he had his first meeting with Chairman Mao in Beijing, and 24 when he was forced to escape to India and became a leader in exile. Almost 75 years after China’s initial invasion of Tibet, the Dalai Lama has faced communist China’s leaders – Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping – in his effort to protect Tibet and its people.

In Voice for the Voiceless, the Dalai Lama reminds the world of Tibet’s unresolved struggle for freedom and the hardship his people continue to face in their homeland. The book captures his extraordinary life, uncovering what it means to lose your home to a repressive invader and build a life in exile; dealing with the existential crisis of a nation, its people, and its culture and religion; and envisioning the path forward.

Voice for the Voiceless is a powerful testimony from a global icon, sharing both his pain and his enduring hope in his people’s ongoing quest to restore dignity and freedom.

The Record of Buddhist Kingdoms is a classic travelogue that records the Chinese monk Faxian's journey in the early fifth century CE to Buddhist sites in Central and South Asia in search of sacred texts. In the nineteenth century, it traveled west to France, becoming in translation the first scholarly book about "Buddhist Asia," a recent invention of Europe. This text fascinated European academic Orientalists and was avidly studied by Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. The book went on to make a return journey east: it was reintroduced to Inner Asia in an 1850s translation into Mongolian, after which it was rendered into Tibetan in 1917. Amid decades of upheaval, the text was read and reinterpreted by Siberian, Mongolian, and Tibetan scholars and Buddhist monks. Matthew W. King offers a groundbreaking account of the transnational literary, social, and political history of the circulation, translation, and interpretation of Faxian's Record. He reads its many journeys at multiple levels, contrasting the textual and interpretative traditions of the European academy and the Inner Asian monastery. King shows how the text provided Inner Asian readers with new historical resources to make sense of their histories as well as their own times, in the process developing an Asian historiography independently of Western influence. Reconstructing this circulatory history and featuring annotated translations, In the Forest of the Blind models decolonizing methods and approaches for Buddhist studies and Asian humanities.

Since the late 19th century, when the "new science" of psychology and interest in esoteric and occult phenomena converged - leading to the "discovery" of the unconscious - the dual disciplines of depth psychology and mysticism have been wed in an often unholy union. Continuing in this tradition, and the challenges it carries, this volume includes a variety of inter-disciplinary approaches to the study of depth psychology, mysticism, and mystical experience, spanning the fields of theology, religious studies, and the psychology of religion. Chapters include inquiries into the nature of self and consciousness, questions regarding the status and limits of mysticism and mystical phenomenon, and approaches to these topics from multiple depth psychological traditions.

This book offers an overview of the emergence of Bodh Gaya as a sacred site within Gaya Dharmaksetra. It contextualizes the different encounters, incidents, and legends connected to the Buddha's experiences shortly before and after he attained Bodhi - when, spiritually speaking, he was extremely lonely and was trying to carve a place for himself in the highly competitive Gaya Dharmaksetra. Further, the book examines the role of various personalities and institutions contributed towards the emergence of Mahabodhi Temple. It incorporates a wealth of research on the role of the Victorian Indologists as well as the colonial administrators, the Giri mahants, and Anagarika Dharmapala, to understand the material milieu pertaining not only to its identity but also access to spiritual resources as its conservation and development. This book is an indispensable read for students and scholars of history, cultural studies, and art and architecture as well as practitioners of Buddhism and Hinduism.

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.

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.

"A warm, profound and cleareyed memoir. . . this wise and sympathetic book's lingering effect is as a reminder that a deeper and more companionable way of life lurks behind our self-serious stories."-Oliver Burkeman, New York Times Book Review A remarkable exploration of the therapeutic relationship, Dr. Mark Epstein reflects on one year's worth of therapy sessions with his patients to observe how his training in Western psychotherapy and his equally long investigation into Buddhism, in tandem, led to greater awareness-for his patients, and for himself For years, Dr. Mark Epstein kept his beliefs as a Buddhist separate from his work as a psychiatrist. Content to use his training in mindfulness as a private resource, he trusted that the Buddhist influence could, and should, remain invisible. But as he became more forthcoming with his patients about his personal spiritual leanings, he was surprised to learn how many were eager to learn more. The divisions between the psychological, emotional, and the spiritual, he soon realized, were not as distinct as one might think. In The Zen of Therapy, Dr. Epstein reflects on a year's worth of selected sessions with his patients and observes how, in the incidental details of a given hour, his Buddhist background influences the way he works. Meditation and psychotherapy each encourage a willingness to face life's difficulties with courage that can be hard to otherwise muster, and in this cross-section of life in his office, he emphasizes how therapy, an element of Western medicine, can in fact be considered a two-person meditation. Mindfulness, too, much like a good therapist, can "hold" our awareness for us-and allow us to come to our senses and find inner peace. Throughout this deeply personal inquiry, one which weaves together the wisdom of two worlds, Dr. Epstein illuminates the therapy relationship as spiritual friendship, and reveals how a therapist can help patients cultivate the sense that there is something magical, something wonderful, and something to trust running through our lives, no matter how fraught they have been or might become. For when we realize how readily we have misinterpreted our selves, when we stop clinging to our falsely conceived constructs, when we touch the ground of being, we come home.

This book main idea is that intrinsic to the heart, mind and spirit in every human being is an identical essence which can be realized. This realization makes any man or woman a Buddha. The focus of this book is the method of how to implement that through a system of training which is of timeless value, and not bound by cultural limitations. The timeless truth it conveys is as meaningful for a Westerner today as it was in India and Tibet.
During the centuries this system of effortless training has been applied by people from all any occupation -- tailers and kings, monks and business men - and provided them with a simple method to not only withstand the changes of life but also to transcend them. Like the waves on an ocean, the ups and downs, joys and sorrows, we meet in our lives can be seen as movements in the ocean, giving true peace and room for caring for others.
I will be hard to find another book which is as concise as Heart Lamp.
The audience is the steadily increasing followers of Buddhism in the Americas, Europe and Asia, which is grown in the wake of Tibetan masters' teaching outside of Tibet. Heart Lamp is unique in that its translator worked closely with several of the most respected meditation masters of recent times and was able to receive knowledge from the "lifeblood" of the living tradition.
Heart Lamp is unique in its brevity without losing the depth of a true spiritual lineage the training in which can bring about enlightenment in a single lifetime. And, it is being used as the textbook during meditation retreats around.

The British colonial administrator and scholar Sir Reginald Fleming Johnston (1874-1938) travelled extensively in the Far East, developing a keen intellectual interest in Chinese culture and spirituality. His fourteen-year posting to the relatively quiet port of Weihaiwei allowed him to indulge this interest and to travel to places not usually visited by Europeans. In 1918, he was appointed tutor to the young Puyi (1906-67), who had been China's last emperor before his forced abdication. Deeply interested in Mahayana Buddhism, Johnston played an important role in raising Western awareness of its philosophy and practice in China. This work, first published in 1913, provides valuable insight into the history of this branch of Buddhism as well as fascinating accounts of notable centres of Chinese monasticism. Among other works, Johnston's Confucianism and Modern China (1934) and Twilight in the Forbidden City (1934) are also reissued in this series.