. . . Lively and engaging, Lopez's book raises important questions about how Eastern religions are often co-opted, assimilated and misunderstood by Western culture."—Publishers Weekly"Proceeding with care and precision, Lopez reveals the extent to which scholars have behaved like intellectual colonialists. . . . Someone had to burst the bubble of pop Tibetology, and few could have done it as resoundingly as Lopez."—Booklist"Fascinating. . . [A] provocative exploration. Lopez conveys the full dizziness of the Western encounter with Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism."—Fred Pheil, Tricycle: The Buddhist Review"A timely and courageous exploration. . . . [Lopez's] book will sharpen the terms of the debate over what the Tibetans and their observers can or should be doing about the place and the idea of Tibet. And that alone is what will give us all back our Shambhala."—Jonathan Spence, Lingua Franca Book Review"Lopez's most important theme is that we should be wary of the idea . . . that Tibet has what the West lacks, that if we were only to look there we would find the answers to our problems. Lopez's book shows that, on the contrary, when the West has looked at Tibet, all that it has seen is a distorted reflection of itself."—Ben Jackson, Times Higher Education Supplement

     Khyentse shows that genuine spiritual practice, not least the Ngöndro preliminaries, will not bring the kind of comfort and ease most worldly people crave. Quite the opposite, in fact. But if your ultimate goal is enlightenment, Ngöndro practice is a must, and Not for Happiness your perfect guide, containing everything an aspiring practitioner needs to start to practise, including advice about:    • “renunciation mind”   • discipline, meditation and wisdom    • using your imagination in visualisation practice   • why we need a guru Students’ Reactions to Not for Happiness: “Having a map of the path that shows where each practice is headed helps me to see what each stage is preparing me for. Even the chapters that at first didn’t seem relevant to my current practice contained such great gems of teaching that they turned out to be extremely relevant and very helpful.”—Catherine Fordham “To me, this book is like the world’s best kind of GPS! I feel that by following its guidance, even though I am not a skilful driver, I will have the confidence to drive through my Ngöndro practice—and may even end up feeling quite good about it!”—Helena Wang

    Do the right thing, of course-- but better yet, find your inner light and doing the right thing becomes as natural as breathing. THE ZEN COMMANDMENTS offers ten powerful nudges toward that light.Drawing on sources from Zen stories and the Bible to jazz and rock 'n' roll, from American movies to Tibetan meditative techniques, Dean Sluyter steers clear of dogma and emphasizes what works-- a sort of spiritual street smarts. He shows that the state of boundless freedom and happiness isn't something distant or exotic, but is right here, while you're stuck in traffic or taking out the trash. And revisiting the Ten Commandments, he shows how on a deeper level they offer some surprising enlightenment wisdom of their own.“The book is extremely well written and joyously entertaining.”—Publishers Weekly “With sparkling clarity and wit, Sluyter's ten suggestions lay out the practical essentials of the path. My suggestion is: listen to this guy.”—Lama Surya Das, author of Awakening the Buddha Within “Dean Sluyter clearly presents simple but profound ways to live one's life consciously and skillfully. He teaches that the source of universal truth not only rests in the heart of every one of us, but is the essence of what ultimately brings us true happiness and freedom. This is a wonderful book with rich wisdom and deep insight.”—Rabbi David Cooper, author of God Is a Verb “No matter what your religion (or lack of it), this book shows how to live the kind of life people ache for. It turns out to be pretty simple.”—Jane Cavolina, co-author of Growing Up Catholic

    It is an excellent, indepth description of mindfulness practice and its benefits. It includes a concise explanation of clear comprehension, which is the kind of mindfulness you use in the course of your daily life. It also presents an easily understandable explanation of the Four Foundations of Mindfulness.This new edition includes an introduction from noted author and teacher Sylvia Boorstein. Although the Buddha lived over 2500 years ago, his teachings on meditation are among the most effective methods for healing the pain of grief, finding inner peace, and overcoming the sense of dislocation caused by living in the 21st century. Mindfulness is a method not only for committed Buddhists. It is for everyone interested in mastering the mind.From the introduction by Sylvia BoorsteinThe Heart of Buddhist Meditation was the first serious, didactic Dharma book I read. It was the early nineteeneighties. My teacher, Jack Kornfield, suggested it as the beginning formal training of my becoming a Mindfulness teacher. I have that original copy and I am touched by how many underlined passages, how many exclamation points in margins, how many addendums of my own written in tiny scrawl appear in its fading pages.

    How can we BE LOVE instead of craving it? This simple booklet explores that question and presents Four Paths of Being Love based in Buddhist teachings. Guaranteed to make you re-think love and transform your expression of it.The greatest question of every century in which human beings have existed is "What is love?" It is our deepest desire to touch others' hearts and be touched.We want to feel love. And of course this would be our deepest desire. Once we are born, we are held in the arms of someone at least our entire first year on Earth. In BE LOVE, the author says, Peace in these times is dependent on our falling back in love with each other and all other living beings."Manuel links the Bible verse God is love to the teachings of Buddha in which the true nature of us all is love. Her presentation explores what has carried us far from ourselves given the high rates of homicide and suicide rates today.Take a look and don't forget to leave a review.

    In fact, emptiness points to something quite different than “nothingness” or “vacancy.” And by developing a richer understanding of this complex topic, we can experience freedom as we live consciously in the world. Guy Armstrong has been a leading figure and beloved teacher of insight meditation for decades. In this book, he makes difficult Buddhist topics easy to understand, weaving together Theravada and Mahayana teachings on emptiness to show how we can liberate our minds and manifest compassion in our lives.

    With clarity and humour he guides us to understand how we ourselves generate the clouds of anxiety, desire and anger that obscure our happiness. We learn to recognise these obscurations, how they came about and how to release and dissolve them. The innate wisdom and brilliance of the mind then naturally manifest. The title contains guidelines and practices for meditators.

    Some of them accord with reality and serve us well throughout the course of our lives. Others are out of alignment with reality and cause us problems. Tibetan Buddhist practice isn't just sitting in silent meditation, it's developing fresh attitudes that align our minds with reality. Attitudes need adjusting, just like a spinal column that has been knocked out of alignment. In this book, B. Alan Wallace explains a fundamental type of Buddhist mental training which is designed to shift our attitudes so that our minds become pure wellsprings of joy instead of murky pools of problems, anxieties, fleeting pleasures, hopes, and frustrations. Wallace shows us the way to develop attitudes that unveil our full capacity for spiritual awakening. The author draws on his thirty-year training in Buddhism, physics, the cognitive sciences, and comparative religion to challenge readers to reappraise many of their assumptions about the nature of the mind and physical world. By explicitly addressing many practical and theoretical issues that uniquely face us in the modern world, Wallace brings this centuries-old practice into the twenty-first century.

    With mindfulness being so widely taught, there is a need for a clear-sighted and experience-based guide. Analayo provides it.

    In this famous twenty-four-day teaching on the lamrim, or stages of the path, Pabongka Rinpoche weaves together lively stories and quotations with frank observations and practical advice to move readers step by step along the journey to buddhahood. When his student Trijang Rinpoche first edited and published these teachings in Tibetan, an instant classic was born. The flavor and immediacy of the original Tibetan are preserved in Michael Richards' fluid and lively translation, which is now substantially revised in this new edition.

    But “faith is not equivalent to mere belief. Faith is the condition of ultimate confidence that we have the capacity to follow the path of doubt to its end. And courage.”In this engaging spiritual memoir, Stephen Batchelor describes his own training, first as a Tibetan Buddhist and then as a Zen practitioner, and his own direct struggles along his path. “It is most uncanny that we are able to ask questions, for to question means to acknowledge that we do not know something. But it is more than an acknowledgement: it includes a yearning to confront an unknown and illuminate it through understanding. Questioning is a quest.”Batchelor is a contemporary Buddhist teacher and writer, best known for his secular or agnostic approach to Buddhism. He considers Buddhism to be a constantly evolving culture of awakening rather than a religious system based on immutable dogmas and beliefs. Buddhism has survived for the past 2,500 years because of its capacity to reinvent itself in accord with the needs of the different Asian societies with which it has creatively interacted throughout its history. As Buddhism encounters modernity, it enters a vital new phase of its development. Through his writings, translations and teaching, Stephen engages in a critical exploration of Buddhism's role in the modern world, which has earned him both condemnation as a heretic and praise as a reformer.

    The Feeling Buddha is a lucid account of how the Buddha's path of wisdom and loving kindness grew out of the challenges he encountered in life. Brazier explains the concepts of enlightenment, nirvana and the four Noble Truths, free from mystification. Buddha emerges as a very human figure whose success lay not in his perfection, but in how he positively utilized the energy which was generated through his suffering. This rare guide illustrates how Buddha's philosophy of the "middle way" can lead to a balanced, harmonious, and serene existence in the 21st century.

    In Zen Is Right Here, his teachings are brought to life powerfully and directly through stories told about him by his students. These living encounters with Zen are poignant, direct, humorous, paradoxical, and enlightening; and their setting in real-life contexts makes them wonderfully accessible.Like the Buddha himself, Suzuki Roshi gave profound teachings that were skilfully expressed for each moment, person, and situation he encountered. He emphasized that while the ungraspable essence of Buddhism is constant, the expression of that essence is always changing. Each of the stories presented here is an example of this versatile and timeless quality, showing that the potential for attaining enlightenment exists right here, right now, in this very moment.

    Along the way, however, we tend to encounter the same perplexing questions again and again. Some are cosmic enigmas that have always tested the human mind: What is my purpose in life? What happens after I die? Others are puzzles presented by daily life in modern society: What, if anything, justifies assisted suicide? What is my personal responsibility to the homeless? According to Lama Surya Das, one of the foremost Western Buddhist scholars and teachers, the more we seek to resolve these mysteries, the more fully we live.Along with his own personal beliefs, the author presents a variety of thoughtful points of view representing different schools of Buddhism, other religions, spirituality in general, and pragmatism. The Big Questions challenges readers in the most stimulating and thoughtful way to formulate individual, authentic responses to life’s big questions.

    Now, Adrienne Howley -- personally ordained by His Holiness the Dalai Lama and one of the highest ranking Buddhist nuns in the world -- writes in a warm, simple, and engagingly humorous style that illustrates the life, ideas, and teachings of the Buddha and the religion and philosophy that he inspired. This charming guide demystifies Buddhism and shows how we can apply its teachings to our lives in useful and meaningful ways. Howley covers who Buddha was and how he came to formulate his philosophy, the three main Buddhist traditions, what ordinary Buddhists believe and practice today, and meditation: how and why. There are also answers to questions most commonly asked by non-Buddhists, including: How can Buddhism make me happy? How can I always practice generosity? and How can I move away from greed and hatred? The Naked Buddha is an accessible, down-to-earth introduction to this ancient Asian religion and a valuable addition to the literature on Buddhism.