However, when you attend to your home, you begin to feel less hurried and more in tune with the world around you. There is delight and calm to be found in the midst of washing dishes or changing the water in a vase of flowers; there is pleasure to be experienced in the repetitions of daily life.In Sweeping Changes, Gary Thorp shows how the principles of Zen can bring harmony and peace to your life at home. You don’t need special surroundings or to sit quietly in a formal posture to achieve the tranquillity of Zen; you can find it anywhere–in the action of dusting a shelf, organizing your closet, or feeding your cat. As Thorp conveys in sparkling prose, many everyday activities provide an opportunity for Zen practice, satisfaction, and spiritual growth. Whether you live in a small room, an apartment, or a palace, this delightful, insightful book will not only change your feelings toward housekeeping, it will help you see your home, and your place in it, in a new and nurturing light.

    This book is a powerful and enriching synthesis of the 12-Step recovery programs and the Noble Eightfold Path of Buddhism. It is sure to appeal to anyone touched by addiction, including those looking for new ways to understand and work with the tried-and-true 12-Step system. Tens of millions of Americans suffer from alcoholism and other forms of dependence, and 12 Steps on Buddha's Path offers hope and help for any one of them.Though writing anonymously out of deep respect for 12-Step policies, the author is in fact a well-known professional author, deeply involved in the recovery and meditation communities.

    These short, inspiring readings illuminate Zen practice in simple, eloquent language. Topics include zazen and Zen koans, how to appreciate your life as the life of the Buddha, and the essential matter of life and death. Appreciate Your Life conveys Maezumi Roshi's unique spirit and teaching style, as well as his timeless insights into the practice of Zen. Never satisfied with merely conveying ideas, his teisho, the Zen talks he gave weekly and during retreats, evoked personal questions from his students. Maezumi Roshi insisted that his students address these questions in their own lives. As he often said, "Be intimate with your life." The readings are not teachings or instructions in the traditional sense. They are transcriptions of the master's teisho, living presentations of his direct experience of Zen realization. These teisho are crystalline offerings of Zen insight intended to reach beyond the student's intellect to her or his deepest essence.

    The best collection of Zen wisdom and wit since "Zen Flesh, Zen Bones": koans, sayings, poems, and stories by Eastern and American Zen teachers and students capture the delightful, challenging, mystifying, mind-stopping, outrageous, and scandalous heart of Zen.

    The jar proved to hold treasure of an unexpected sort: a collection of some fifty-two ancient manuscripts, most of which reflect the teachings of a mystical religious movement we call Gnosticism (from the Greek word gnosis, "knowledge"). The texts are also, with few exceptions, Christian documents, and thus they provide us with valuable new information about the character of the early church, and about the Gnostic Christians within the church.In this volume, Marvin W. Meyer has produced a new English translation for general readers of four of the most important and revealing of these early Christian texts -- the Secret Book of James, the Gospel of Thomas, the Book of Thomas, and the Secret Book of John.

    As you identify your tribe and divinely align in time with God's calendar, you will discover how to find your position in God's Kingdom, how to war effectively for your inheritance, and then walk in His blessings.A Time to Advance: Understanding the Significance of the Hebrew Tribes and Months will help you understand how God is developing His whole conquering army for today. You will also understand how each part moves together, and the redemptive quality of God's covenant plan for Israel. This will help ground you on how we are grafted into a movement in days ahead.As you learn how to think like God thinks and study the Hebrew tribes and months, you will receive prophetic understanding of how the Lord orders your steps throughout the year. You will also see your place in God's next Triumphant Reserve that is rising in the Earth today!

    This guide demonstrates how readers can become actively calm, centred in the stillness and joy of our own essential nature while living a dynamic, fulfilling and balanced life.

    The book’s centerpiece is her moving account of her return to Vietnam, her homeland, after 40 years of exile. She describes in refreshing detail her emotional reactions, the reunions with many old friends and fellow activists, and her impression of the “new Vietnam” where Buddhists still struggle for religious freedom. Often compared to The Autobiography of Mahatma Gandhi, this memoir connects to larger themes, especialy when the author discusses the life and teaching of her fellow exile, Thich Nhat Hanh, gives an overview of the development of the European and American peace and human rights movements, and introduces readers to the Vietnamese style of Buddhism. Learning True Love is a testament to the power of tenacity and faith.

    Glassman illuminates three key teachings of Zen Buddhism, offering line-by-line commentary in clear, direct language:- The Heart Sutra the Buddha's essential discourse on emptiness, a central sutra of the Mahayana Buddhist tradition. - The Identity of Relative and Absolute: an eighth-century poem by Shih-t'ou His-ch'ien, a key text of the Soto Zen school. - The Zen precepts: the rules of conduct for laypeople and monks.His commentaries are based on workshops he gave as Abbot of the Zen Community of New York, and they contain within them the principles that became the foundation for the Greyston Mandala of community development organizations and the Zen Peacemaker Order.

    Drawing on his long personal experience as a Buddhist teacher, journalist, and editor, Clark Strand offers broad insight into how and why the Soka Gakkai, with its commitment to social justice and its egalitarian approach, has become a role model, not only for other schools of Buddhism, but for other religions as well. Readers will be inspired by the struggles and triumphs of the Soka Gakkai’s three founding presidents—individuals who staked their lives on the teachings of the Lotus Sutra and the extraordinary power of those teachings to help people become happy.

    Juergensmeyer explores the 1993 World Trade Center explosion, Hamas suicide bombings, the Tokyo subway nerve gas attack, and the killing of abortion clinic doctors in the United States. His personal interviews with 1993 World Trade Center bomber Mahmud Abouhalima, Christian Right activist Mike Bray, Hamas leaders Sheik Yassin and Abdul Azis Rantisi, and Sikh political leader Simranjit Singh Mann, among others, take us into the mindset of those who perpetrate and support violence in the name of religion.

    Here, Chögyam Trungpa discusses bardo in a very different sense: as the peak experience of any given moment. Our experience of the present moment is always colored by one of six psychological states: the god realm (bliss), the jealous god realm (jealousy and lust for entertainment), the human realm (passion and desire), the animal realm (ignorance), the hungry ghost realm (poverty and possessiveness), and the hell realm (aggression and hatred). In relating these realms to the six traditional Buddhist bardo experiences, Trungpa provides an insightful look at the "madness" of our familiar psychological patterns and shows how they present an opportunity to transmute daily experience into freedom.

    This phenomenally diverse tradition includes not only frescoes, relief carvings, colossal statues, silk embroideries and bronze ritual objects but also rock-cut shrines with a thousand Buddhas, the glorious stupas of South-East Asia and the pagodas of the Far East, the massive "mandala in stone" of Borobudur in Java and entire 13th-century temple complexes at Angkor in Cambodia. The author describes all the Buddhist schools and cultures, and explains their imagery, from Tibetan cosmic diagrams and Korean folk art to early Sri Lankan sites and Japanese Zen gardens.

    Do that, and the whole world becomes your teacher, you wake up to the sacredness of every aspect of existence, and compassion for others arises without even thinking about it. It's indeed just that simple, says Zen teacher Ezra Bayda, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's easy—especially when being present brings us up against the painful parts of life. Bayda provides a wealth of practical advice for making difficult experiences a valued part of the path and for making mindulness a daily habit. He breaks practice down into three phases:    •  The Me Phase, in which we uncover our most basic and tightly-clung-to beliefs about ourselves, observe our emotions, and become intimate with our fears    •  Being Awareness, in which we cultivate a larger sense of what life is, transforming our limited experience into a more spacious sense of being    •  Being Kindness, in which we learn to connect with the love that is our true nature, and learn to live from that place of kindness and compassion

    Evil stalks us now in disembodied spirits; immortal wraiths once clothed in flesh when angel and women bred; spirits released from their fleshly prisons when their bodies were destroyed for drinking the blood of men. Evil also lives inside of the common man; set free when pride kills reason and eats integrity whole. There is evil that entraps us and evil that tugs from within. But neither have control until we choose to relent. Evil is a choice of action, of thoughts entertained too long, of arrogance pushing aside the last vestiges of compassion. Evil resides within the problem of choice. What is evil? Could it be as simple as pernicious selfishness? Could it be the drive for immediate gratification without regard for others? Man's life is limited; one hundred years or less. But, the souls of angel and watcher are eternal. Consider how much evil can be wrought through the millennia of immediate gratification on an eternal scale. By contrasting and comparing ancient texts such as Enoch, Jasher, Jubilees, the Bible, and various others containing stories of the creation of angels, demons, and man, a full and panoramic history of evil is produced. In this history the startling revelation of the descent of man and angels, and the evolution of evil on earth is clearly revealed.