Buddhist Religion

Sylvia Boorstein—known by friends and colleagues as a "Jewish grandmother bodhisattva"—is highly skilled in making the universal wisdom of traditional Buddhist teachings available to all. Using delightful and deceptively powerful stories from everyday experiences, Boorstein demystifies spirituality, charts the path to happiness through the Buddha's basic teachings, and presents the means to develop a realistic course toward wisdom and compassion. This wonderfully engaging guide to Buddhism is full of humor, love, and memorable insights.

Deciding that her life was insufficiently grounded in real-world experience, the author, a Quaker reared as a Catholic, embarked on a year of tending sheep. In this often hilarious book, she describes her time in the barn as well as an extended visit to a Buddhist monastery in France.

Do you feel at home right now? Or do you sense a hovering anxiety or uncertainty, an underlying unease that makes you feel just a bit uncomfortable, a bit distracted and disconnected from those around you? In The Road Home, Ethan Nichtern, a senior teacher in the Shambhala Buddhist tradition, investigates the journey each of us takes to find where we belong.

Of all the Buddhist meditations, lovingkindness is thought to have the most immediate effect on shifting the negative thought patterns of your mind into positive ones. No matter the degree you allow negative thought patterns to dominate your thinking, supplanting them with lovingkindness will improve your life experience.

Are you tired of going through the motions and dealing with the same old problems? Regardless of your circumstances, it is important to know just one thing: you can change your life for the better. A spiritual approach to life in the philosophy of Buddhism is practiced in the East and by millions of people in the West. The wisdom of the Buddha, explained through the Four Noble Truths and Eightfold Path provides insight into the mysticism of the karmic cycle of life, death and rebirth.

As a Buddhist monk and psychotherapist with over 10 years of experience in the mental health field, Nick Keomahavong has packaged ancient wisdom into a simple, relatable, and - above all - practical guide to shift your life in 24 hours. Whether you are looking to deepen your existing spiritual practice, break out of the monotony of a stale, daily routine, or undergo a full-on life-reset, The Buddhist Cleanse will help you instigate the change you seek.

If you are reading this, then you’re likely plagued with anxiety. The good news is that you don’t have to be. You can live a life without so much anxiety and stress. You can train the mind to feel contentment, peace and joy - even in the midst of difficult circumstances. Best-selling author and long-time Buddhist meditation teacher Lodro Rinzler shows us how to work with the mind so that we don’t hold ourselves in a state of stress and learn to relax into and appreciate our world once more.

The Venerable Ayya Khema was beloved for her crystal-clear presentation, the extremely practical guidance she always gave, and the open-hearted quality of her teachings. In The Path to Peace, she presents a complete course in the active and intentional process to cultivate peace through metta, unconditional love. Peace is the sum of many parts, namely the fifteen wholesome qualities the Buddha himself noted in the Metta Sutta, including usefulness, mildness, humility, contentment, receptivity, and others.

At the request of her students, Lama Shenpen Hookham tells her fascinating and unconventional life story in the Keeping the Dalai Lama Waiting & Other Stories. The lively, anecdotal autobiography documents her extraordinary spiritual journey and her encounters with her teachers that are deeply profound, moving and often humorous. Lama Shenpen shares first-hand experience of how differing cultures and ways of thinking overlap and collide with unexpected consequences.

On the spiritual path we speak of enlightenment. But how do we reconcile the idea of enlightenment with what we see when we look in the mirror - when insecurities, doubts, and self-centered tendencies arise in our minds? Dzigar Kongtrül suggests that we need not feel "doomed" when these experiences surface. In fact, such experiences are not a problem if we are able to simply let them arise without judging them or investing them with so much meaning. This approach to experience is what Kongtrül calls self-reflection.

In this new collection of 33 stories, one of Korea's foremost Seon (Zen) masters introduces the richness and depth of Korea's Buddhist tradition. With humor and insight, Seon Master Daehaeng shows us our inherent potential and demonstrates how we can face the challenges of life with wisdom and vigor.

If you’ve ever been interested in why sacred geometry continues to show up in many religions throughout history, then this book is for you. You’ll uncover the mysteries about our holographic reality, and that everyone is traveling between parallel realities in their Merkabah. Knowledge of Buddhist Mandalas provides insight into the ultimate truth…you are a masterpiece in the making.

The spiritual exercises and Buddhist stories for a calming attunement to sleep serve to slow down and promote inner serenity. It is well known that sleep helps us to relax. Buddhist nuns and Buddhist monks welcome you warmly and accompany you on a meditation path through a Buddhist monastery. A pleasant participation in different, inspiring meditations and in the various relaxation exercises, which are practiced only in the mental imagination, can touch an inner space. Buddhist stories that invite you to smile are also calming relaxation impulses.

Using step by step instructions, the author illustrates how to be fully present in the moment without clinging to joy or resisting sorrow. This opens the door to a kind of wellness that goes beyond circumstances. Actively engaging life as it is in this fashion holds the potential for awakening to a peace and well-being that are not dependent on whether a particular experience is joyful or sorrowful.

The sacred arts play an essential, intrinsic role in Tibetan Buddhist practice. Here, one of the great practitioners and master artists of our time presents a guide to the Tibetan Buddhist path, from preliminary practices through enlightenment, from the artist's perspective. With profound wisdom, he shows how visual representations of the sacred in paintings, sculptures, mandalas, and stupas can be an essential support to practice throughout the path.

In Modern Mindfulness, Rohan Gunatillake argues that to lead more mindful, calm, and happy lives, switching off is the last thing we need to do. Instead he gives listeners ideas, principles, and techniques to bring awareness, composure, and kindness to whatever they are doing. Filled with over 60 practical exercises, the author's mobile mindfulness approach gives the benefits of meditation to even the busiest of lives.

Do you want to live a happier and more peaceful life? When people hear the word "Buddhism", they automatically assume that it refers to a religion. Anyone, regardless of religious affiliation, can incorporate Buddhist principles into their daily lives without having to give up their own. More than 300 million people around the world are practicing Buddhism, a simple and practical philosophy that can improve your life and help you find inner peace and happiness. Buddhism is a way of life based on a spiritual path that ultimately leads to enlightenment.

Observing an encounter between Catholic and Buddhist monks in 1996 at the Abbey of Gethsemani, near where he grew up in rural Kentucky, Fenton Johnson found himself unable to make the sign of the cross. His distance from his childhood faith had become so great - he considered himself a rational, skeptical man - that he could not participate in this most basic ritual. Impelled by this troubling experience, Johnson began a search for the meaning of the spiritual life.

Here are the stories of those who have encountered and embraced the way of life called Shin Buddhism (or Jodo Shinshu). Starting from other religious traditions and backgrounds, the writers have “crossed over” to become part of the Shin Buddhist community in the U.S. and Canada. In powerful essays, they share personal experiences and explain how their paths found a new direction.

From the best-selling author of the biography of Shunryu Suzuki (Crooked Cucumber), comes a memoir and oral history of Tassajara—a monastery founded in 1967 by Shunryu Suzuki, abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center. Peopled like a Sixties film of Buddhist invasion, with hippies, dreamers, lovers, a wave of serious practitioners. Nyogen Senzaki, D.T. Suzuki, Alan Watts, Ruth Fuller Sasaki, Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, and of course Shunryu Suzuki and Richard Baker are all here. This is the story of what happened at and surrounding the founding of the first Zen monastery in the West.