Author: Jack Kornfield
Publisher: Buddhist Publication Society
ISBN: 9552400422
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 346
Get Book Here
Book Description
This reprint of Living Buddhist Masters is one of the most valuable books in print on Theravada Buddhist practice, bringing to the reader the precise instructions of twelve great meditation masters, including Mahasi Sayadaw, Achaan Chah and U Ba Khin. With lucid introductory chapters and photos.
Author: Don Farber
Publisher: Motilal Banarsidass
ISBN: 8120842057
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 193
Get Book Here
Book Description
Renowned photographer Don Farber, one of the most important chroniclers of Buddhism today, brings the face and the spirit of contemporary Tibetan Buddhism alive with this remarkable book. Portraits of Tibetan Buddhist Masters―a collection of superb color photographs presented with brief biographies and teachings from each master―is a vibrant work, a testament to the compassion and wisdom that lies at the heart of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. Farber felt compelled to record the last of the living Buddhist masters who received their training in Tibet and then fled the country following the invasion by China, as well as other masters who survived many years of imprisonment during the Cultural Revolution. He has worked with a sense of urgency to photograph and interview these extraordinary beings who have been the custodians of this endangered Buddhist tradition. His collection of portraits also includes some of the bright lights of Tibetan Buddhism, the younger masters who will carry the tradition into the future. As a photographic archive of Tibetan Buddhist masters, this book plays an important role in preserving Tibetan culture, in all its richness and complexity, through the words and faces of its esteemed masters.
Author: Thich Nhat Hanh
Publisher: Orbis Books
ISBN: 1608332543
Category : Buddhism
Languages : en
Pages : 177
Get Book Here
Book Description
Drawn from more than twenty of the books of Thich Nhat Hanh, these are the essential writings of one of the most popular spiritual writers of today. Thought-provoking and inspiring, this selection is aimed at the mind, body and spirit.-- Provided by publisher.
Author: Kelsang Gyatso
Publisher: Tharpa Publications US
ISBN: 1616060069
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 450
Get Book Here
Book Description
Based on teachings from the Kadampa Buddhist Tradition, Modern Buddhism is a special presentation that communicates the essence of the entire path to liberation and enlightenment in a way that is easy to understand and put into practice.
Author:
Publisher: Inner Traditions
ISBN: 9780892817849
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 208
Get Book Here
Book Description
A beautifully illustrated collection of the stories of the Mahasiddhas, the magicians and saints who founded the lineages of the Tantric tradition. A highly readable translation of legends from the Tibetan oral tradition. Recounts stories of the masters who embodied various paradigms for psychic and spiritual awakening. There is no better illustration of the nature of Tantric Buddhism than the lives of the masters who founded it. Extraordinary men and women who attained enlightenment and magical powers by disregarding convention and penetrating to the core of life, the Mahasiddhas show us a way through human suffering into a spontaneous and free state of oneness with the divine. Keith Dowman's highly readable translation of these legends from Tibetan oral tradition is enhanced by the beautifully realized illustrations of the Tantric saints by artist Robert Beer.
Author: Alicia Turner
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824847911
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 242
Get Book Here
Book Description
Saving Buddhism explores the dissonance between the goals of the colonial state and the Buddhist worldview that animated Burmese Buddhism at the turn of the twentieth century. For many Burmese, the salient and ordering discourse was not nation or modernity but sāsana, the life of the Buddha’s teachings. Burmese Buddhists interpreted the political and social changes between 1890 and 1920 as signs that the Buddha’s sāsana was deteriorating. This fear of decline drove waves of activity and organizing to prevent the loss of the Buddha’s teachings. Burmese set out to save Buddhism, but achieved much more: they took advantage of the indeterminacy of the moment to challenge the colonial frameworks that were beginning to shape their world. Author Alicia Turner has examined thousands of rarely used sources-- newspapers and Buddhist journals, donation lists, and colonial reports—to trace three discourses set in motion by the colonial encounter: the evolving understanding of sāsana as an orienting framework for change, the adaptive modes of identity made possible in the moral community, and the ongoing definition of religion as a site of conflict and negotiation of autonomy. Beginning from an understanding that defining and redefining the boundaries of religion operated as a key technique of colonial power—shaping subjects through European categories and authorizing projects of colonial governmentality—she explores how Burmese Buddhists became actively engaged in defining and inflecting religion to shape their colonial situation and forward their own local projects. Saving Buddhism intervenes not just in scholarly conversations about religion and colonialism, but in theoretical work in religious studies on the categories of “religion” and “secular.” It contributes to ongoing studies of colonialism, nation, and identity in Southeast Asian studies by working to denaturalize nationalist histories. It also engages conversations on millennialism and the construction of identity in Buddhist studies by tracing the fluid nature of sāsana as a discourse. The layers of Buddhist history that emerge challenge us to see multiple modes of identity in colonial modernity and offer insights into the instabilities of categories we too often take for granted.
Author: Kamala Tiyavanich
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0861715365
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 306
Get Book Here
Book Description
A preacher must have common sense, knowing how to turn everyday life experience into Dharma lessons, and assess an audience to maximize communications with them. "Sons of the Buddha" shows how three boys evolved into remarkable exponents of this ideal. Filled with lively anecdotes and illustrations, and brimming with local color, the book shows how each worked successfully to change moral attitudes and Dharma practices, restore Buddhism's social dimension, bridge the divide between laypeople and monastics, and champion tolerance toward other religions.
Author: Holly Gayley
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231542755
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 415
Get Book Here
Book Description
Love Letters from Golok chronicles the courtship between two Buddhist tantric masters, Tāre Lhamo (1938–2002) and Namtrul Rinpoche (1944–2011), and their passion for reinvigorating Buddhism in eastern Tibet during the post-Mao era. In fifty-six letters exchanged from 1978 to 1980, Tāre Lhamo and Namtrul Rinpoche envisioned a shared destiny to "heal the damage" done to Buddhism during the years leading up to and including the Cultural Revolution. Holly Gayley retrieves the personal and prophetic dimensions of their courtship and its consummation in a twenty-year religious career that informs issues of gender and agency in Buddhism, cultural preservation among Tibetan communities, and alternative histories for minorities in China. The correspondence between Tare Lhamo and Namtrul Rinpoche is the first collection of "love letters" to come to light in Tibetan literature. Blending tantric imagery with poetic and folk song styles, their letters have a fresh vernacular tone comparable to the love songs of the Sixth Dalai Lama, but with an eastern Tibetan flavor. Gayley reads these letters against hagiographic writings about the couple, supplemented by field research, to illuminate representational strategies that serve to narrate cultural trauma in a redemptive key, quite unlike Chinese scar literature or the testimonials of exile Tibetans. With special attention to Tare Lhamo's role as a tantric heroine and her hagiographic fusion with Namtrul Rinpoche, Gayley vividly shows how Buddhist masters have adapted Tibetan literary genres to share private intimacies and address contemporary social concerns.
Author: Jeffrey Samuels
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824858581
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 241
Get Book Here
Book Description
This book introduces contemporary Buddhists from across Asia and from various walks of life. Eschewing traditional hagiographies, the editors have collected sixty-six profiles of individuals who would be excluded from most Buddhist histories and ethnographies. In addition to monks and nuns, readers will encounter artists, psychologists, social workers, part-time priests, healers, and librarians as well as charlatans, hucksters, profiteers, and rabble-rousers—all whose lives reflect changes in modern Buddhism even as they themselves shape the course of these changes. The editors and contributors are fundamentally concerned with how individual Buddhists make meaning and display this understanding to others. Some practitioners profiled look to the past, lamenting the transformations Buddhism has undergone in recent times, while others embrace these. Some have adopted a “new asceticism,” while others are eager to explore different religious traditions as they think about their own ways of being Buddhist. Arranging the profiles according to these themes—looking backward, forward, inward, and outward—reveals the value of studying individual Buddhists and their idiosyncratic religious backgrounds and attitudes, thus highlighting the diversity of approaches to the practice and study of Buddhism in Asia today. Students and teachers will welcome sections on further readings and additional tables of contents that organize the profiles thematically, as well as by tradition (Theravada, Mahayana, Vajrayana), region, and country.
Author: Steven Heine
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195146980
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 298
Get Book Here
Book Description
The history of Buddhism has been characterized by an ongoing tension between attempts to preserve traditional ideals and modes of practice and the need to adapt to changing cultural conditions. Many developments in Buddhist history, such as the infusion of esoteric rituals, the rise of devotionalism and lay movements, and the assimilation of warrior practices, reflect the impact of widespread social changes on traditional religious structures. At the same time, Buddhism has been able to maintain its doctrinal purity to a remarkable degree. This volume explores how traditional Buddhist communities have responded to the challenges of modernity, such as science and technology, colonialism, and globalization. Editors Steven Heine and Charles S. Prebish have commissioned ten essays by leading scholars, each examining a particular traditional Buddhist school in its cultural context. The essays consider how the encounter with modernity has impacted the disciplinary, textual, ritual, devotional, practical, and socio-political traditions of Buddhist thought throughout Asia. Taken together, these essays reveal the diversity and vitality of contemporary Buddhism and offer a wide-ranging look at the way Buddhism interacts with the modern world.
