New World Dharma
New World Dharma

Author: Trevor Carolan

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 2016-03-16

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 1438459831

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Interviews and profiles of spiritual and cultural figures influenced by Buddhism. Based on Trevor Carolan’s interviews, profiles, and essays from the past twenty years, this book offers a fascinating and intimate look at many of the Buddhist (and Buddhist-inspired) spiritual and cultural leaders who have shaped our time. Drawn from the global mosaic of the arts and humanities, environmentalism, and governance, Carolan’s collaborators include Buddhist teachers, poets, writers, activists, and even a politician. Readers will encounter Red Pine, Maxine Hong Kingston, Gary Snyder, Robert Aitken-Roshi, Jerry Brown, the Dalai Lama, Allen Ginsberg, along with many others. They explore engaged practice, East-West ethics, the role of dharma-influenced literature, Beat literature, social and political activism, and more. A rich resource for anyone interested in Buddhism, New World Dharma reveals a Buddhist consciousness responding to the challenge of rethinking what citizenship, community, and the sacred might mean in a global age. “Congratulations to Trevor Carolan for creating a wise and excellent sequence of essays, accurate historical information, and interviews which provide very useful insights and Buddhist time-tracks to both Buddhist and non-Buddhist readers and researchers.” — Ed Sanders, poet and historian “New World Dharma sheds light on a major development in literary and spiritual life by giving a personal, social, internal look into the lives of key Buddhist writers and leaders. In hindsight, it is clear that the influx of Asian spiritual teachings into the West instigated a cultural awakening of major proportion. This book provides a sense of how the fabric of this cultural awakening was woven, thread by thread, over several decades, as the people interviewed were all connected in some way.” — Fran Grace, coeditor of Meditation and the Classroom: Contemplative Pedagogy for Religious Studies

After Buddhism
After Buddhism

Author: Stephen Batchelor

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2015-10-28

Total Pages: 396

ISBN-13: 030021622X

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Some twenty-five centuries after the Buddha started teaching, his message continues to inspire people across the globe, including those living in predominantly secular societies. What does it mean to adapt religious practices to secular contexts? Stephen Batchelor, an internationally known author and teacher, is committed to a secularized version of the Buddha’s teachings. The time has come, he feels, to articulate a coherent ethical, contemplative, and philosophical vision of Buddhism for our age. After Buddhism, the culmination of four decades of study and practice in the Tibetan, Zen, and Theravada traditions, is his attempt to set the record straight about who the Buddha was and what he was trying to teach. Combining critical readings of the earliest canonical texts with narrative accounts of five members of the Buddha’s inner circle, Batchelor depicts the Buddha as a pragmatic ethicist rather than a dogmatic metaphysician. He envisions Buddhism as a constantly evolving culture of awakening whose long survival is due to its capacity to reinvent itself and interact creatively with each society it encounters. This original and provocative book presents a new framework for understanding the remarkable spread of Buddhism in today’s globalized world. It also reminds us of what was so startling about the Buddha’s vision of human flourishing.

The Dharma in Difficult Times
The Dharma in Difficult Times

Author: Stephen Cope

Publisher: Hay House, Inc

Published: 2022-01-11

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 1401957277

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The sequel to the bestseller The Great Work of Your Life shows us the way through our darkest times to our truest calling. How do we make sense of our lives when our world seems to be falling apart? This beautifully written guide from scholar and teacher Stephen Cope shows that crises don’t have to derail us from our purpose—they can actually help us to find our purpose and step forward as our best selves. In this sequel to his best-loved book, The Great Work of Your Life, Cope again takes the ancient yogic text the Bhagavad Gita—the epic narrative of the warrior Arjuna’s odyssey of self-discovery—as a roadmap for our journey to our own true calling. Then he builds on that foundation using the stories and teachings of famous figures, as well as stories of ordinary people and his own rich personal experience. Along the way, we find striking examples for finding meaning and purpose in our lives: Gandhi shows how to tap our spiritual resources and listen for our inner voice Sojourner Truth and Henry David Thoreau inspire us to seek out the unmistakable signs of dharma in the midst of chaos Marian Anderson and Ruby Sales shed light on dharma’s mystic power and how we learn to trust in it And more In the spirit of Pema Chödrön’s When Things Fall Apart, this book is required reading when you find yourself forging a path through crisis—or seeking a way through your darkest times to your truest self.

Secular Buddhism
Secular Buddhism

Author: Stephen Batchelor

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2017-02-21

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 0300227582

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An essential collection of Stephen Batchelor’s most probing and important work on secular Buddhism As the practice of mindfulness permeates mainstream Western culture, more and more people are engaging in a traditional form of Buddhist meditation. However, many of these people have little interest in the religious aspects of Buddhism, and the practice occurs within secular contexts such as hospitals, schools, and the workplace. Is it possible to recover from the Buddhist teachings a vision of human flourishing that is secular rather than religious without compromising the integrity of the tradition? Is there an ethical framework that can underpin and contextualize these practices in a rapidly changing world? In this collected volume of Stephen Batchelor’s writings on these themes, he explores the complex implications of Buddhism’s secularization. Ranging widely—from reincarnation, religious belief, and agnosticism to the role of the arts in Buddhist practice—he offers a detailed picture of contemporary Buddhism and its attempt to find a voice in the modern world.

The Dharma Bum’s Guide to Western Literature
The Dharma Bum’s Guide to Western Literature

Author: Dean Sluyter

Publisher: New World Library

Published: 2022-03-29

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 1608687708

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HOW THE LITERATURE WE LOVE CONVEYS THE AWAKENING WE SEEK Suppose we could read Hemingway as haiku . . . learn mindfulness from Virginia Woolf and liberation from Frederick Douglass . . . see Dickinson and Whitman as buddhas of poetry, and Huck Finn and Gatsby as seekers of the infinite . . . discover enlightenment teachings in Macbeth, The Catcher in the Rye, Moby-Dick, and The Bluest Eye. Some of us were lucky enough to have one passionate, funny, inspiring English teacher who helped us fall in love with books. Add a lifetime of teaching Dharma — authentic, traditional approaches to meditation and awakening — and you get award-winning author Dean Sluyter. With droll humor and irreverent wisdom, he unpacks the Dharma of more than twenty major writers, from William Blake to Dr. Seuss, inspiring readers to deepen their own spiritual life and see literature in a fresh, new way: as a path of awakening.

An End to Suffering
An End to Suffering

Author: Pankaj Mishra

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2010-08-24

Total Pages: 433

ISBN-13: 1429933631

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An End to Suffering is a deeply original and provocative book about the Buddha's life and his influence throughout history, told in the form of the author's search to understand the Buddha's relevance in a world where class oppression and religious violence are rife, and where poverty and terrorism cast a long, constant shadow. Mishra describes his restless journeys into India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, among Islamists and the emerging Hindu middle class, looking for this most enigmatic of religious figures, exploring the myths and places of the Buddha's life, and discussing Western explorers' "discovery" of Buddhism in the nineteenth century. He also considers the impact of Buddhist ideas on such modern politicians as Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. As he reflects on his travels and on his own past, Mishra shows how the Buddha wrestled with problems of personal identity, alienation, and suffering in his own, no less bewildering, times. In the process Mishra discovers the living meaning of the Buddha's teaching, in the world and for himself. The result is the most three-dimensional, convincing book on the Buddha that we have.

Standing at the Edge
Standing at the Edge

Author: Joan Halifax

Publisher:

Published: 2018-05

Total Pages: 301

ISBN-13: 1250101344

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"[This book is] an ... examination of how we can respond to suffering, live our fullest lives, and remain open to the full spectrum of our human experience"--Amazon.com.