Hospice chaplain Garnette Arledge has helped hundreds of people say “good-bye” to loved ones who are about to pass away. In this unique book, she explains how to make the most of this period of passing, which she refers to as “Angel’s Eve.” The author begins by exploring your understanding of death. She then offers spiritual support by showing how Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, and Hinduism provide healing perspectives on dying. She also includes suggested activities to help make the most of your time together.
Somebody’s Listening is the awe-inspiring true story of a seeker’s mystical journey of awakening and fulfillment. This enlightening journey traces a long arc from a revealing California childhood in the fifties through the sixties and on to adulthood, when a decades-long spiritual journey begins under the tutelage of a Chinese Taoist-Buddhist priest in the summer of 1980. A truly auspicious and mystical event happens that summer, the first of many illuminating experiences during the long apprenticeship. Written with grace and expansion, this book brings the reader along a journey of inconceivable wonder, filled with spiritual insights, practical guidelines, and revelatory realizations that are both current and ancient. Somebody’s Listening is spiritual nourishment, intended to inspire the cultivation of spiritual values in daily life through Taoist and Buddhist principles and practice and to bring awareness of something greater than ourselves in the hopes all might find peace.
Buddhism or Buddhisms? By the time they move on to Buddhism in Japan, many students who have studied its origins in India ask whether this is in fact the same religion, so different can they appear. In Buddhisms: An Introduction, Professor John S. Strong provides an overview of the Buddhist tradition in all its different forms around the world. Beginning at the modern day temples of Lumbini, where the Buddha was born, Strong takes us through the life of the Buddha and a study of Buddhist Doctrine, revealing how Buddhism has changed just as it has stayed the same. Finally, Strong examines the nature of Buddhist community life and its development today in the very different environments of Thailand, Japan, and Tibet. Enriched by the author’s own insights gathered over forty years, Buddhisms never loses sight of the personal experience amidst the wide-scope of its subject. Clear in its explanations, replete with tables and suggestions for further reading, this is an essential new work that makes original contributions to the study of this 2,500 year-old religion.
On a peaceful summer day in 1952, ten monks on horseback arrived at a traditional nomad tent in northeastern Tibet where they offered the parents of a precocious toddler their white handloomed scarves and congratulations for having given birth to a holy child—and future spiritual leader. Surviving the Dragon is the remarkable life story of Arjia Rinpoche, who was ordained as a reincarnate lama at the age of two and fled Tibet 46 years later. In his gripping memoir, Rinpoche relates the story of having been abandoned in his monastery as a young boy after witnessing the torture and arrest of his monastery family. In the years to come, Rinpoche survived under harsh Chinese rule, as he was forced into hard labor and endured continual public humiliation as part of Mao's Communist "reeducation." By turns moving, suspenseful, historical, and spiritual, Rinpoche's unique experiences provide a rare window into a tumultuous period of Chinese history and offer readers an uncommon glimpse inside a Buddhist monastery in Tibet.
Compiled in the fifteenth century, Mind Training: The Great Collection is the earliest anthology of a special genre of Tibetan literature known as "mind training," or lojong in Tibetan. The principal focus of these texts is the systematic cultivation of such altruistic thoughts and emotions as compassion, love, forbearance, and perseverance. The mind-training teachings are highly revered by the Tibetan people for their pragmatism and down-to-earth advice on coping with the various challenges and hardships that unavoidably characterize everyday human existence. The volume contains forty-four individual texts, including the most important works of the mind training cycle, such as Serlingpa's well-known Leveling Out All Preconceptions, Atisha's Bodhisattva's Jewel Garland, Langri Thangpa's Eight Verses on Training the Mind, and Chekawa's Seven-Point Mind Training together with the earliest commentaries on these seminal texts. An accurate and lyrical translation of these texts, many of which are in metered verse, marks an important contribution to the world's literary heritage, enriching its spiritual resources.