Kategoria BISAC: Religion >> Buddhism - History

Since Trungpa Rinpoche's death in 1987, many people have talked about the need for a book of photographs of his life. Now, finally, it's here: a book of 240 black-and-white photographs taken from 1972 to 1982 at Karme-Choling, Vermont, and Boulder, Colorado. Thank you, Bob Of the many great photographic images of Trungpa Rinpoche, Del Tredici's black-and-whites stand out. Some are iconic shots that we all know and love. Others have rarely been seen. TRUNGPA PHOTOGRAPHS is a fulsome collation of Del Tredici's work, a feast for the eyes, for Trungpa's students, and for the world at large....

The Return of the Buddha traces the development of Buddhist archaeology in colonial India, examines its impact on the reconstruction of India's Buddhist past, and the making of a public and academic discourse around these archaeological discoveries.

The book discusses the role of the state and modern Buddhist institutions in the reconstitution of national heritage through promulgation of laws for the protection of Buddhist monuments, acquiring of land around the sites, restoration of edifices, and organization of the display and dissemination of relics. It...

Discover the heart of the Buddha's teachings in this new and beautiful translation of Gampopa's classic guidebook.

Ornament of Precious Liberation is a spiritual and literary treasure of Tibetan Buddhism and of the Kagyu lineage in particular. Laying out step-by-step the path to buddhahood that is open to us all, to read Gampopa's text is like receiving the teachings directly from the master himself. It is a quintessential guide to enlightenment that students will return to...

"No matter how hard the past, you can always begin again." - Buddha

An ancient and deeply revered practice, Buddhism is even more popular now than it has been in decades. The secret behind its steady rise is due in part to the plethora of benefits Buddhism reaps upon those who practice it and apply its teachings to their lives. Through mindfulness and meditation, Buddhism injects peace and clarity into the minds and lives of those who dedicate themselves to it. Those wonderful benefits can be a part of your life as well through the careful study of its...

These sources explore in detail medical topics ranging from the development of fetal anatomy in the womb to nursing, hospice,...

Buddhists across Asia have often aspired to die with a clear and focused mind, as the historical Buddha himself is said to have done. This book explores how the ideal of dying with right mindfulness was appropriated, disseminated, and transformed in premodern Japan, focusing on the late tenth through early fourteenth centuries. By concentrating one's thoughts on the Buddha in one's last moments, it was said even an ignorant and sinful person could escape the cycle of deluded rebirth and achieve birth in a buddha's pure land, where liberation would be assured. Conversely, the slightest...

Ritualized Writing takes readers into the fascinating world of Japanese Buddhist manuscript cultures. Using archival sources that have received scant attention in English, primarily documents from an eighth-century Japanese scriptorium and colophons from sutra manuscripts, Bryan D. Lowe uncovers the ways in which the transcription of Buddhist scripture was a highly ritualized endeavor. He takes a ground-level approach by emphasizing the activities and beliefs of a wide range of individuals, including scribes, provincial patrons, and royals, to reassess the meaning of scripture and...

Behaving Badly in Early and Medieval China presents a rogues' gallery of treacherous regicides, impious monks, cutthroat underlings, ill-bred offspring, and disloyal officials. It plumbs the dark matter of the human condition, placing front and center transgressive individuals and groups traditionally demonized by Confucian annalists and largely shunned by modern scholars. The work endeavors to apprehend the actions and motivations of these men and women, whose conduct deviated from normative social, cultural, and religious expectations.

Early chapters examine how core Confucian...

Until its recent political thaw, Burma was closed to most foreign researchers, and fieldwork-based research was rare. In The Traffic in Hierarchy, one of the few such works to appear in recent years, author Ward Keeler combines close ethnographic attention to life in a Buddhist monastery with a broad analysis of Burman gender ideology. The result is a thought-provoking analysis of Burmese social relations both within and beyond a monastery's walls.

Keeler shows that the roles individuals choose in Burman society entail inevitable trade-offs in privileges and prestige. A man who...

In this first serious study of Hanshan ("Cold Mountain"), Paul Rouzer discusses some seventy poems of the iconic Chinese poet who lived sometime during the Tang dynasty (618-907). Hanshan's poems gained a large readership in English-speaking countries following the publication of Jack Kerouac's novel The Dharma Bums (1958) and Gary Snyder's translations (which began to appear that same year), and they have been translated into English more than any other body of Chinese verse.

Rouzer investigates how Buddhism defined the way that believers may have read Hanshan in premodern...

Everyone has a story that can enlighten if told from the right perspective. My story is of a search for peace of mind through a mental illness that began in childhood and continued most of my adult life. The spiritual conflicts of the Christian beliefs left me with despair when I was an adolescent and into my adulthood. In my case, I could not divorce the spiritual from the mental. To me, hell was here on earth as I went in and out of mental institutions, even making attempts to end the torment by ending my life. A very wise doctor pointed the way to Buddhism, which has a view of reality...