In this introduction to the foundations of Buddhism, Rupert Gethin concentrates on the ideas and practices which constitute the common heritage of the different traditions of Buddhism Thervada, Tibetan, and Eastern which exist in the world today.
From the narrative of the story of the Buddha, through discussions of aspects such as textual traditions, the framework of the Four Noble Truths, the interaction between the monastic and lay ways of life, the cosmology of karma and rebirth, and the path of the bodhisattva, this books provides a stimulating introduction to Buddhism as a religion and way of life, which will also be of interest to those who are more familiar with the subject.
This edition offers a new translation of a selection of the Buddha's most important sayings reflecting the full variety of material: biography of the Buddha, narrative, myth, short sayings, philosophical discourse, instruction on morality, meditation, and the spiritual life. It provides an excellent introduction to Buddhist scripture. The first step toward a solid foundation in Buddhist thought!
These unique books, based on the curriculum of a popular course of the same name, were developed by Geshe Tashi Tsering, a Tibetan scholar renowned for his ability to render Buddhist teachings accessible and relevant to everyday life. Geshe Tashi Tsering's Foundation of Buddhist Thought courses are systematic introductions to Buddhist philosophy and practice. With this series of books drawn from his highly successful courses, his insights can now be enjoyed by a wide audience of both specialists and newcomers to the Buddhist tradition.
And given this milieu, the bare 'facts' of the Buddha's life as presented by tradition are historically unproblematic and inconsequential. The precise dates of the Buddha's life are uncertain. A widespread Buddhist tradition records that he was in his eightieth r4 The Buddha year when he died, and the dates for his life most widely quoted in modern published works are BCE. These dates are arrived at by, first, following a tradition, recorded in the Pali sources of 'southern' Buddhism, that the great Mauryan king, Asoka, was consecrated 2r8 years after the death of the Buddha, and, secondly, taking BCE as the year of Asoka's accession.
This is done on the basis of the Asokan rock-edict reference to rulers in the wider Hellenic world who can be dated from other ancient sources. But both the figure 2r8 and the accession of Asoka in BCE are problematic. In contrast to the southern 'long chronology', northern Buddhist Sanskrit sources.
U Moreover, as was first pointed out by Rhys Davids and more recently by Richard Gombrich, a time lapse of rather less than 2r8 years from the Buddha's death to Asoka's accession is suggested by the figures associated with the lineage of teachers found in a Pali source, namely an ancient Sri Lankan chronicle, the DipavaJ! The earliest Buddhist sources state that the future Buddha was born Siddhartha Gautama Pali Siddhattha Gotama , the son of a local chieftain-a riijan-in Kapilavastu Pali Kapilavatthu on what is now the Indian-Nepalese border.
He was thus a member of a relatively privileged and wealthy family, and enjoyed a comfortable upbringing. While the later Buddhist tradition, in recounting the story of his youth, certainly likes to dwell on the wealth of Siddhartha's family and the extravagance of his princely upbringing, there is something of a cultural misunderstanding involved in the notion that the Buddhist tradition presents the Buddha as born a royal prince, the son of a great king.
At some point he became disillusioned with his comfortable and privileged life; he became troubled by a sense of the suffering that, in the form of sickness, old age, and death, sooner or later awaited him and everyone else.
In the face of this, the pleasures he enjoyed seemed empty and of little value. So he left home and adopted the life of a wandering ascetic, a srama! Ja, to embark on a religious and spiritual quest.
He took instruction from various teachers; he practised extreme austerities as was the custom of some ascetics. Still he was not satisfied. Finally, seated in meditation beneath an asvattha tree on the banks of the Nairafijana in what is now the north Indian state of Bihar, he had an experience which affected him profoundly, convincing him that he had come to the end of his quest. While the historian can make no judgement on the nature of this experience, the Buddhist tradition apparently bearing witness to the Buddha's own understanding of his experience calls it bodhi or 'awakening' and characterizes it as involving the deepest understanding of the nature of suffering, its cause, its cessation, and the way leading to its cessation.
The Buddha devoted the rest of. In the course of his wanderings across the plains that flank the banks of the Ganges he gathered a considerable following and by the time of his death at about the age of So he had established a well-organized mendicant community which attracted considerable support from the wider population. His followers cremated his body and divided up the relics which were enshrined in a number of stupas which became revered shrines. That the subsequent Buddhist tradition is founded upon and inspired by the teaching activity of a charismatic individual who lived some centuries before the beginning of the Christian era can hardly be doubted.
In the words of the great Belgian scholar Etienne Lamotte, 'Buddhism cannot be explained unless we accept that it has its origin in the strong personality of its 16 The Buddha founder. Of course, as the Buddhist tradition tells it, the story of the life of the Buddha is not history nor meant to be. The whole story takes on a mythic and legendary character. A wealth of detail is brought in capable of being read metaphorically, allegorically, typologically, and symbolically.
Much of this detail is to modern sensibilities of a decidedly 'miraculous' and 'supernatural' kind. The story of the Buddha's life becomes not an account of the particular and individual circumstances of a man who, some 2, years ago, left home to become a wandering ascetic, but something universal, an archetype; it is the story of all those who have become buddhas in the past and all who will become buddhas in the future, and, in a sense, of all who follow the Buddhist path.
It is the story of the Buddhist path, a story that shows the way to a profound religious truth. Yet for all that, many of the details of his eady life given in the oldest sources remain evocative of some memory of events from a distant time.
If we persist in distinguishing and holding apart myth and history, we are in danger of missing the story's own sense of truth. Furthermore, the historian must recognize that he has virtually no strictly historical criteria for distinguishing between history and myth in the accounts of the life of the Buddha. And at that point he should perhaps remain silent and let the story speak for itself.
This narrative must be accounted one The Buddha I7 of the great stories of the world. Part of the common heritage of Buddhism, it is known throughout Asia wherever Buddhism has taken root. The core of this story and not a few of its details are already found in the Sutra and Vinaya collections of early Buddhist texts see next chapter. What follows is in effect the story of these twelve acts and most of the thirty features, told with a bias to how they are recounted in the early discourses of the Buddha and Pali sources, together with some comments aimed at providing a historical perspective on the development of the story.
The legend The Buddhist and general Indian world-view is that all sentient beings are subject to rebirth: all beings are born, live, die, and are reborn again and again in a variety of different circumstances.
This process knows no definite beginning and, ordinarily, no definite end. The being who becomes a buddha, like any other being, has known countless previous lives-as a human being, an animal, and a god. Here the bodhisattva Pali bodhisatta -the being intent on awakening-dwells awaiting the appropriate time to take a human birth and become a buddha. Long ago, in fact incalculable numbers of aeons ago, there lived an ascetic called Sumedha or Megha by some who encountered a former buddha, the Buddha DipaQlkara.
This meeting affected Sumedha in such a way that he too aspired to becoming a buddha. Nietzsche and Buddhist philosophy. Introduction Part I. Nihilism and Buddhism: 1. Nietzsche as Buddha 2. Nietzsche as anti-Buddha Part II.
Suffering: 3. Amor Fati and the affirmation of suffering 4. Nirvana and the cessation of … Expand. Inviting Buddha to Work. Buddhism may be considered one of the most fascinating mass ideologies we know. Different people review it in different ways.
Some see it as a religion, just like Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and … Expand. On the naturalization of karma and rebirth. Although Buddhism has become increasingly popular in the West, some vital concepts remain abstruse. Naturalistic Buddhism has arisen mainly as an attempt to demystify certain aspects of Buddhist … Expand. Of course, I do not mean to suggest by this that a Buddhist layman in Tokyo and a Buddhist laywoman in Bangkok, that a monk in Colombo and a nun in Lhasa, would all respond to questions on these topics precisely along the lines set out in the relevant chapters below.
None the less, it is not unreasonable nor, I think, is it to commit oneself to an essentialist view of Buddhism to suggest that, whatever the nature of the Buddhist terrain, one cannot dig much below the surface without coming across some trace of the patterns of thought and practice out- lined here, even if at different times and in different places the constructions built on their foundations present their own distinctive and peculiar aspects.
Moreover, the fact that those patterns of thought and practice are not immediately apparent does not of itself mean that they exert no influence. The principles of, say, Newtonian physics, Darwinian evolutionary theory, and Freudian psychology contribute to a world-viewthat is shared by many who have never read a word of what Newton, Darwin, or Freud wrote and would be hard pressed to explain in detail any of their ideas. I should, however, add that I have not entirely eschewed the general-survey approach; Chapter 9, on specifically Mahayana ideas, and especially Chapter IO, an overview of the history of the different traditions of Buddhism in Asia, are intended to give some indication of what I have not covered and provide some form of orientation for further study.
Apart from its simply allowing a more sustained account of some significant aspects of Buddhist thought and practice, there is a further reason why I think focusing on the common heritage as indicated above is appropriate at the introductory level: it affords a perspective on the development of Buddhist thought and prac- tice which calls into question what might be dubbed the standard 'textbook' view and is in fact more in tune with recent scholar- ship.
This textbook view tends to see the history of Buddhism in terms of a division into two major 'sects': the Theravada and the Mahayana. More specifically, according to this 'textbook' view, in origin the Mahayana was at once a popular religious protest against the elitist monasticism of early Buddhism and a philo- sophical refutation of its dead-end scholasticism; moreover,this religious protest and philosophical refutation rapidly all but marginalized earlier forms of Buddhism.
The research published in the last twenty years or so has increasingly made such a view of the development of Indian Buddhist thought and prac- tice untenable. The Mahayana did not originate as a clearly defined 'sect' and, far from being a popular lay movement, it seems increasingly likely that. Thus, instead of seeing Mahayana as simply superseding earlier forms of Buddhism in India, the approach adopted in the pre- sent volume is to try to focus on the common ground between the non-Mahayana and Mahayana in the formative phase of Indian Buddhist thought and practice, and by referring to both the Pali sources of Sri Lanka and the Sanskrit sources of north- ern India to present an outline of 'mainstream' Buddhist thought and practice as the foundations for developments in India and beyond.
Let me add here a few words on my specific approach to my material. In describing Buddhist thought and practice, my aim has been, in the first place, simply to act as spokesman for its principles, and to try to articulate those principles as Buddhist tradition itself has understood them. In the second place, I have tried to give some indication of and pass some comment on the critical and scholarly issues that have emerged in the modern aca- demic study of Buddhism over the last rso years or so.
Some might question the need for yet another introductory volume on Buddhism, yet as a teacher of introductory courses on Buddhism at a university I find myself somewhat dissatisfied with the available teaching materials.
Certainly there are avail- able a number of survey-type books ranging from short and sketchy to more moderate-sized treatments. In addition there are some solid introductions to various aspects of Buddhism -the social history of Theravada, Mahayana thought, Chinese Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhism-but if one looks for a volume giving a more focused account, reflecting recent scholarship, of what, for want of a better expression, one might refer to as the principles of 'mainstream' Buddhist thought and practice, there appears to be a gap.
It is hoped that the present work will go some way to filling that gap. Thus there is material here which, although basic from a Buddhist point of view, is only available in specialized books and articles.
I hope, then, that while the book is intended to be accessible to the nov- ice, there may also be something here for the elders of Buddhist studies. Peppe, digging into a mound on his estate at Pipdihwa just the Indian side of the Indian- Nepalese border, unearthed a soapstone vase some six inches in height with a brief inscription around its lid.
The inscription, written in the Brahmi script and dating from about the second century BCE, was in one of the ancient Indian dialects or Prakrits collectively referred to as Middle Indo-Aryan.
The precise inter- pretation of the inscription remains problematic, but it appears to claim that the vase is 'a receptacle of relics of the Blessed Buddha of the Sakyas'. Peppe was among the early excavators of ruined Buddhist stiipas or monumental burial mounds. Such stupas vary considerably in size. The largest were made to enshrine the relics of the Buddha himself or of Buddhist 'saints' or arhats Pali arahat , while smaller ones contained the remains of more ordinary men and women. Buddhism was, then, in origin an Indian phenomenon.
Beginning in the fifth cen- tury BCE, its teachings and institutions continued to flourish for some fifteen centuries on Indian soil, inspiring and moulding the intellectual, religious, and cultural life of India. Yet by around the close of the twelfth century Bud" dhist institutions had all but disappeared from India proper, and it is in the countries and cultures that lie beyond India that Buddhism flourishes today. He is Sakya-muni, 'the sage of the Sakyas', or as our inscription prefers to call him buddho bhagavii-'the Blessed Buddha', 'the Lord Buddha'.
So who, and indeed what, was the Lord Buddha? This is a quesc tion that might be answered in a number of different ways, a ques- tion about which both the Buddhist tradition and the historian have something to say.
This title is generally applied by the Buddhist tradition to a class of beings who are, from the perspective of ordinary humanity, extremely rare and quite extraordinary.
In contrast to these Buddhas or 'awakened ones' the mass of humanity; along with the other creatures and beings that constitute the world, are asleep-asleep in the sense that they pass through their lives never knowing and seeing the world 'as it is' yathii-bhutarrt.
As a con- sequence they suffer. A buddha on the other hand awakens to the knowledge of the world as it truly is and in so doing finds release from suffering. Moreover-and this is perhaps the great- est significance of a buddha for the rest of humanity, and indeed for all the beings who make up the universe-a buddha teaches. He teaches out of sympathy and compassion for the suffering of beings, for the benefit and welfare of all beings; he teaches in order to lead others to awaken to the understanding that brings final relief from suffering.
Let us for the moment consider the ques- tion not so much from the perspective of the Buddhist tradition as from the perspective of the historian. The Buddha and the Indian 'renouacer' tradition We can know very little of the historical Buddha with any degree of certainty. Yet within the bounds of reasonable historical probability we can form quite a clear picture of the kind of per- son the Buddha was and the main events of his life.
The oldest Buddhist sources, which provide us with a number of details con- cerning the person and life of the Buddha, date from the fourth or third century BCE. Unfortunately when we tum to the non- Buddhist sources of a similar date, namely the earliest texts of the Jain and brahmanical traditions, there is no explicit mention of the Buddha at all. This term means literally 'one who strives' and belongs to the technical vocabulary of Indian reli- gion, referring as it does to 'one who strives' religiously or spir- itually.
It points towards a particular tradition that in one way or another has been of great significance in Indian religious his- tory, be it Buddhist, Jain, or Hindu. Any quest for the historical Buddha must begin with the sramatJa tradition.
Collectively our sources may not allow us to write the early history of this move- a ment but they do enable us to say certain amount concerning its character. IO The Buddha The tradition is sometimes called the 'renouncer sarrmyiisin tradition'.
What we are concerned with here is the phenomenon of individuals' renouncing their normal role in society as a mem- ber of an extended 'household' in order to devote themselves to some form of religious or spiritual life. The 'renouncer' abandons conventional means of livelihood, such as farming or trade, and adopts instead the religious life as a means of livelihood.
That is, he becomes a religious mendicant dependent on alms. What our sources make clear is that by the fifth century BCE this phenom- enon was both widespread and varied. Thus while 'renouncers' had in common the fact. This is suggested by some of the terms that we find in the texts: in addition to 'one who strives' and 'renouncer', we fil. Three kinds of activity seem to have preoccupied these wan- derers and. First, there is the practice of austerities, such as going naked in all weathers, enduring all physical dis- comforts, fasting, or undertaking the vow to live like a cow or.
While some groups and indi- viduals seem to have combined all three activities, others favoured one at the expense of the others, and the line between th'e prac- tice of austerities and the practice of meditation may not always be clear: the practice of extreme austerity will certainly alter one's state of mind.
The existence of some of these different groups of ancient Indian wanderers and ascetics with their various practices and theories finds expression in Buddhist texts in a stock description of 'six teachers of other schools', who are each represented as expounding a particular teaching and practice.
Another list, with no details of the associated teachings and practices, gives ten types of renouncer. In fact two other ancient Indian traditions that were subsequently of some importance in the religious life of India the Ajivikas and the Jains find a place in both these ancient Buddhist lists; the Jain tradition, of course, survives to this day.
The brahmanical tradition It is generally thought that some time after the beginning of the second millennium BCE groups of a nomadic tribal people began to move south from ancient Iran, through the passes of the Hindu Kush and down into the plains of the Indus valley. The Aryas who moved into India were descendants of nomadic pastoralists who had occu- pied the grasslands of central Asia, some of whom similarly moved west into Europe.
Once in India the Aryas' cultural influence gradually spread southwards and eastwards across the plains of northern India. The coming of the Aryas into India did not bring political unity to northern India, but it did bring a certain ideology that constitutes one of the prin- cipal components of Indian culture. This Aryan vision of society was principally developed and articulated by a hereditary group within Aryan society known as briihmafJas or, in the Anglo-Indian spelling, brahmins. By the time of the Buddha, Vedic literature probably already comprised several different classes: the four collections saf!
Two aspects of the brahmanical vision are of particular im- portance, namely an understanding of society as reflecting a hierarchy of ritual 'purity', and a complex system of ritual and sacrifice. From the brahmanical perspective society comprises two groups: the Aryas and the non-Aryas. These three classes are termed 'twice born' dvija by virtue of the fact that traditionally male members undergo an initiation upanayana into a period of study of the Vedic tradition under the super- vision of a brahmin teacher; at the end of this period of study it is their duty to maintain the household sacrificial fires and, with the help ofbrahmins, carry out various sacrificial rituals in accord- ance with the prescriptions of Vedic tradition.
While it is important not to confuse these four classes varlJa and the countless castes jiiti oflater Indian society, it is none the less the ideology of the relat- ive ritual purity of the classes that underpins the medieval and.
The brahmins' hereditary ritual status empowered them to carry out certain ritual functions that members of other classes were excluded from, but at the time of the Buddha not all brahmins were full-time 'priests'. Precisely how brahmins related to the various groups of wandering ascetics is not clear.
To accept the brahmanical view of the world was to accept brahmanical authority as an aspect of the eternal structure of the universe and, as such, unassailable. Yet wandering ascetics threatened brahmanical supremacy by offer- ing rival visions of the world and society. On the other hand, within brahmanical circles we find the development of certain esoteric theories of the nature of the sacrificial ritual and philosophical views about the ultimate nature of man and his relationship to the universe at large.
These theories may to some extent have drawn on ideas developing amongst the groups of wandering ascetics; at the same time they may have substantially con- tributed to the development of the tradition of the wanderers itself, since it is clear that brahmin circles were an important recruit- ing ground for the various groups of wandering ascetics. Yet it seems clear that in certain respects the Buddhajs teachings were formulated as a response to certaih brahmanical teachings. And given this milieu, the bare 'facts' of the Buddha's life as presented by tradition are historically unproblematic and inconsequential.
The precise dates of the Buddha's life are uncertain. These dates are arrived at by, first, following a tradition, recorded in the Pali sources of 'southern' Buddhism, that the great Mauryan king, Asoka, was consecrated 2r8 years after the death of the Buddha, and, secondly, taking BCE as the year of Asoka's accession.
This is done on the basis of the Asokan rock-edict reference to rulers in the wider Hellenic world who can be dated from other an- cient sources. But both the figure 2r8 and the accession of Asoka in BCE are problematic. In contrast to the southern 'long chronology', northern Buddhist Sanskrit sources.
U Moreover, as was first pointed out by Rhys Davids and more recently by Richard Gombrich, a time lapse of rather less than 2r8 years from the Buddha's death to Asoka's accession is suggested by the figures associated with the lineage of teachers found in a Pali source, namely an ancient Sri Lankan chronicle, the DipavaJ! The earliest Buddhist sources state that the future Buddha was born Siddhartha Gautama Pali Siddhattha Gotama , the son of a local chieftain-a riijan-in Kapilavastu Pali Kapilavatthu on what is now the Indian-Nepalese border.
He was thus a mem- ber of a relatively privileged and wealthy family, and enjoyed a comfortable upbringing. While the later Buddhist tradition, in recounting the story of his youth, certainly likes to dwell on the wealth of Siddhartha's family and the extravagance of his princely upbringing, there is something of a cultural misunder- standing involved in the notion that the Buddhist tradition pre- sents the Buddha as born a royal prince, the son of a great king.
At some point he became disillusioned with his comfortable and privileged life; he became troubled by a sense of the suf- fering that, in the form of sickness, old age, and death, sooner or later awaited him and everyone else.
In the face of this, the pleasures he enjoyed seemed empty and of little value. So he left home and adopted the life of a wandering ascetic, a srama! Ja, to embark on a religious and spiritual quest. He took instruction from various teachers; he practised extreme austerities as was the custom of some ascetics. Still he was not satisfied. Finally, seated in meditation beneath an asvattha tree on the banks of the Nairafijana in what is now the north Indian state of Bihar, he had an experience which affected him profoundly, convin- cing him that he had come to the end of his quest.
While the historian can make no judgement on the nature of this experi- ence, the Buddhist tradition apparently bearing witness to the Buddha's own understanding of his experience calls it bodhi or 'awakening' and characterizes it as involving the deepest under- standing of the nature of suffering, its cause, its cessation, and the way leading to its cessation.
The Buddha devoted the rest of. In the course of his wanderings across the plains that flank the banks of the Ganges he gathered a considerable following and by the time of his death at about the age of So he had established a well-organized mendicant community which attracted considerable support from the wider population. His followers cremated his body and divided up the relics which were enshrined in a number of stupas which became revered shrines.
That the subsequent Buddhist tradition is founded upon and inspired by the teaching activity of a charismatic individual who lived some centuries before the beginning of the Christian era can hardly be doubted.
Of course, as the Buddhist tradition tells it, the story of the life of the Buddha is not history nor meant to be. The whole story takes on a mythic and legendary character.
A wealth of detail is brought in capable of being read metaphorically, allegorically, typologically, and symbolically. Much of this detail is to modern sensibilities of a decidedly 'miraculous' and 'supernatural' kind. The story of the Buddha's life becomes not an account of the particular and individual circumstances of a man who, some 2, years ago, left home to become a wandering ascetic, but something universal, an archetype; it is the story of all those who have become buddhas in the past and all who will become bud- dhas in the future, and, in a sense, of all who follow the Buddhist path.
It is the story of the Buddhist path, a story that shows the way to a profound religious truth. Yet for all that, many of the details of his eady life given in the oldest sources remain evocat- ive of some memory of events from a distant time. If we persist in distinguishing and holding apart myth and history, we are in danger of missing the story's own sense of truth. Furthermore, the historian must recognize that he has virtually no strictly his- torical criteria for distinguishing between history and myth in the accounts of the life of the Buddha.
And at that point he should perhaps remain silent and let the story speak for itself. Part of the common heritage of Buddhism, it is known throughout Asia wherever Buddhism has taken root. The core of this story and not a few of its details are already found in the Sutra and Vinaya collections of early Buddhist texts see next chapter. What follows is in effect the story of these twelve acts and most of the thirty features, told with a bias to how they are recounted in the early discourses of the Buddha and Pali sources, together with some comments aimed at providing a historical perspective on the development of the story.
The legend The Buddhist and general Indian world-view is that all sentient beings are subject to rebirth: all beings are born, live, die, and are reborn again and again in a variety of different circum- stances. This process knows no definite beginning and, ordinar- ily, no definite end. The being who becomes a buddha, like any other being, has known countless previous lives-as a human being, an animal, and a god. Here the bodhisattva Pali bodhisatta -the being intent on awakening-dwells awaiting the appropriate time to take a human birth and become a buddha.
Long ago, in fact incalculable numbers of aeons ago, there lived an ascetic called Sumedha or Megha by some who encountered a former buddha, the Buddha DipaQlkara. This meeting affected Sumedha in such a way that he too aspired to becoming a bud- dha. What impressed Sumedha was DipaQlkara's very presence and a sense of his infinite wisdom and compassion, such that he resolved that he would do whatever was necessary to cultivate and perfect these qualities in himself.
Sumedha thus set out on the path of the cultivation of the ten 'perfections': generosity, morality, desirelessness, vigour, wisdom, patience, truthfulness, resolve, loving kindness, and equanimity. In undertaking the cultivation of these perfections Sumedha became a bodhisattva, a being intent on and destined for buddhahood, and it is the life in which he becomes the Buddha Gautama some time in the fifth century BCE that represents the fruition of that distant aspira- tion.
Many jiitakas-'[tales] of the [previous] births [of the Bod- hisattva]'-recount how the Bodhisattva gradually developed the 'perfections'. The appearance of such a being in the world may not be unique, but is nevertheless a rare and special circumstance, for a buddha only appears in the world when the teachings of a previous buddha have been lost and when beings will be receptive to his message.
Maya carried the Bodhisattva in her womb for precisely ten lunar months. Then on the full moon of Vaisakha May , pass- ing by the Lumbini grove on her way to her home town, she was captivated by the beauty of the flowering siila trees and stepped down from her palanquin to walk amongst the trees in the grove. As she reached for a branch of a sala tree, which bent itself down to meet her hand, the pangs of birth came upon her.
Thus, 'while other women give birth sitting or lying down', the Bodhisattva's mother was delivered of her child while standing and holding on to the branch of a sala tree. There are a great many books now available describing the complex rituals and esoteric significance of the ancient practices of Buddhist tantra.
Understanding the many questions Westerners have upon first encountering tantra's colorful imagery and veiled language, Geshe Tsering gives straight talk about deities, initiations, mandalas, and the various stages of tantric development. He even goes through a simple tantric compassion practice written by the Dalai Lama, using it to unpack the building blocks common to all such visualization techniques.
Tantra is a fitting conclusion to the folksy and practical wisdom in the Foundation of Buddhist Thought series. This book explores a wide range of mindfulness and meditative practices and traditions across Buddhism.
It deepens contemporary understanding of mindfulness by examining its relationship with key Buddhist teachings, such as the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eight-Fold Path. In addition, the volume explores how traditional mindfulness can be more meaningfully incorporated into current psychological research and clinical practice with individuals and groups e.
Mindfulness of emptiness and the emptiness of mindfulness. Buddhist teachings that support the psychological principles in a mindfulness program. A practical contextualization and explanatory framework for mindfulness-based interventions. Mindfulness in an authentic, transformative, everyday Zen practice.
Pristine mindfulness. Buddhist Foundations of Mindfulness is an indispensable resource for clinical psychologists, and affiliated medical and mental health professionals, including specialists in complementary and alternative medicine as well as social work as well as teachers of Buddhism and meditation. In simple and straightforward language, Bhante Gunaratana shares the Buddha's teachings on mindfulness and how we can use these principles to improve our daily lives, deepen our mindfulness, and move closer to our spiritual goals.
Based on the classic Satipatthana Sutta, one of the most succinct yet rich explanations of meditation, Bhante's presentation is nonetheless thoroughly modern. The Satipatthana Sutta has become the basis of all mindfulness meditation, and Bhante unveils it to the reader in his trademark "plain English" style. Contemplating the Four Foundations of Mindfulness--mindfulness of the body, of feelings, of the mind, and of phenomena themselves--is recommended for all practitioners. Newcomers will find The Four Foundations of Mindfulness in Plain English lays a strong groundwork for mindfulness practice and gives them all they need to get started right away, and old hands will find rich subtleties and insights to help consolidate and clarify what they may have begun to see for themselves.
People at every state of the spiritual path will benefit from reading this book.
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