Aura Glaser wrote this book to remedy a deficiency she discovered while engaged in psychological research–a nearly complete omission of the importance and cultivation of compassion. Other books exploring Buddhism and psychology have focused on what the Theravada school of Buddhism–which teaches personal liberation through enlightenment–can offer psychology. A Call to Compassion works with Mahayana Buddhism, in which practitioners commit to the liberation of all sentient beings, wi...

The beautiful practicality of her teaching has made Pema Chödrön one of the most beloved of contemporary American spiritual authors among Buddhists and non-Buddhists alike. A collection of talks she gave between 1987 and 1994, the book is a treasury of wisdom for going on living when we are overcome by pain and difficulties. Chödrön discusses:· Using painful emotions to cultivate wisdom, compassion, and courage· Communicating so as to encourage others to open up rather than ...

It is extremely important for us to know how best to lead our daily lives. This depends upon our knowing what is a spiritual action and what is not, the difference between what is Dharma and what is not Dharma. The benefits of having this knowledge are incredible, infinite.In this book, Lama Zopa Rinpoche gives us the answer to the perennial question of how to integrate Dharma with our daily lives - not only Dharma, but the best Dharma, bodhicitta: the determination to attain enlig...

A prominent Zen teacher offers a “direct, penetrating, and powerful” perspective on a popular mind training practice of Tibetan Buddhism (Rick Hanson, author of Buddha’s Brain)Lojong is the Tibetan Buddhist practice of working with short phrases (called "slogans") to generate bodhichitta, the heart and mind of enlightened compassion. With roots tracing back to the 900 A.D., the practice has gained more Western adherents over the past two decades, ...

It can be hard for those of us living in the twenty-first century to see how fourteenth-century Buddhist teachings still apply. When you’re trying to figure out which cell phone plan to buy or brooding about something someone wrote about you on Facebook, lines like "While the enemy of your own anger is unsubdued, though you conquer external foes, they will only increase" can seem a little obscure.Thubten Chodron’s illuminating explication of Togmay Zangpo’s revered text, The Th...

A Tibetan Buddhist master shares his commentary on Santideva's Way of the Bodhisattva, illuminating the path to enlightenment and the meaning of true compassionWhat would be the practical implications of caring more about others than about yourself? This is the radical theme of this extraordinary set of instructions, a training manual composed in the fourteenth century by the Buddhist hermit Ngulchu Thogme, here explained in detail by one of the great Tibe...

In what he calls a "200 percent potent" teaching, Chögyam Trungpa reveals how the spiritual path is a raw and rugged "unlearning" process that draws us away from the comfort of conventional expectations and conceptual attitudes toward a naked encounter with reality. The tantric paradigm for this process is the story of the Indian master Naropa (1016–1100), who is among the enlightened teachers of the Kagyu lineage of the Tibetan Buddhism. Naropa was the leading scholar at Nalanda, the Budd...

The essence of Buddha's 84,000 teachings is bodhicitta: the awakening mind that aspires towards enlightenment so as to have the perfect ability to free all beings from suffering and lead them to peerless happiness. On his two visits to Singapore in 1997, Venerable Lama Ribur Rinpoche taught extensively on how to generate that precious bodhimind. Using scriptural understanding and his personal experience, Rinpoche also gave insightful teachings on lo-jong (thought transformation), the pract...

In this fascinating memoir the Dalai Lama’s mother tells a compelling woman’s story. With vivid and intimate details, she recounts her life’s humble beginning, the customs and rituals of old Tibet, the births of her sixteen children (only seven of whom survived), learning her son’s remarkable destiny, the family’s arduous move to Lhasa before the Chinese invasion of Tibet, and their escape and eventual exile. Rich in historic and cultural details, this moving memoir personalizes the histor...

Fear, anger, and negativity are states that each of us have to contend with. Machik's Complete Explanation, the most famous book of the teachings of Machik Lapdrön, the great female saint and yogini of eleventh- to twelfth-century Tibet, addresses these issues in a practical, direct way.Machik developed a system, the Mahamudra Chöd, that takes the Buddha's teachings as a basis and applies them to the immediate experiences of negative mind states and malignant forces. Her u...

A leading authority on the rainbow body traces its history in the encounter of religions in medieval Central Asia, exploring a previously unimagined connection between early Dzogchen and the resurrection of JesusFrancis V. Tiso, a noted authority on the rainbow body, explores this manifestation of spiritual realization in a wide-ranging and deeply informed study of the transformation of the material body into a body of light. Seeking evidence on the boundary betwee...

Buddhism teaches that the mind is the source of 100 percent of all unhappiness: anxiety, agitation, desire, anger, grief. Through understanding how our mind works, it is possible to tame it—and to discover that happiness, wisdom, compassion, and clarity are actually inherent qualities in all of us. Much has been written of this subject, but Rob Nairn's book is the first to express the principles of Buddhist psychology in a way that is so easy to understand and enjoyable to read—while remai...