There is a particular silence that follows a good koan. Not the silence of failing to understand, but the silence of a mind that has just met something it cannot out-argue. Ask a philosopher to define enlightenment and you will get paragraphs. Ask a Zen master and you might get a cup of tea poured until it overflows the saucer, or a single unanswerable question about the sound made by one hand. That is the territory David Tuffley PhD maps in this quietly disarming collection of a hundred c...

At five o'clock on a cold May morning in 1915, Private Albert Money waited behind the British breastworks near Neuve Chapelle while five to seven hundred guns hammered the German line. Handed a dose of rum, he passed it to his mate, who was shaking, though not from fear. Within the hour Albert would be lying in a narrow ditch in no man's land with a bullet through his hip, surrounded by the dead, working out how to drag himself home hand over hand.A Soldier's Tale is Albert's own a...

This eBook allows you to grasp the basic principles of Buddhism in just a few minutes.Much has been written about Buddhism and how to practice it. Readers will have no difficulty finding hundreds of books on the topic. It simply focuses on the essence of Buddhism, as expressed in the Four Noble Truths and the Eight-fold Path. It is what the Buddha first talked about after he became enlightened – this is what makes it the essence.Reading this eBook should not conflict with y...

Every traveller has stood in a queue that stretched around a city block, watching the clock, wondering whether the view from the top will be worth the wait, and suspecting, somewhere beneath the fatigue, that there might be a better way to see the world. The Artful Traveller: The Flâneur's Guidebook begins with that suspicion and turns it into a philosophy.David Tuffley takes as his starting point the nineteenth century Parisian Flâneur, Baudelaire's idle wanderer of the b...

Nearly nineteen hundred years ago, a former slave who became one of Rome's most respected philosophers dictated a short handbook on how to live well. It has never gone out of print. David Tuffley's Enchiridion of Epictetus brings that handbook into plain modern English, chapter by short chapter, with a commentary alongside each one that shows exactly how a piece of ancient Stoic advice applies to a life lived now.The Enchiridion, Greek for handbook, was compiled from Epict...

Meditation has a reputation for being complicated, requiring special postures, secret words, years of training with a teacher somewhere far away. David Tuffley's Meditation strips all of that away and gets to what he calls the distilled essence of the practice, a method simple enough to learn in a few minutes, though as he is honest enough to admit, one that can take a lifetime to make your own.The book's core claim is that inner peace is not something you acquire from out...

What happens when I die? is the question every human being asks, usually in private, sometimes in the middle of the night, and almost always without receiving a satisfying answer. In this compact and startlingly direct book, David Tuffley PhD turns to one of the oldest and most sophisticated accounts of dying ever compiled, the Bardo Thodol, better known in the West as the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and distils its wisdom into a guide a modern reader can actually use.Rather than tre...

You said yes again. You meant no, you wanted to say no, and somewhere between the thought and the words it turned into "sure, no problem". Or perhaps your trouble runs the other way: you said exactly what you thought, at volume, and have been repairing the damage ever since.Being Assertive: Finding the Sweet-Spot between Passive & Aggressive is a compact guide to the ground between those two mistakes. David Tuffley starts from a simple and clarifying idea. Assertiveness is...

Most people who write reports for a living were never actually taught how. They learned to write at school and university, where the only reader who mattered was a lecturer obliged to read every word, and then walked straight into a workplace where nobody is obliged to read anything at all. David Tuffley's Guide to Effective Report Writing exists to close that gap, in a short, dense, entirely practical handbook built for people who need to write well at work, not for people who wa...

Almost everyone carries a quieter, harsher voice than the one they use with other people. Raising Your Self-Esteem is written for that voice, and for the person who has spent years believing what it says.David Tuffley opens with a claim that sets the tone for everything that follows: high self-esteem is not a privilege to be earned, it is the ordinary birthright of every person, and the negative self-talk so many of us live with is not proof of some inner flaw but a treata...

You know cool when you see it. Try to define it and the thing evaporates. David Tuffley's The Essence of Cool spends twenty chapters catching that elusive quality anyway, arguing convincingly that cool is not a genetic lottery or a pose borrowed from a magazine, but a learnable skill grounded in something far more useful than style: a particular relationship to pressure.The book opens with the central paradox that governs everything that follows. You cannot become cool by ...

Thirty-seven Practices of a Bodhisattva is an ancient text written in the 14th Century BCE by Tokme Zangpo, a Buddhist monk and scholar who was born in Puljung, south west of the Sakya Monastery in Tibet.Thirty-seven Practices seeks to make clear the day-to-day behavior of a Bodhisattva (an enlightened being on their way to attaining full Buddhahood for the benefit of all sentient beings). It serves as a practical guide for those people seeking to travel the path of enlightenment. ...