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...

We are trained from our first days at school to produce answers, and to produce them quickly. Exams reward them, job interviews test for them, and in meetings the person with the most confident answer is routinely mistaken for the person who has thought hardest. Almost nobody teaches the harder and more valuable skill that sits upstream of every answer worth having: knowing what to ask.The Art of Asking Good Questions sets out to correct that imbalance. Drawing on a career spanning...

What if the leadership manual you actually need was written two and a half thousand years ago, in a language you have never studied, by a court archivist trying to end a civil war? That is the provocative premise behind Leadership & the Tao, in which Dr David Tuffley brings together two things rarely found in the same book: a fresh, plain English rendering of the Tao Te Ching and a rigorous academic survey of modern leadership theory, and shows that they are, in essence, describing the sam...

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...

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...

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. ...

Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, alone on a wide, wide sea, speaks for anyone who has known loneliness at its worst. Most of us have been there, if only briefly, and a growing number now report living there much of the time. The paradox is hard to miss. We have never had more ways of reaching one another, yet the ranks of the lonely keep growing.Being Alone begins by separating two experiences that are often treated as one. Loneliness looks outward and fixes on what is missing. Solitud...

In a Brisbane bookshop sometime in the 1970s, a slim volume practically jumped off the shelf into David Tuffley's hands. It was the Tao Te Ching, and what he found inside changed the direction of his thinking for the next fifty years. Tao Te Ching: Lao Tzu's Timeless Classic for Today is the result of that lifelong engagement, a fresh rendering of the oldest book still in print anywhere in the world into language a twenty-first century reader can actually use.Written aroun...

Most of us have felt it before, even if we never had a word for it. A moment on a clifftop when the line between you and the sea seemed to dissolve. A strange spaciousness that opens in the small hours when the city sleeps. The sudden, unaccountable rightness of watching a child lost in play. The Japanese call this satori, the flash of intuitive insight in which the felt separation between you and everything else falls away, and something larger and calmer looks out through your eyes. Chri...

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...

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...

Somewhere between the ninth and eleventh centuries, in halls warmed by firelight and shadowed by war, a Norse skald set down one hundred and sixty four verses spoken in the voice of Odin himself. He called it the Hávamál, the Sayings of the High One. It was not a hymn and it was not a myth. It was survival counsel, the kind a father might give a son before sending him out into a hostile world: how to enter a stranger's hall without getting killed, how to spot a false friend before he ruins...