After absorbing these stories and their context, readers will not only have a greater appreciation of Buddhism as a religion but can gain insights that can help them develop their own discerning wisdom.
The Awakening of the West is a unique, engaging and important book for anyone seeking a greater understanding of Buddhism. He aimed to venture more deeply into solitude, discovering its full extent and depth. This beautiful literary collage documents his multifaceted explorations. Spending time in remote places, appreciating and making art, practicing meditation and participating in retreats, drinking peyote and ayahuasca, and training himself to keep an open, questioning mind have all contributed to Batchelor's ability to be simultaneously alone and at ease.
Mixed in with his personal narrative are inspiring stories from solitude's devoted practitioners, from the Buddha to Montaigne, from Vermeer to Agnes Martin.
In a hyperconnected world that is at the same time plagued by social isolation, this book shows how to enjoy the inescapable solitude that is at the heart of human life. At the heart of Buddhist meditative practice is a radical promise: We can learn to see the world, including ourselves, more clearly and so gain a deep and morally valid happiness. He also shows why this transformation works, drawing on the latest in neuroscience and psychology, and armed with an acute understanding of human evolution.
Written with the wit, clarity, and grace for which Wright is famous, Why Buddhism Is True lays the foundation for a spiritual life in a secular age and shows how, in a time of technological distraction and social division, we can save ourselves from ourselves, both as individuals and as a species.
In this simple yet important book, Noah Rasheta takes profound Buddhist concepts and makes them easy to understand for anyone trying to become a better whatever-they-already-are. The understanding of the nature of reality is the insight upon which the Buddha was able to achieve his own enlightenment.
This vision of the sublime is the source of all that is enigmatic and paradoxical about Buddhism. In Verses from the Center, Stephen Batchelor explores the history of this concept and provides readers with translations of the most important poems ever written on the subject, the poems of 2nd century philosopher Nagarjuna.
Buddhism Plain and Simple offers a clear, straightforward treatise on Buddhism in general and on awareness in particular. When Buddha was asked to sum up his teaching in a single world, he said, "Awareness. His observations and insights are plain, practical, and down-to-earth, and they deal exclusively with the present.
Longtime teacher of Buddhism Steve Hagan presents the Buddha's uncluttered, original teachings in everyday, accessible language unencumbered by religious ritual, tradition, or belief. An intimate guide to self-acceptance and discovery that offers a Buddhist perspective on wholeness within the framework of a Western understanding of self. For decades, Western psychology has promised fulfillment through building and strengthening the ego.
We are taught that the ideal is a strong, individuated self, constructed and reinforced over a lifetime. But Buddhist psychiatrist Mark Epstein has found a different way.
Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart shows us that happiness doesn't come from any kind of acquisitiveness, be it material or psychological.
Happiness comes from letting go. Weaving together the accumulated wisdom of his two worlds--Buddhism and Western psychotherapy—Epstein shows how "the happiness that we seek depends on our ability to balance the ego's need to do with our inherent capacity to be. Drawing on events in his own life and stories from his patients, Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart teaches us that only by letting go can we start on the path to a more peaceful and spiritually satisfying life.
A timely essay collection on the development and influence of secular expressions of Buddhism in the West and beyond. How do secular values impact Buddhism in the modern world? What versions of Buddhism are being transmitted to the West?
In this new essay collection, opposing ideas that often define Buddhist communities—secular versus religious, modern versus traditional, Western versus Eastern—are unpacked and critically examined.
These reflections by contemporary scholars and practitioners reveal the dynamic process of reinterpreting and reimagining Buddhism in secular contexts, from the mindfulness movement to Buddhist shrine displays in museums, to whether rebirth is an essential belief. This collection explores a wide range of modern understandings of Buddhism—whether it is considered a religion, philosophy, or lifestyle choice—and questions if secular Buddhism is purely a Western invention, offering a timely contribution to an ever-evolving discussion.
Jackson, Charles B. Jones, David L. McMahan, Richard K. The text demystifies Buddhism by explaining what awakening is and how to practice it. The author points out that the Buddha was not a mystic and his awakening was not a shattering revelation that revealed the mysteries of God or the universe. In the broadest sense, it challenges how we relate to our existence as such: our birth, sickness, aging, and death. To what extent do we fail to understand these realities and their implications?
How much time is spent in distraction or oblivion? When we are gripped by a worry, for example, what do we do? We might struggle to shake it off. Or we try to convince ourselves that things are not the way they seem, failing which we seek to preoccupy ourselves with something else.
How often do we embrace that worry, accept our situation, and try to understand it? Anguish maintains its power only as long as we allow it to intimidate us. By habitually regarding it as fearful and threatening, we fail to see the words etched on it by the Buddha: "Understand Me. But if we face it head-on and dive right into it, we discover only water.
To understand a worry is to know it calmly and clearly for what it is: transient, contingent, and devoid of intrinsic identity. Whereas to misunderstand it is to freeze it into something fixed, separate, and independent. Worrying about whether a friend still likes us, for example, becomes an isolated thing rather than part of a process emerging from a stream of contingencies. This perception induces in turn a mood of feeling psychologically blocked, stuck, obsessed. The longer this undignified state persists, the more we become incapable of action.
The challenge of the first truth is to act before habitual reactions incapacitate us. Such craving is manifest in a variety of ways: it extends from simple egoism and selfishness to that deep-seated, anxious longing for security to fear of rejection by those we love to the compulsion to have a cigarette.
Whenever such feelings arise, the habitual reaction is either to indulge them or to deny them. Which again blinds us to the phrase stamped on them by the Buddha: "Let Go! As with anguish, letting go begins with understanding: a calm and clear acceptance of what is happening. While craving the second truth may be the origin or cause of anguish the first truth , this does not mean they are two separate things— any more than the sprout is separate from the daffodil that emerges from it.
Just as craving crystallizes into anguish, so does understanding flower into letting go. Letting go of a craving is not rejecting it but allowing it to be itself: a contingent state of mind that once arisen will pass away. Instead of forcibly freeing ourselves from it, notice how its very nature is to free itself. To let it go is like releasing a snake that you have been clutching in your hand. By identifying with a craving "I want this," "I don't want that" , you tighten the clutch and intensify its resistance.
Instead of being a state of mind that you have, it becomes a compulsion that has you. As with understanding anguish, the challenge in letting go of craving is to act before habitual reactions incapacitate us.
By letting go of craving it will finally cease. This cessation allows us to realize, if only momentarily, the freedom, openness, and ease of the central path. This sudden gap in the rush of self-centered compulsion and fear allows us to see with unambiguous immediacy and clarity the transient, unreliable, and contingent nature of reality.
Dharma practice at this moment has relinquished the last traces of belief; it is founded on authentic vision born from experience. It no longer requires the support of moralistic rules and religious ritual; it is grounded in integrity and creative autonomy.
In revealing life in all its vulnerability, it becomes the doorway to compassion. This is emptiness: not a cosmic vacuum but the unborn, undying, infinitely creative dimension of life.
It is known as the "womb of awakening"; it is the clearing in the still center of becoming, the track on which the centered person moves. And it whispers: "Realize Me. Cessation of craving is like a momentary gap in the clouds. The sun shines brilliantly for a few moments, only to be covered over again. We find ourselves back in the humbling fog of anguish, craving, habit, restlessness, distraction. But with a difference: now we know where this track goes. We have set foot in the territory for which these words are just a map.
We realize that until this point we have not really been on the path at all. We have been following hunches, heeding the words of those we respect, exploring blind alleys, stumbling and guessing.
No matter how strong our resolve and conviction, all along there may have been a nagging unease that we didn't really know where we were going. Each step felt hesitant and forced, and we were terribly alone. The difference between then and now is like the idea of sex and the first experience of it. Henceforth, resolve to cultivate this path becomes unwavering yet entirely natural.
It is simply what we do. There is no longer any sense of self-consciousness, contrivance, awkwardness, or hesitation.
Awakening is no longer seen as something to attain in the distant future, for it is not a thing but a process—and this process is the path itself. But neither does this render us in any way perfect or infallible. We are quite capable of subverting this process to the interests of our far-from-extinct desires, ambitions, hatreds, jealousies, and fears. We have not been elevated to the lofty heights of awakening; awakening has been knocked off its pedestal into the turmoil and ambiguity of everyday life.
There is nothing particularly religious or spiritual about this path. It encompasses everything we do. It is an authentic way of being in the world. It begins with how we understand the kind of reality we inhabit and the kind of beings we are that inhabit such a reality.
This book written by Stephen Batchelor and published by Penguin which was released on 01 March with total pages We cannot guarantee that Buddhism without Beliefs book is available in the library, click Get Book button to download or read online books. Join over A national bestseller and acclaimed guide to Buddhism for beginners and practitioners alike In this simple but important volume, Stephen Batchelor reminds us that the Buddha was not a mystic who claimed privileged, esoteric knowledge of the universe, but a man who challenged us to understand the nature of anguish, let go of its origins, and bring into being a way of life that is available to us all.
The concepts and practices of Buddhism, says Batchelor, are not something to believe in but something to do—and as he explains clearly and compellingly, it is a practice that we can engage in, regardless of our background or beliefs, as we live every day on the path to spiritual enlightenment. A national bestseller and acclaimed guide to Buddhism for beginners and practitioners alike In this simple but important volume, Stephen Batchelor reminds us that the Buddha was not a mystic who claimed privileged, esoteric knowledge of the universe, but a man who challenged us to understand the nature of anguish,.
Buddhism Without Beliefs presents a new interpretation of Buddhism and proposes realistic, non-religious, Buddhist solutions to the existential anguish that most of us live in.
Does Buddhism require faith? In his classic Buddhism Without Beliefs, Stephen Batchelor offered a profound, secular approach to the teachings of the Buddha that struck an emotional.
Stephen Batchelor's seminal work on humanity's struggle between good and evil In the national bestseller Living with the Devil, Batchelor traces the trajectory from the words of the Buddha and Christ, through the writings of Shantideva, Milton, and Pascal, to the poetry of Baudelaire, the fiction of Kafka, and the.
Kierkegaard said that faith without doubt is simply credulity, the will to believe too readily, especially without adequate evidence, and that "in Doubt can Faith begin. An essential collection of Stephen Batchelor's most probing and important work on secular Buddhism As the practice of mindfulness permeates mainstream Western culture, more and more people are engaging in a traditional form of Buddhist meditation.
However, many of these people have little interest in the religious aspects of Buddhism,.
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