Buddhism Biography

In this updated edition, Dr. Orloff reflects on her career and the sea change that modern medicine and psychiatry have experienced since Second Sight was first published. She expands her earlier ideas and further explores intuition's role in maintaining physical health and emotional well-being, using examples from her own and her patients' lives. This is both a remarkable self-portrait of one woman's journey toward the acceptance of intuition as a therapeutic tool, and a comprehensive look at how you, too, can develop your intuition, transform your health, and revolutionize your everyday life.

The Wisdom of Compassion offers rare insights into the Dalai Lama’s life and his efforts to translate compassion into action through deeply engaging, behind-the-scene stories about his interactions with remarkable people from all walks of life. This is the Dalai Lama at his most human, and most humane. We see how he approaches the world with playfulness, optimism, and a profound empathy for the suffering of others. Through his own conduct, he shows us the tangible benefits of practicing kindness, forgiveness, and compassion.

Reimagining Buddhism through a feminine lens: a powerful memoir of healing, strength, and spiritual awakening.

While many accounts of the Buddha’s life mix legend and history, this compelling new biography discriminates between fact and fiction to reveal Gautama, the remarkable human being behind the myth, and sheds new light on his teachings. Plunging us into the noises, smells and jostling streets of Gautama’s world, Vishvapani Blomfield brings the Buddha to life as a passionate and determined individual - a strikingly modern figure who rejected contemporary beliefs.

With silence increasingly becoming a stranger to us, one man set out to become its intimate: Pablo d'Ors, a Catholic priest whose life was changed by Zen meditation. With disarming honesty and directness, as well as a striking clarity of language, d'Ors shares his struggles as a beginning meditator: the tedium, restlessness, and distraction. But, persevering, the author discovers not only a deep peace and understanding of his true nature, but also that silence, rather than being a retreat from life, offers us an intense engagement with life just as it is.

The captivating life story of renowned Buddhist activist Sulak Sivaraksa. Matteo Pistono’s deft prose weaves together the story of Sulak Sivaraksa’s years of social-justice work and his tireless campaigns to effect change. As a seminal figure in the world of socially engaged spirituality, Sulak has given us a blueprint for peaceful, nonviolent activism in the 21st century.

In this gripping account, John Avedon draws on his work and travels with the Fourteenth Dalai Lama to bring us the riveting story of Tibet and its temporal and spiritual leader. Included is an extensive interview with the Dalai Lama, who speaks about the conditions in Tibet, the mind of a Buddha, and the events of his life. Rigorously researched, passionately written, the original edition of In Exile From the Land of Snows was instrumental in launching the modern Tibet movement when it was published in 1984.

The daughter of an artist, Helen Tworkov grew up in the heady climate of the New York School of Abstract Expressionism; yet from an early age, she questioned the value of Western cultural norms. At the age of twenty-two, she set off for Japan, then traveled through Cambodia, India, and eventually to Tibetan refugee camps in Nepal. Set against the arresting cultural backdrop of the sixties and their legacy, this intimate self-portrait depicts Tworkov's search for a true home but also into the ways each of us can better understand and transform ourselves.

An epic adventure full of incredible characters, death-defying athletic achievement, and bleeding edge science, The Fear Project began with one question: how can we overcome our fears to reach our full potential? Who among us has not been paralyzed by fear? In The Fear Project, award-winning journalist and surfer Jaimal Yogis sets out to better understand fear - why does it so often dominate our lives, what makes it tick, and is there even a way to use it to our advantage?

Born into a "formerly untouchable manual-scavenging family in small-town India," Yashica Dutt was taught from a young age to not appear “Dalit looking.” Although prejudice against Dalits, who compose 25% of the population, has been illegal since 1950, caste-ism in India is alive and well. Blending her personal history with extensive research and reporting, Dutt provides an incriminating analysis of caste’s influence in India over everything from entertainment to judicial systems and how this discrimination has carried over to US institutions.

According to legend, when the founder of Zen Buddhism was asked about the main principle of his holy teaching, he replied that there was "nothing holy about it!" Now, a millennium and a half later, Tim Burkett reveals how and why the wisdom of nonholiness is the key to a joyful heart. You don't need to go looking for something sacred - the happiness you seek is right where you are.

The Vedanta was an inseparable part of Swami Vivekananda’s personality. He lived and breathed this philosophy while preaching it to India and the West. While Vivekananda’s landmark address at the Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893 established him as modern India’s great spiritual leader, his popularity and appeal is attributed to his ability to integrate his human side with his profound spiritual side.

When His Holiness the Dalai Lama came to New York City in 1999, he spoke simply and powerfully on the everyday Buddhist practice of compassion. An Open Heart lays out this course of meditation, from the simplest to the most challenging, describing the mental training techniques that will enable anyone of any faith to change their minds and open their hearts. Featuring an afterword by Richard Gere.

Each of us struggles with the existential questions of meaning, purpose, and responsibility. In The Meaning of Life, the Dalai Lama examines these questions from the Buddhist perspective, skillfully guiding us to a clearer understanding which can liberate us from the prison of selfishness and suffering. Also from the Dalai Lama:
The Art of Happiness.

At the time of his murder trial, Jarvis Jay Masters was in solitary confinement and spent 22 years in a five-foot-by-11-foot cell. This is where The Buddhist on Death Row takes off. With uncanny clarity, David Sheff describes Masters’ path to enlightenment - from being sullen and violent to discovering how easy and how hard it is to just sit and breathe, how those minutes spawn heightened perception and deepened compassion, the right way to remember one’s pain, and much more.

Composer John Cage sought the silence of a mind at peace with itself - and found it in Zen Buddhism, a spiritual path that changed both his music and his view of the universe. "Remarkably researched, exquisitely written", Where the Heart Beats weaves together "a great many threads of cultural history" (Maria Popova, Brain Pickings) to illuminate Cage’s struggle to accept himself and his relationship with choreographer Merce Cunningham. Freed to be his own man, Cage originated exciting experiments that set him at the epicenter of a new avant-garde forming in the 1950s.

This book attempts to explore the military lives of Moses, the Buddha, and Muhammad, and the role their war experiences played in their religious lives.

Su Santidad el Dalai Lama expone su visión de la ciencia y de la fe con una única intención: aliviar el sufrimiento humano. Mediante el estudio científico, que nunca ha abandonado, y el llamamiento a la práctica religiosa, el Dalai Lama explora muchos de los grandes y eternos debates y realiza asombrosas conexiones entre algunas cuestiones aparentemente dispares, como la evolución o el karma, llamadas a cambiar nuestra forma de percibir el mundo.

A powerful, emotional memoir and an extraordinary portrait of three generations of Tibetan women whose lives are forever changed when Chairman Mao’s Red Army crushes Tibetan independence, sending a young mother and her six-year-old daughter on a treacherous journey across the snowy Himalayas toward freedom.

At twenty-five, activist Cristina Moon faced an impossible task: preparing for the possibility of arrest and torture inside military-ruled Myanmar. Her response? Learning Buddhist meditation. So began what would become a decades-long spiritual path—eventually leading her to a Zen temple and martial arts dojo in Hawai'i with a timeless method of warrior Zen training.