Tibetan Buddhism

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.

This wonderfully practical book is a manifestation of Lama Zopa Rinpoche's peerless wisdom realizing emptiness and illuminates the personal experience of this rare and precious teacher. Rinpoche offers an incredible amount of information in this concise title by emphasizing the importance of compassion and universal responsibility, showing how we can make this life meaningful, giving a brief explanation of the nature of the enlightened mind and how we can attain it, offering an amazing and extensive explanation of emptiness, the ultimate nature of reality, by analyzing the way various phenomena exist and finally teaching us how we can successfully meditate on emptiness.

The Art of Happiness has become the classic guide to the Dalai Lama's enlightened approach to living. In this inspirational new volume, the unique collaboration between the Dalai Lama and the highly respected scholar Howard Cutler returns with a practical application of Tibetan Buddhist spiritual values to the stressful and demanding world we all live in today.

Fear and guilt are two of the greatest challenges we face on the spiritual path—but there is a way to transform these painful feelings into courageous self-acceptance. Here Pema Chödrön presents the five aphorisms for developing fearlessness that were given to Machig Lapdronma, one of Tibetan Buddhism's greatest female teachers.

The most pressing question in these uncertain times may well be, How can we bring healing and protection to the Earth? It was this very question that Cynthia Jurs carried with her in 1990 as she climbed a path high in the Himalayas, to meet an old wise man in a cave a venerated lama from Nepal. In response to her question, the old lama gave her a formidable assignment based on an ancient practice from Tibet: she must procure earth treasure vases made of clay and potent medicines, fill them with prayers and symbolic offerings, and bury them around the world where healing is called for.

Haciendo uso del sentido común y de un envidiable espíritu práctico, el Dalai Lama nos devuelve la confianza en nuestras mejores cualidades y nos ofrece una propuesta simple y clara para el nuevo milenio: aprender a creer en nuestra bondad innata y a ejercer la compasión, no solo como un deber, sino como una virtud.

With war and violence flaring all over the world, many of us are left feeling vulnerable and utterly helpless. In this book Pema Chödrön draws on Buddhist teachings to explore the origins of aggression, hatred, and war, explaining that they lie nowhere but within our own hearts and minds. She goes on to explain that the way in which we as individuals respond to challenges in our everyday lives can either perpetuate a culture of violence or create a new culture of compassion.

"Everyone dies, but no one is dead," goes the Tibetan saying. It is with these words that Advice on Dying takes flight. Using a 17th-century poem written by a prominent scholar-practitioner, His Holiness the Dalai Lama draws from a wide range of traditions and beliefs to explore the stages we all go through when we die, which are the very same stages we experience in life when we go to sleep, faint, or reach orgasm (Shakespeare's "little death").

The Buddha's teaching on karma (literally, "action") is nothing other than his compassionate explanation of the way things are: our thoughts and actions determine our future, and therefore we ourselves are largely responsible for the way our lives unfold. Yet this supremely useful teaching is often ignored due to the misconceptions about it that abound in popular culture, especially oversimplifications that make it seem like something not to be taken seriously.

El Bardo thodol, más conocido en Occidente como El libro tibetano de los muertos, es una guía de instrucciones para los moribundos y los muertos que, según la creencia del budismo tántrico del Tíbet, permite alcanzar la iluminación durante el periodo inmediato posterior a la muerte y por algunos días más, a fin de evitar renacer e ingresar nuevamente al samsara, pues se considera que la muerte dura 49 días y después de ello sobreviene un renacimiento en el ciclo de la reencarnación.

Beautifully read by Buddhist practitioner and translator John Canti, this commentary on Padampa Sangye's classic verses of advice to Tibetan villagers of Tingri—by renowned and beloved meditation master Dilgo Khyentse—offers guidance for people trying to lead a dharmic life in the workaday world. These hundred verses, studied for centuries by Tibetans and students of Buddhism, contain a complete survey of the Tibetan Buddhist path.

It is possible that this book may be the absolute truth - yet another product of the incredible powers of the holy men of the Himalayas, who are said to have projected their reincarnations into the hilly areas of America, to avoid the holocaust brought by the Chinese to Tibet? Could we, as a nation, be ignoring one of the greatest gifts we have ever received?

Buddhism is a house full of treasures – practices for gaining the happiness of future lives, the bliss of liberation and the supreme happiness of enlightenment – but knowing the difference between Dharma and non-Dharma practices is the key that opens the door to all those treasures. No matter how much we know about emptiness, the chakras or controlling our vital energy through kundalini yoga, it's all pointless without this crucial understanding of how to practice Dharma, how to correct our actions.

Full of personal anecdotes and intimate accounts of the Dalai Lama's experiences as a life-long student, thinker, political leader, and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Becoming Enlightened is a remarkable and empowering work that can be enjoyed by seekers of all faiths, at every stage of spiritual development.

On the spiritual path we speak of enlightenment. But how do we reconcile the idea of enlightenment with what we see when we look in the mirror - when insecurities, doubts, and self-centered tendencies arise in our minds? Dzigar Kongtrül suggests that we need not feel "doomed" when these experiences surface. In fact, such experiences are not a problem if we are able to simply let them arise without judging them or investing them with so much meaning. This approach to experience is what Kongtrül calls self-reflection.

The power of the breath has been recognized for millennia as an integral part of health and well-being. In Awakening the Sacred Body, teacher Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche makes accessible the ancient art of Tibetan breath and movement practices. In clear, easy-to-understand language, he outlines the theory and processes of two powerful meditations - the Nine Breathings of Purification and the Tsa Lung movements - that can help you change your relationship to yourself, to others, and to the world.

About 1,000 years ago, the great Indian pandit and yogi, Dipamkara Shrijnana (Atisha), was invited to Tibet to reestablish the Buddhadharma which had been suppressed and corrupted for almost two centuries. One of Atisha's main accomplishments in Tibet was his writing of the seminal text A Lamp for the Path to Enlightenment, in which he extracted the essence of all 84,000 teachings of the Buddha and organized them into a clear, steplike arrangement that makes it easy for any individual practitioner to understand and practice the Dharma. This genre of teachings is known as lam-rim, or steps of the path, and forms an essential part of every school of Tibetan Buddhism.

This book offers a refreshing Buddhist approach to understanding the role of digital technology in our world and how we can better manage our relationship to it. Our engagement with digital devices connects us to people and ideas, but it also causes anxiety, distraction, imbalance, and suffering. Rather than a digital detox, we can train our minds to leverage our negative habits and digital temptations to deal with life more effectively, improve our attention span, reduce mental fatigue, and deepen our happiness.

The Dalai Lama, at his most compassionate and outspoken, here elaborates and deepens his vision for the nonreligious way. Transcending the mere "religion wars", he outlines a system of secular ethics that gives tolerant respect to religion, those that ground ethics in a belief in God and an afterlife, and those that understand good actions as leading to better states of existence in future lives. And yet, with the highest level of spiritual and intellectual authority, the Dalai Lama makes a claim for what he calls a third way.

Why do things happen the way they do in our lives? How do we create the causes for a happy life? The Buddhist practice of mind training gives us the answer to these questions: it involves overcoming our self-centered attitude and replacing it with an attitude that cherishes others. This, in turn, leads us to act in ways that naturally lead away from suffering and toward happiness—in short, to create good karma.