Buddhism Biography

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.

We all possess one common desire: the need for happiness and a meaningful life. According to His Holiness the Dalai Lama, the ability to find true fulfillment lies within each of us. Now, the spiritual and temporal leader of Tibet, Nobel Prize winner, and best selling author helps you begin the path to enlightenment in this easy-access reference for daily practice.

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.

Running Toward Mystery is the Venerable Tenzin Priyadarshi's profound account of his lifelong journey as a seeker. At its heart is a story of striving for enlightenment, the vital importance of mentors in that search, and of the many remarkable teachers he met along the way, among them the Dalai Lama, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and Mother Teresa.

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.

"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 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.

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.

This audiobook reveals the main facts about the magical childhood and teenage years of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, the youngest son of a humble farmer, born in a remote Tibetan village, who became the political and spiritual leader of his homeland when he was only a kid. Its surprising content sheds light on the main facts and events that shaped his amazing early life, including: the Tibetan prophecy that announced his reincarnation; the magic lake that described the place where he was born; how the high lamas found him in a small farming village when he was two; and more!

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.

In this extensive lesson, Tenzin Gyatso beautifully elucidates the meaning of the path to enlightenment. His discourse arises from the Third Dalai Lama's brilliant and powerful work, Essence of Refined Gold, a classic text that summarizes the meaning of all Buddha's teachings. The subject of Essence is the Lam Rim, a term that literally means "stages on the spiritual path." Through his insightful exploration and interpretation of Essence of Refined Gold, the Dalai Lama speaks directly to the listener, offering spiritual advice, personal reflections, and scriptural commentary.

Colorful stories about and profound teachings of Patrul Rinpoche, one of the most impactful teachers and thinkers in the Tibetan tradition from the 19th century.

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.

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.

After flipping her raft days away from help on a trip down the remote Salmon River, Katie Arnold's shattered leg tests both her spirit and her marriage for years to come. It also reignites her meditation practice and motivates her to dive into Zen in search of healing. Before the accident, Katie was an elite ultrarunner with a simmering but adequate marriage who avoided being indoors whenever possible. But who is she afterwards? In the midst of hardship, Katie turns for support to the Zen practice she had long dabbled in.

Originally written in 1955 and now published for the first time in audiobook form, Wake Up is Kerouac's retelling of the life of Prince Siddartha Gotama, who as a young man abandoned his wealthy family and comfortable home for a lifelong searchfor Enlightenment. Distilled from a wide variety of canonical scriptures, Wake Up serves as both a penetrating account of the Buddha's life and a concise primer on the principal teachings of Buddhism.

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.

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.

Deciding that her life was insufficiently grounded in real-world experience, the author, a Quaker reared as a Catholic, embarked on a year of tending sheep. In this often hilarious book, she describes her time in the barn as well as an extended visit to a Buddhist monastery in France.

Dinty Moore set out to explore America's fascination with Buddhism and found himself enthralled. You will be too, as Moore takes you into the world of American-style Buddhism, from a mountain retreat for executives learning to deal with stress to a Tibetan Freedom Concert with the Beastie Boys.