World-renowned thinker and scholar Thich Nhat Hanh, considered by many to be a "Living Buddah," explores the spiritual crossroads where the traditions of Christianity and Buddhism meet. Living Buddha, Living Christ reawakens our understanding of both religions and the connections between them.

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.

Gallileo, Copernicus, Newton, Niels Bohr, Einstein. Their insights shook our perception of who we are and where we stand in the world and in their wake have left an uneasy co-existence: science vs. religion, faith vs. empirical enquiry. Which is the keeper of truth? Which is the true path to understanding reality?

In their only collaboration for children, His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu use their childhood stories to show young people how to find joy even in hard times and why sharing joy with others makes it grow. The two spiritual masters tell a simple story of how every child has joy inside them, even when it sometimes hides, and how we can find it, keep it close, and grow it by sharing it with the world.

The occasion was a big birthday. And it inspired two close friends to get together in Dharamsala for a talk about something very important to them. The friends were His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The subject was joy. Both winners of the Nobel Prize, both great spiritual masters and moral leaders of our time, they are also known for being among the most infectiously happy people on the planet.

For more than 2,000 years, the Heart Sutra has been part of the daily life of millions of Buddhists. This concise text, so rich and laden with meaning, concentrates the very heart of Buddhism into a powerful and evocative teaching on the interdependence of all reality. In Essence of the Heart Sutra, the Dalai Lama masterfully unpacks the Heart Sutra so that any listener can benefit from its teachings - teachings meant to help us release ourselves from suffering and live with true compassion.

In 2008, celebrating the long-awaited completion of the English-language translation of The Great Treatise, the Dalai Lama gave a historic six-day teaching at Lehigh University to explain the meaning of this classic text and to underscore its importance. It is the longest teaching that he has ever given to Westerners on just one text, and Westerners have never before had the opportunity to receive such a complete teaching that encompasses the totality of the Buddhist path from the Dalai Lama.

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.

No person today is untouched by what happens in the rest of the world. With this historic development, the Dalai Lama understands that the essential task of humanity is to cultivate peaceful coexistence. But this has long been problematic with religion, and while previous conflicts over religious differences may have been significant, they did not threaten the very survival of humanity. Now, when extremists have access to powerful technologies, a single spark could ignite a powder keg of frightening proportions.

The Dalai Lama will tell you that happiness is the purpose of life, and that "the very motion of our life is toward happiness." How to get there has always been the question. With the help of a psychiatrist, he now gets the message across in a context we can easily understand.

In How to See Yourself as You Really Are, the world's foremost Buddist leader teaches listeners how to recognize and dispel misguided notions of self and embrace the world from a more realistic and loving perspective

In troubled times there is an urgency to understand ourselves and our world. We have so many questions, and they tug at us night and day, consciously and unconsciously. In this important volume, Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh - one of the most revered spiritual leaders in the world today - reveals an art of living in mindfulness that helps us answer life's deepest questions and experience the happiness and freedom we desire.

Richard Rohr Rohr goes through the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount, explaining the historical and cultural context of each verse and offering guidance for what it means for Christians today.

The Buddhist practice of mindfulness caught on in the west when we began to understand the everyday, personal benefits it brought us. Now, in this extraordinary audiobook, the highly acclaimed thought leader and longtime English translator of His Holiness the Dalai Lama shows us that compassion can bring us even more.

Presented in a practical Q&A format, No-Nonsense Buddhism for Beginners is the most clear-cut introductory guide to understanding the essential concepts of Buddhism and how they relate to your daily life. How is an awakening different from enlightenment? Can agnostics and atheists be Buddhist? In No-Nonsense Buddhism for Beginners, renowned Buddhism teacher and host of the popular Secular Buddhism podcast, Noah Rasheta, delivers an easily accessible introduction to the teachings of Buddhism that answers these common questions and many more.

Of all the Buddha's teachings, perhaps his greatest gift can be found in "the Bodhisattva ideal", a template for living in the world as an "Awakener", a servant of the highest good for all. With his previous best-sellers including Awakening the Buddha Within, American-born Tibetan Buddhist teacher Lama Surya Das has made the helpful, healing insights of the Buddha accessible to millions.

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, and the practice occurs within secular contexts such as hospitals, schools, and the workplace. Is it possible to recover from the Buddhist teachings a vision of human flourishing that is secular rather than religious without compromising the integrity of the tradition?

Discover the books that have already changed the lives of millions. This unabridged guide to the literature of the spirit surveys 50 of the all-time classics, giving you their key ideas, insights, and applications - everything you need to know to start benefiting from these legendary works.

The Eightfold Path is the most widely known formulation of the Buddha's teaching. It is ancient, reaching back to the Buddha's very first discourse, and it is highly venerated as a unique treasury of wisdom and practical guidance. The teaching of the Eightfold Path challenges us to grasp the implications of that vision, and asks us to transform ourselves in its light. Like the teaching itself, this work covers every aspect of life.

Twenty-seven years ago, Matthieu Ricard gave up a promising career as a scientist to study Tibetan Buddhism - not as a detached observer but by immersing himself in its practice under the guidance of its greatest living masters. Years later, this project was born, and Richard met with his father, Jean-Francois Revel - a French philosopher who became world famous for his challenges to both Communism and Christianity. At an inn, these two profoundly thoughtful men explored questions that have occupied humankind throughout its history.

Perhaps you've had one of those moments when everything, quite unexpectedly, simply falls into place; or, when you've been puzzling over an impossible question and - pow! - the answer suddenly arises, seemingly out of nowhere. These and other such experiences are not caused by our efforts. They are moments of grace, the gift dimension of life. Grace is generally associated with religion, but, as Dave Richo shows, you don't need to be religious to notice - and benefit from - this help from outside yourself that's being offered to you in every moment.

His Holiness the Dalai Lama provides intimate details on an advanced meditation practice called Dzogchen using a visionary poem by the 19th-century saint Patrul Rinpoche, author of the Buddhist classic Words of My Perfect Teacher. The Dalai Lama deftly connects how training the mind in compassion for other beings is directly related to - and in fact a prerequisite for - the very pinnacle of Buddhist meditation.

Francis of Assisi is one of the most beloved of all saints. Both traditional and entirely revolutionary, he was a paradox. He was at once down-to-earth and reaching toward heaven, grounded in the rich history of the Church while moving toward a new understanding of the world beyond. Franciscan Father Richard Rohr helps us look beyond the birdbath image of the saint to remind us of the long tradition founded on Francis' revolutionary, radical, and life-changing embrace of the teachings of Jesus.

The last command Jesus gave the church before he ascended to heaven was the Great Commission, the call for Christians to "make disciples of all the nations.

"But Christians have responded by making "Christians", not "disciples". This, according to brilliant scholar and renowned Christian thinker Dallas Willard, has been the church's Great Omission.

Many Christians today tend to view the story of medieval faith as a cautionary tale. Too often, they dismiss the Middle Ages as a period of corruption and decay in the church. They seem to assume that the church apostatized from true Christianity after it gained cultural influence in the time of Constantine, and that the faith was only later recovered by the 16th-century Reformers or even the 18th-century revivalists. As a result, the riches and wisdom of the medieval period have remained largely inaccessible to modern Protestants.

The course begins by looking at the origins of Christian monasticism during the third century CE, when thousands of men and women renounced the world and withdrew to the deserts of Egypt, Syria, and Palestine to seek God in a life of solitude and prayer. What inspired them to do this? What were they trying to achieve? In seeking answers to these questions, we will examine the lives and sayings of the so-called "desert fathers", with a particular emphasis on the theological writings of Evagrius of Pontus (c. 345-399).

The question-and-answer format makes this introduction to Zen especially easy to understand - and also to use as a reference, as you can easily look up just the question you had in mind. The esteemed Zen teacher Norman Fischer and his old friend and teaching colleague Susan Moon (both of them in the lineage of Shunryu Suzuki, author of Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind) give this collaborative effort a playful tone: Susan asks a question on our behalf, Norman answers it, and then Sue challenges him.

The co-editors of Gnosis magazine explore the many esoteric traditions that Western culture has to offer. While terms from Eastern spiritual practices such as Zen, mantra, and karma have become part of our daily lexicon, the traditions of Western spirituality have been largely unexplored by people searching for non-mainstream routes to spiritual experience. But for those who identify with Western culture, Western religious traditions have their own wisdom teachings that are more suitable to their needs and expectations.

World-renowned Jesus scholar Marcus J. Borg shows how we can live passionately as Christians in today's world by practicing the vital elements of Christian faith. For the millions of people who have turned away from many traditional beliefs about God, Jesus, and the Bible, but still long for a relevant, nourishing faith, Borg shows why the Christian life can remain a transforming relationship with God. Emphasizing the critical role of daily practice in living the Christian life, he explores how prayer, worship, Sabbath, pilgrimage, and more can be experienced as authentically life-giving practices.

In God and the Evolving Universe, James Redfield and Michael Murphy present an important message of hope and a vision for the future. The authors contend that thousands of years of human striving have delivered us to this very moment, in which each act of self-development is creating a new stage in planetary evolution and the emergence of a human species possessed of vastly expanded spiritual experience.

World-renowned thinker and scholar Thich Nhat Hanh, considered by many to be a "Living Buddah," explores the spiritual crossroads where the traditions of Christianity and Buddhism meet. Living Buddha, Living Christ reawakens our understanding of both religions and the connections between them.

Buddhism is practiced by hundreds of millions of people worldwide, from Tibetan caves to Tokyo temples to redwood retreats. To an outside viewer, it might be hard to see what they all have in common. In Buddhism, His Holiness the Dalai Lama and American Buddhist nun Thubten Chodron map out with clarity the convergences and the divergences between the two major strains of Buddhism - the Sanskrit traditions of Tibet and East Asia and the Pali traditions of Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia.

With characteristic humility, His Holiness the Dalai Lama begins this landmark survey of the entire Buddhist path by saying, "I think an overview of Tibetan Buddhism for the purpose of providing a comprehensive framework of the path may prove helpful in deepening your understanding and practice." In this book the Dalai Lama delivers a presentation that is both concise and profound, accessible and engaging.

Honest and unflinching, Without Buddha I Could Not Be a Christian narrates each spiritual dilemma that Knitter has struggled with and explains how a Buddhist worldview has allowed him to resolve each one. From the "petitioning" nature of Christian prayer to how Christianity views life after death, Knitter argues that a Buddhist standpoint can help inspire a more person-centered conception of Christianity, where individual religious experience comes first, and liturgy and tradition second.

There are two types of anger. One type arises out of compassion and is useful and must be encouraged. The other type arises out of jealousy and envy and results in hatred, ill will, and harm. Here, you will learn the Buddhist path to compassionate anger - a motivating force that can transform the negative into the positive and change the world.

In the same engaging style that has endeared him to listeners of Mindfulness in Plain English, Bhante Gunaratana delves deeply into each step of the Buddha's most profound teaching on bringing an end to suffering: the noble eightfold path. With generous and specific advice, Eight Mindful Steps to Happiness offers skillful ways to handle anger, to find right livelihood, and to cultivate loving-friendliness in relationships with parents, children, and partners, as well as tools to overcome all the mental hindrances that prevent happiness.

Presented in a practical Q&A format, No-Nonsense Buddhism for Beginners is the most clear-cut introductory guide to understanding the essential concepts of Buddhism and how they relate to your daily life. How is an awakening different from enlightenment? Can agnostics and atheists be Buddhist? In No-Nonsense Buddhism for Beginners, renowned Buddhism teacher and host of the popular Secular Buddhism podcast, Noah Rasheta, delivers an easily accessible introduction to the teachings of Buddhism that answers these common questions and many more.

In 2008, celebrating the long-awaited completion of the English-language translation of The Great Treatise, the Dalai Lama gave a historic six-day teaching at Lehigh University to explain the meaning of this classic text and to underscore its importance. It is the longest teaching that he has ever given to Westerners on just one text, and Westerners have never before had the opportunity to receive such a complete teaching that encompasses the totality of the Buddhist path from the Dalai Lama.

This very short introduction offers listeners a superb overview of the teachings of the Buddha, as well as a succinct guide to the integration of Buddhism into daily life.

The Dalai Lama will tell you that happiness is the purpose of life, and that "the very motion of our life is toward happiness." How to get there has always been the question. With the help of a psychiatrist, he now gets the message across in a context we can easily understand.