In A Trackless Path renowned translator and teacher Ken McLeod offers a beautiful and evocative translation and commentary of one of the many poems that the 18th century Tibetan mystic Jigmé Lingpa wrote on the practice of Dzogchen, one of the great wisdom traditions of Tibetan Buddhism. McLeod makes this ancient poem relevant and accessible to today's seeker.

In Meditations on Living, Dying and Loss, Graham Coleman, the editor of Viking's acclaimed unabridged translation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, collects the most beautifully written passages, ones that draw out the central perspectives most relevant to modern experience: What is death? How can we help those who are dying? And how can we come to terms with bereavement? New to this edition are Coleman's introduction and his brilliant and incisive essays, which preface each chapter and provide the seeker entrée to these ancient insights.

The great Indian Buddhist master Nagarjuna wrote his celebrated poem Letter to a Friend as a gift of advice to a South Indian king, and it has since become a monument in the Indian shastra tradition. Despite its short length (only 123 verses), it covers the entire Mahayana path, combining a practical approach to daily conduct with a theoretical exposition of the different stages leading to enlightenment. It has thus been an ideal source for many of Tibet’s greatest scholars seeking a scriptural authority to enhance their own descriptions of the Buddhist path.

Padmasambhava, the Lotus-Born Indian mystic and tantric master, is second only to Skakyamuni as the most famous figure in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. In the ninth century, he journeyed across the Himalayan Mountains to establish Buddhism for the people of Tibet. This legendary tale interweaves narration with timeless advice to all spiritual practitioners. Here, in English for the first time, is the complete story of how Buddhism was planted in Tibet.

In December 2010 residents of Kalimpong, a town on the Indian border with Tibet, turned out en masse to welcome the Dalai Lama. It was only then they realized for the first time that the neighbor they knew as the noodle maker of Kalimpong was also the Dalai Lama's older brother. The Tibetan spiritual leader had come to visit the Gaden Tharpa Choling monastery and join his brother for lunch in the family compound.

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.

At 36 years old, Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche was a rising star within his generation of Tibetan masters and the respected abbot of three monasteries. Then one night, telling no one, he slipped out of his monastery in India with the intention of spending the next four years on a wandering retreat, following the ancient practice of holy mendicants. His goal was to throw off his titles and roles in order to explore the deepest aspects of his being.

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?

Diligence is the essential quality to inspire joy and openheartedness for Buddhist practice and daily life. In this commentary focused on the Diligence Chapter from Shantideva’s eighth-century classic The Way of the Bodhisattva, Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche illuminates how diligence is the inner vigor that sparks enthusiasm despite difficulty, the dynamic armor that protects against laziness, and the inner strength that aims to meet the world with joy and openheartedness.

No matter how rich, well-connected, famous, intelligent, talented and compassionate a person may be, no one can avoid death. Yet how many of us believe death will happen to us? Or wonder what dying will be like? Or imagine what comes after death? Death is certain and inescapable, so wouldn’t it be sensible to at least inform ourselves about an event that we have no choice but to experience? In Living Is Dying, Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse presents us with everything we need to face death calmly and confidently.

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.

"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 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.

You have within you an unlimited capacity for extraordinary love, for joy, for communion with life, and for unshakable freedom - and here is how to awaken it. In The Wise Heart, celebrated author and psychologist Jack Kornfield offers an accessible, comprehensive, and illuminating guide to the universal teachings of Buddhist psychology. He shows you how to use powerful Buddhist insights and practices to go beyond the trap of "self-improvement".

The Dalai Lama, a living symbol of holiness and selfless triumph over tribulation, has shared his philosophy of peace with today's turbulent world. Yet rarely do we hear him speak with such directness as in this collection of quotations drawn from his own writings, teachings, and interviews.

Treasured by Buddhists of all traditions, The Way of the Bodhisattva (Bodhicharyavatara) is a guide to cultivating the mind of enlightenment and to generating the qualities of love, compassion, generosity, and patience. This text has been studied, practiced, and expounded upon in an unbroken tradition for centuries, first in India, and later in Tibet. Presented in the form of a personal meditation in verse, it outlines the path of the Bodhisattvas - those who renounce the peace of individual enlightenment and vow to work for the liberation of all beings.

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.

What would be the practical implications of caring more about others than about yourself? This is the radical theme of this extraordinary set of instructions, a training manual composed in the fourteenth century by the Buddhist hermit Ngulchu Thogme, here explained in detail by one of the great Tibetan Buddhist masters of the twentieth century, Dilgo Khyentse. In the Mahayana tradition, those who have the courage to undertake the profound change of attitude required to develop true compassion are called bodhisattvas.

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.

Buddhist philosophy tells us that all personal unhappiness and interpersonal conflict lie in the "three poisons": craving, anger, and delusion. With new high-tech devices, scientists can peer inside the brain centers that calm the inner storms of rage and fear. They also can demonstrate that awareness-training strategies such as meditation strengthen emotional stability - and greatly enhance our positive moods.

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.

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

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.

This is a tale of pursuit through the kitchens of New York City at the turn of the century. By the late nineteenth century, it seemed that New York City had put an end to the outbreaks of typhoid fever that had so frequently decimated the city's population. That is until 1904, when the disease broke out in a household in Oyster Bay, Long Island. Authorities suspected the family cook, Mary Mallon, of being a carrier. But before she could be tested, the woman, soon to be known as Typhoid Mary, had disappeared.

One of the greatest works created by any culture and overwhelmingly the most significant of all Tibetan Buddhist texts in the West, The Tibetan Book of the Dead has had a number of distinguished translations, but none encompassed the work in its entirety. Now, in one of the year's most important publishing events, the entire text has not only been made available in English but in a translation of quite remarkable clarity and beauty.

He Leadeth Me is a deeply personal story of one man’s spiritual odyssey and the unflagging faith which enabled him to survive the ordeal that wrenched his body and spirit to near collapse. Captured by a Russian army during World War II and convicted of being a “Vatican spy,” Jesuit Father Walter J. Ciszek spent some twenty-three agonizing years in Soviet prisons and the labor camps of Siberia. In He Leadeth Me, he relates how it was only through an utter reliance on God’s will that he managed to endure.

The rise of China and its great power competition with the U.S. will be one of the defining issues of our generation. But to understand modern China, one has to understand the people who live there–and the way the Chinese state is trying to control them along lines of identity and free expression. In vivid, cinematic detail, Let Only Red Flowers Bloom tells the stories of nearly two dozen people who are pushing back.

The acclaimed author of the “stirring, definitive, and engrossing” (NPR) The Woman’s Hour returns with the story of four activists whose audacious plan to restore voting rights to Black Americans laid the groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement.

In On Xi Jinping, former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd provides an authoritative account of the ideological worldview driving Chinese behaviour both domestically and on the world stage—that of President Xi Jinping, who now holds near-total control over the Chinese Communist Party and is now, in effect, president-for-life. Rudd argues that Xi’s worldview differs significantly from those of the leaders who preceded him, and that this ideological shift is reflected in the real world of Chinese policy and behaviour.

At age sixteen Sophie Strand—bright, agile, fearless—is suddenly beset by unexplained, debilitating illness while on a family trip abroad. Her once vibrant life becomes a tangled miasma of medication, specialists, anaphylaxis, and seemingly never-ending attempts to explain what has gone so terribly wrong. And, for many years thereafter, Sophie's life becomes subsumed with ideas not of "health," but of explanation, and the narrative of how and why she became sick. But slowly, she comes to another, more fundamental understanding of what has happened to her body.