The author describes her own journey of recovery from alcoholism—an astonishing passage through strange and frightening territory—and marks out the path that allowed her to emerge from that darkness as a wise and compassionate person living a life that is joyous and free. This book is a powerful and enriching synthesis of the 12-Step recovery programs and the Noble Eightfold Path of Buddhism. It is sure to appeal to anyone touched by addiction, including those looking for new ways to understand and work with the tried-and-true 12-Step system. Tens of millions of Americans suffer from Alcoholism and other forms of dependence, and 12 Steps on Buddha's Path offers hope and help for any one of them.

Though writing anonymously out of deep respect for 12-Step policies, the author is in fact a well-known professional author, deeply involved in the recovery and meditation communities.

ISBN:0-86171-281-1_|_208 pp_|_Our Price: $10.36 (20% OFF)_|_More Info

Bad Dog! is a vivid testament to the unforeseen love, beauty, and redemption discovered in the most difficult times and places. Bad Dog! reads like a collection of closely linked short stories (think JD Salinger) but is in fact a work of literary nonfiction (think Robert Fulgham, or and Augusten Burroughs). Bad Dog! will appeal to anyone who has fallen into dark places and wants to climb back into the light.

With quietly crafted poetic language of a quality rarely seen in spiritual books, Lin Jensen tells the stories of his remarkably difficult life: his tumultuous early years on a struggling Midwestern turkey farm, his failed marriage, and the search for meaning that led him eventually to become a Zen teacher. The raw and earthy lessons of Bad Dog! cut to the quick with an understated power, and the reader is left at the end of each chapter subtly transformed, able to reflect more deeply and more fruitfully on the struggles of our own lives. Lin Jensen's writing is of a poetiic and literary merit rarely seen.

Lin Jensen received the Best Nonfiction/Spiritual Book award from Today's Librarian for his previous book, Uncovering the Wisdom of the Heartmind. He has taught writing in various colleges and universities for over twenty years, and continues to teach Buddhist ethics and practices at Chico State University. He is the founding teacher and senior teacher emeritus of the Chico Zen Sangha, in Chico, California, where he lives with his wife.

ISBN:0-86171-486-5_|_288 pages_|_Our Price: $12.76 (20% OFF)_|_More Info

The Blue Poppy and the Mustard Seed helps us confront the universal truths of love and loss that we all will eventually and inevitably encounter. This book will be a comfort to anyone who has faced a tragic loss, but not only that, it takes us all on a rich journey, through joy, suffering, and ultimately to hope, in a way that is quietly beautiful and, above all, utterly life-affirming.

ISBN:0-86171-565-9_|_192_|_Our Price: $12.76 (20% OFF)_|_More Info

Sumi Loundon’s typically rich and youthful commentary lets us appreciate each contributor’s individual voice, and helps us to see how they contribute to the always-evolving chorus of modern Buddhism.

The Buddha's Apprentices can be considered a sequel to Sumi Loundon's 'Blue Jean Buddha', but goes even beyond that work by giving extra attention to teens and young adults, and including pieces from Thich Nhat Hanh, Lama Surya Das, and a truly diverse array of younger author/contributors.

ISBN:0-86171-332-X_|_240 pp_|_Our Price: $13.56 (20% OFF)_|_More Info

Jeff Wilson started his walk on the Buddha's Path as a Zen practitioner-taking up a tradition of vigorous self-effort, intensive meditation, and meticulous attention to rectitude in every action. But in Jeff's case, rather than freeing him from his suffering, he found those Zen practices made him nothing short of insufferable. And so he turned to Shin Buddhism-a path that is easily the most popular in Zen's native land of Japan but is largely unknown in the West.

Shin emphasizes an "entrusting heart," a heart that is able to receive with gratitude every moment of our mistake-filled and busy lives. Moreover, through walking the Shin path, Jeff comes see that each of us (himself especially included) are truly "foolish beings," people so filled with endlessly arising "blind passions" and ingrained habits that we so easily cause harm even with our best intentions. And even so, Shin holds out the tantalizing possibility that, by truly entrusting our foolish selves to the compassionate universe, we can learn to see how this foolish life, just as it is, is nonetheless also a life of grace.

Buddhism of the Heart is a wide-ranging book of essays and open-hearted stories, reflections that run the gamut from intensely personal to broadly philosophical, introducing the reader to a remarkable religious tradition of compassionate acceptance.

ISBN:0-86171-583-7_|_264pages_|_Our Price: $13.56 (20% OFF)_|_More Info

He is known for two major works. The first work, the massive Shobogenzo(Treasury of the True Dharma Eye), represents his early teachings and exists in myriad English translations; the second work, the Eihei Koroku, is a collection of all his later teachings, including short formal discourses to the monks training at his temple, longer informal talks, and koans with his commentaries, as well as short appreciatory verses on various topics. The Shobogenzo has received enormous attention in Western Zen and Western Zen literature, and with the publication of this watershed volume, the Eihei Koroku will surely rise to commensurate stature.

DOGEN'S EXTENSIVE RECORD is the first-ever complete and scholarly translation of this monumental work into English. This edition contains extensive and detailed research and annotation by scholars, translators and Zen teachers Taigen Dan Leighton and Shohaku Okumura, as well as forewords by the eighteenth-century poet-monk Ryokan and Tenshin Reb Anderson, former abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center-plus introductory essays from Dogen scholar Steven Heine, and the prominent, late American Zen master John Daido Loori.

This lavishly-produced cloth-bound volume will be indispensable to students and scholars of Zen.

Click here for an extensive and detailed index not appearing in the hardcover edition.

ISBN:0-86171-305-2_|_752 pages_|_Our Price: $52 (20% OFF)_|_More Info

At the age of seven, in 1207, Dogen lost his mother, who at her death earnestly asked him to become a monastic to seek the truth of Buddhism. We are told that in the midst of profound grief, Dogen experienced the impermanence of all things as he watched the incense smoke ascending at his mother's funeral service. This left an indelible impression upon the young Dogen; later, he would emphasize time and again the intimate relationship between the desire for enlightenment and the awareness of impermanence. His way of life would not be a sentimental flight from, but a compassionate understanding of, the intolerable reality of existence.

At age 13, Dogen received ordination at Mt. Hiei. And yet, a question arose: "As I study both the exoteric and the esoteric schools of Buddhism, they maintain that human beings are endowed with Dharma-nature by birth. If this is the case, why did the buddhas of all ages—undoubtedly in possession of enlightenment—find it necessary to seek enlightenment and engage in spiritual practice?" When it became clear that no one on Mt. Hiei could give a satisfactory answer to this spiritual problem, he sought elsewhere, eventually making the treacherous journey to China. This was the true beginning of a life of relentless questioning, practice, and teaching—an immensely inspiring contribution to the Buddhadharma.

As you might imagine, a book as ambitious as Eihei Dogen: Mystical Realist has to be both academically rigorous and eminently readable to succeed. Professor Hee-Jim Kim's work is both indeed, as his contemporaries attest.

ISBN:0-86171-376-1_|_368 pages_|_Our Price: $15.96 (20% OFF)_|_More Info

Everything Yearned For is a collection of 88 love poems, evocative of the mystical love poetry of Rumi, and even reminiscent of the work of Pablo Neruda.Though Manahe's poetry can be read allegorically on many levels—political and religious—it is completely unlike any other poetry in Buddhist or secular realm.

The first poem, "My Lover's Silence," narrates the lover's departure and establishes the enduring themes of the work: The happiness of meeting, the sadness of separation, the agony of longing and waiting, and, most of all, the perfection of love in absence that demands the cost of one's ongoing life, as opposed to the relief of death. The Korean word translated in these poems as "love" and "lover" is nim, though nim has many and broad interpretations. Understandably, the identity of Manhae's lover, or "nim" has been the subject of much speculation.

Manhae writes in his own preface:

"Nim" is not only a human lover but everything yearned for. All beings are nim for the Buddha, and philosophy is the nim of Kant. The spring rain is nim for the rose, and Italy is the nim of Mazzini. Nim is what I love, but it also loves me. If romantic love is freedom, then so is my nim. But aren't you attached to the lofty name of freedom? Don't you also have a nim? If so, it's only your shadow. I write these poems for the young lambs wandering lost on the road home from the darkening plains."

ISBN:0-86171-489-X_|_192 pp_|_Our Price: $12 (20% OFF)_|_More Info

Twenty-four of the Buddha's most distinguished disciples are brought to life in ten chapters of rich narration. Drawn from a wide range of authentic Pali sources, the material in these stories has never before been assembled in a single volume. Through these engaging tales, we meet all manner of human beings—rich, poor, male, female, young, old—whose unique stories are told with an eye to the details of ordinary human concerns. If read with careful attention, these stories can sharpen our understanding of the Buddhist path by allowing us to contemplate the living portraits of the people who fulfilled the early Buddhist ideals of human perfection. The characters detailed include:

SHARIPUTTA
NANDA
MAHAMOGGALLANA
MAHAKASSAPA
ANANDA
ISIDASI
ANURUDDHA
MAHAKACCANA
ANGULIMALA
VISAKHA

And many more…

Conveniently annotated with the same system of sutta references used in each of the other series volumes, Great Disciples of the Buddha allows the reader to easily place each student in the larger picture of Buddha's life. It is a volume that no serious student of Buddhism should miss.

ISBN:0-86171-381-8_|_448 pages_|_Our Price: $15.16 (20% OFF)_|_More Info

The subtitle (and the cover!) say it all: there has never been a book like this one.

ISBN:0-86171-380-X_|_224 pp_|_Our Price: $11.96 (20% OFF)_|_More Info

At just 19, Sienna Craig made her first venture deep into Mustang, an ethnically Tibetan area of Nepal, in the rainshadow of the Himalayas. As an equestrian and a buddhing anthropologist, she sought not only to understand what it was like to rely on horses to navigate through the windswept valleys and plains of High Asia, but also to grasp how horses lent meaning to the lives of the Mustangi people. Through living and working with local Tibetan doctors, veterinarians, and other horse experts, as well as the deep friendships she formed, Sienna began to understand the region's history, and the way life in Mustang was being transformed in the face of temendous social, political, and economic shifts. She learned much about herself and her life's course through her year in Mustang -- a place that came to feel, for all its foreignness, like home.

Click below to read more about Sienna and Horses Like Lightning

The Santa Barbara Independent article.

ISBN:0-86171-517-9_|_304_|_Our Price: $13.56 (20% OFF)_|_More Info

This life-affirming, instructive and thoroughly inspiring book is a must-read for anyone who is—or who might one day be—sick. And it can also be the perfect gift of guidance, encouragement, and uplifting inspiration to family, friends, and loved ones struggling with the many terrifying or disheartening life changes that come so close on the heels of a diagnosis of a chronic condition or even life-threatening illness.

The author—who became ill while a university law professor in the prime of her career—tells the reader how she got sick and, to her and her partner’s bewilderment, stayed that way. Toni had been a longtime meditator, going on long meditation retreats and spending many hours rigorously practicing, but soon discovered that she simply could no longer engage in those difficult and taxing forms. She had to learn ways to make “being sick” the heart of her spiritual practice—and through truly learning how to be sick, she learned how, even with many physical and energetic limitations, to live a life of equanimity, compassion, and joy. And whether we ourselves are sick now or not, we can learn these vital arts of living well from How to Be Sick.

ISBN:0-86171-626-4_|_216 pages_|_Our Price: $12.76 (20% OFF)_|_More Info

For Westerners, Tibet is a land of powerful spiritual teachings, staggering mountain vistas, and geopolitical intrigue. The country's resistance to Chinese occupation, and also the growing presence of Tibetan Buddhism in the West, are not just part of our daily news but of the Western consciousness as well. In January 2000, interest hit a peak as fourteen-year-old Orgyen Trinley Dorje was thrust upon the world stage. Recognized as the Seventeenth Karmapa-arguably the second most powerful figure in the Tibetan Buddhist religious hierarchy-he made a dramatic escape from his Chinese Communist overseers to the land of the Buddha's birth, India, so that he could study with the masters of his religious lineage, follow his conscience, and be a leader to his people.

Through wide-ranging research and interviews with key figures, including the Karmapa himself, award-winning journalist Lea Terhune unlocks the riveting tale of the Karmapa's disputed incarnation, and traces the roots of the Kagyu tradition and the history of the previous Karmapas in order to illuminate the tale of the young man born to play a key role in the future of Tibet.

ISBN:0-86171-180-7_|_320 pp_|_Our Price: $11.96 (20% OFF)_|_More Info

Katagiri's teaching was at once powerful, gentle, and sometimes almost even casual. For Dosho, some of the richest teachings came in these simple, casual moments during everyday interactions. The structure of this book is built around a series of such vivid truth-happening places, evocative of the ancient koans of the Zen tradition, touching on such topics as the nature and purpose of Zen, the dynamic and working of realization, and, of course, the functioning of the teacher-student relationship.

ISBN:0-86171-568-3_|_160 pages_|_Our Price: $12.76 (20% OFF)_|_More Info

The Lawudo Lama will appeal to travelers to Nepal, to Buddhist practitioners, and to scholars trying to understand the culture of the region. It is well documented, and is accompanied by more than 125 color and black and white photos, drawings, lineage charts, and maps.

ISBN:0-86171-183-1_|_480 pp_|_Our Price: $17.56 (20% OFF)_|_More Info

This book, a collection of papers presented at a conference at the University of Oxford, presents a multifaceted, multitradition portrait of Buddhist biographies. Part 1 deals with biographies of the Buddha, investigating Chinese and Pali sources and the Sanskrit dramatizations of Asvaghosa. Part 2 contains modern Buddhist life stories, including a rare autobiography from Burma. Part 3 explores the Tibetan tradition, including such well-known figures as Milarepa, Shakya Chogden, and Karmapa Mikyö Dorje. Together, these biographies and studies reveal the rich diversity of Buddhism's myriad incarnations over its long history and the dynamic scope of its thought and practice.

ISBN:0-86171-578-0_|_352 pages_|_Our Price: $19.96 (20% OFF)_|_More Info

Though he lived centuries ago in a culture vastly different from our own, Zen Master Bassui speaks with a voice that spans time and space to address our own modern challenges-in our life, and in our spiritual practice.

Like the revered Master Dogen several generations before him, Bassui was dissatisfied with what passed for Zen training, and taught a radically reenergized form of Zen, emphasizing deep and direct penetration into one's own true nature. And also like Dogen, Bassui uses powerful and often poetic language to take familiar Buddhist concepts recast them in a radically non-dual Zen light, making ancient doctrines vividly relevant.

This edition of Mud and Watercontains several teachings never before translated.

ISBN:0-86171-320-6_|_192 pp_|_Our Price: $11.96 (20% OFF)_|_More Info

All the bowing and meditating and wood-chopping that is part and parcel of her retreat is hardly first nature, but the good-humored and tenacious Dobisz is able to adapt, and to relate her hundred days with moving insight and humanity. Her Solitude in fact offers us all a chance to commune with her and to look inside and rediscover our own grace.

ISBN:0-86171-538-1_|_160_|_Our Price: $11.96 (20% OFF)_|_More Info

Her relentless honesty, along with her encouraging voice, is one reason so many contemporary Buddhist teachers recall Upasika Kee so fondly, and so often.

Pure and Simple, the first widely-available collection of her writings, will be gratefully received not only by those who knew Upasika Kee, but by anyone who encounters her for the first time in its pages.

ISBN:0-86171-492-X_|_272 pp_|_Our Price: $13.56 (20% OFF)_|_More Info

At only 24, Maura O'Halloran left her Irish-American family stateside and traveled to Japan, where she began studying under an inscrutable Zen master. She would herself become recognized as a Zen master-in an uncommonly brief amount of time. Pure Heart, Enlightened Mind is Maura's beautifully-written account of her journey. These journal entries and letters home reveal astonishing, wise-beyond-her-years humor, compassion, wisdom, and commitment.

This expanded edition includes never-before-seen entries and poems, the author's unfinished novel, and an afterword that discusses the book's cultural impact. It will be a must-have for Maura's previous fans-and will surely find her thousands of new ones.

ISBN:0-86171-283-8_|_ 320_|_Our Price: $14.36 (20% OFF)_|_More Info

Calvin Malone has plenty to teach us all about ideas that we rarely associate with the penal system: Dignity. Compassion. Freedom behind bars. He speaks from experience: Malone is nearing the end of a 20-year prison sentence himself.

Razor-Wire Dharma is his eloquent, enlightening, and utterly inspiring personal story how he found Buddhism-and real, transformative meaning for his life-despite being in one of the world's harshest environments.

Some of his stories are hilarious, some are harrowing, but all express Buddhist wisdom as vividly as any practitioner could hope to do. Malone is living it, and in the unlikeliest of places. For him, the choice of staying true to his principles often requires that he quite literally jeopardize his life, safety, and the few small comforts available to him to try to do what's right.

Razor-Wire Dharma makes it clear that if Calvin can do what's right in jail, he can do it anywhere. What's more, it proves that we can, too.

ISBN:0-86171-563-2_|_248 pages_|_Our Price: $13.56 (20% OFF)_|_More Info

Readers of Zen will also find the introduction and translation by Francis Dojun Cook, the scholar whose insights brought Zen Master Dogen to life in How to Raise an Ox, of great value.

ISBN:0-86171-330-3_|_336 pp_|_Our Price: $13.56 (20% OFF)_|_More Info

Half raucous adventure and half inspirational memoir, Rude Awakenings documents an unusual pilgrimage. Two very different men—life-loving naturalist Nick Scott and austere Buddhist monk Ajahn Sucitto—together spend six months retracing the Buddha's footsteps through India. Told alternately by Sucitto and Scott in their distinctive voices, this story blends self-effacing humor, philosophical explorations, drama, travel observations, and the occasional giant fruit bat. Rude Awakenings is a heady record of survival and spirituality set against the dramatic backdrop of one of India's most lawless regions.

ISBN:0-86171-485-7_|_336 pp_|_Our Price: $13.56 (20% OFF)_|_More Info

Filled with lively anecdotes and illustrations, Sons of the Buddha tells the early life stories of three master Buddhist preachers from Thailand, each of whom also has followings in North America. Ajahn Buddhadasa (1906-93), Ajahn Panya (b. 1911), and Ajahn Jumnien (b. 1936), all monks and abbots of monasteries, have been highly influential in Thai society and tireless in their work and teaching.

A preacher must have common sense, know how to turn everyday life experience into Dharma lessons, and be able to accurately assess the needs of his audience. Sons of the Buddha shows how three boys evolved into remarkable embodiments of the "preacher" ideal. Each would effect changes in moral attitudes and Dharma practices, restore Buddhism's social dimension, bridge the divide separating laypeople and monastics, and champion an openmindedness toward other religions. In these delightful stories-full of local color-we see what it was that led them to become so fearless and influential.

ISBN:0-86171-536-5_|_304_|_Our Price: $15.16 (20% OFF)_|_More Info

A pioneer in introducing Tibetan Buddhism to the West, Chogyam Trungpa is also one of its most controversial figures: he often defied notions of how a holy man should act, and his unconventional behavior and "crazy wisdom" caused some to view him with suspicion. But he was above all known for his compassion, insight, and vision and was immediately recognized as a living Buddha by a generation of spiritual seekers.

One of those seekers was Jeremy Hayward, who in little time became a close confidante of the teacher. Warrior King of Shambhala, Hayward's intimate memoir of Trungpa, begins with their first meeting in 1970, progressing year by year until Trungpa's death and beyond. Hayward vividly describes Trungpa's powerful, direct way of working with students, his groundbreaking work in bringing Buddhism to the West, and the teachings Trungpa presented each year. He also describes his own personal spiritual journey with the inimitable Chogyam Trungpa as his guide.

ISBN:0-86171-546-2_|_496_|_Our Price: $15.16 (20% OFF)_|_More Info

Featuring titles such as "The Two-Finger Smile" and "The Worm and His Lovely Pile of Dung," these wry and witty stories provide playful, pithy takes on the basic building blocks of everyday life. Suitable for children, adults, and anyone in between, this eloquent volume wraps insight and inspiration inside of a good old yarn.

ISBN:0-86171-278-1_|_288 pp_|_Our Price: $12.76 (20% OFF)_|_More Info

In Women Practicing Buddhism, you'll meet a diverse sampling of contemporary Buddhist women, from those who are crucial to the community's organizational fabric to others who infuse their art and activism with the Dharma.

Contributors include: Author and social activist bell hooks * Composer, singer, filmmaker, choreographer, and director Meredith Monk * American-born Tibetan Buddhist nun Karma Lekshe Tsomo * former Tricycle editor Helen Tworkov * Jane Hirshfield, prize-winning poet, translator, and essayist * Pat Enkyo O'Hara, abbot of NYC's Village Zendo * and many more.

Women Practicing Buddhism is a kind of mosaic portrait of the Buddhist women's movement, revealing some of the many ways that the Dharma returns the embrace of those women who are coming to it and making it their own.

ISBN:0-86171-539-X_|_256 pp_|_Our Price: $13.56 (20% OFF)_|_More Info

The stories in You Are Not Here and Other Works of Buddhist Fiction dramatize the spirit of Buddhism-often with wit, always with verve, and each in some distinctly vivid way. Only a few of these stories touch on the Dharma explicitly and this book takes you on an inward tour across the whole world-to the jungles of Indonesia, a fog-shrouded park in San Francisco, the sun-blistered African veldt, a Burmese monastery surrounded by gun-fire, and the church-like sanctuary of a Nebraska barn, just to name a few. Collectively these stories paint a living portrait of the face of Buddhism, and readers may discover that that face is a strangely familiar one-and that every journey only ever leads home.

Edited by Keith Kachtick-the author of Hungry Ghost: A Novel (A New York Times Notable Book)-You Are Not Here and Other Works of Buddhist Fiction offers more surprising and transcendent work from some of fiction's famous names, alongside that of names you've never heard before-but surely will again:

Lama Surya Das, Keith Kachtick, Robert Olen Butler, Kate Wheeler, Anne Donovan, Samantha Schoech, Mary Yukari Waters, Andrew Foster Altschul, Jess Row, Anh Chi Pham, Sean Murphy, Pico Iyer, Dan Zigmond, Michele Martin, Sean Hoade, Jeff Davis, Jake Lorfing, Geshe Michael Roach, Anne Carolyn Klein, Dean Sluyter, Mark Salzman, and Hal Hallstein.

ISBN:0-86171-291-9_|_256 pp_|_Our Price: $13.56 (20% OFF)_|_More Info