Dharma Library

This book comprises fourteen essays which originally appeared as articles or talks by one of the leading theoreticians and popularisers of socially engaged Buddhism.

'Liberated Buddhism' is the focus of the first half. By this Loy means that "Buddhism needs to take advantage of its encounter with modern / postmodern civilisation - offering a greater challenge than Buddhism has ever faced before…

I am not normally a consumer of biographies but this is one I wanted to read. One of the first things I did when I began the Buddhist path was to buy a copy of Suzuki’s ‘Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind’. I can still recall standing in a bookshop in London, wondering which book for beginners to buy. I choose the thinnest, what seemed to be the simplest and the one with a picture of the nice man on the…

What is the place of Zen in contemporary thought, the relation of Buddhist metaphysics to philosophy and the value of ancient texts to thinking people today? These and related questions form the subject matter of this intelligent, subtle and provoking book. Dale S. Wright, Professor of Religious Studies, Occidental College, Los Angeles, provides a thought provoking read especially for those of us…

Book review by Pamela Hopkinson

Not living very close to a local group, I place great store by the books I read on Buddhism. I picked this one up because Surya Das has constructed the book following the Eight-Fold Path, and I'd been meditating on parts of this for a long time.

Inside I found one of the liveliest and most enjoyable books on Buddhism that I have read for a long time. With the aim…

I've been throwing basketballs for almost as long as I have been sitting. At about the same time that I began to sit regularly I started attending a Keep Fit evening class where basketball is the staple diet. So most Thursday evenings will see me along with a group of similarly middle aged and slightly overweight (?) men running up and down a gym trying to throw a ball into a suspended basket.

So…

"a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his life as if he were telling a story" Jean-Paul Sartre

I have always been fascinated by the art of story telling and this short book was my first "taste of Zen" through the medium of the story. It is a compilation of a series…

The editors of this book Dr John Crook, Reader in Ethology at Bristol University and Buddhist Scholar and teacher, and Dr David Fontana, Reader in Educational Psychology at Cardiff University, author and therapist, have brought together seventeen essays, most of which are based upon papers presented at a conference on 'Eastern Approaches to Self and Mind' sponsored by the British Psychological…