Dogen’s Extensive Record Now 40% Off.

Get your copy of the beautiful hardcover edition now for a special 40% discount.

Dogen’s Extensive Record is the first-ever complete and scholarly translation of the monumental Eihei Koroku into English. This
edition contains extensive and detailed research and annotation by scholar, translator, and Zen teacher Taigen Dan Leighton, 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 American Zen master John Daido Loori.

“A valuable asset not just for students of the Zen teacher Dogen but for all students of Zen and Buddhism in general.”—Buddhadharma

Order your copy from our website and get 40% off and free shipping.

Free Shipping on all Orders of $25 or More

As a special holiday discount and thank you for all of your support Wisdom is offering free shipping within the U.S. on all orders of $25 or more that are placed through our website.

Each time you purchase a book directly from Wisdom Publications you play a key roll in supporting the publication of authentic Buddhist teachings for the benefit of all. As a way of showing our appreciation for your continued support, we are offering free shipping on any order totaling $25 or more.

There is still time to order the beautiful Tibetan Art Calendar 2010. It includes thirteen antique Tibetan thangka’s and makes the perfect holiday gift.

Visit our website here.

Thank you and happy holidays.

New from the Studies in Indian and Tibetan Buddhism series: Buddhist Teaching in India

“In this wonderful contribution to the field of Buddhist studies, Johannes Bronkhorst provides a historical context for the earliest centuries of the Buddha’s teachings in India. He delineates what the Buddha inherited, transformed, and originated, and the ways that scholars, both American and European, have struggled to make sense of Buddhist doctrine and its place in Indian history. Bronkhorst explains the central ideas of Indian Buddhism with great dexterity, placing them in conversation with the teachings of other traditions, such as Jainism and Brahmanism. With abundant examples from canonical materials, Bronkhorst makes the subtleties of scholarly debates come alive for both laymen and scholars.”-Andy Rotman, Professor of Religion, Smith College, and translator of Divine Stories: Divyavadana

About the Studies in Indian and Tibetan Buddhism series:

This series provides a forum for publishing outstanding new contributions to scholarship on Indian and Tibetan Buddhism and also to make accessible seminal research not widely known outside a narrow specialist audience, including translations of appropriate monographs and collections of articles from other languages. The series strives to shed light on the Indic Buddhist traditions by exposing them to historical-critical inquiry, illuminating through contextualization and analysis these traditions’ unique heritage and the signifcance of their contribution to the world’s religious and philosophical achievements. We are pleased to make available to scholars and the intellectually curious some of the best contemporary research in the Indian and Tibetan traditions.

Get you copy here.

History in the Making?

A guest post by Wisdom editor David Kittelstrom.

The first Theravada bhikkhuni (nun) ordination in Australia, and the first in the Thai Forest Tradition anywhere in the world, was performed in Bodhinyana Monastery in Western Australia on October 22nd. Four nuns from the nearby Dhammasara Nuns Monastery took ordination: Vayama, Nirodha, Seri, and Hassapañña. The second half of the ordination ceremony was performed by  Ajahn Brahm—the abbot of Bodhinyana—along with other monks from the monastery.

Many feel reestablishing the full ordination of nuns, which was first established by the Buddha himself  is vital for ensuring the respect and vitality of the Buddhist Sangha in the modern world and accords with the essential message of the Buddha. As with monks, well-trained and observant nuns are a wonderful field of merit, wonderful exemplars, and a wonderful source of teachings for all who seek to live life according to the Dharma, and seeds of peace for the world as a whole.

While the Chinese tradition has preserved female ordination, the lineage died out in the Tibetan and Theravada traditions. In recent years, women within these traditions have been taking full ordination nonetheless, but the practice has not yet been endorsed by a consensus of senior lineage holders, the resistance coming primarily from older monks in Asia. The Dalai Lama has been vocal in his support and an important international conference to advance the issue was held in Hamburg, Germany in 2007. Proceedings from this conference will appear soon in Wisdom’s forthcoming book Dignity and Discipline: Reviving Full Ordination for Buddhist Nuns.

The  ordination drew a severe reaction from conservative lineage holders in Thailand. The monks of the Ajahn Chah tradition headed at Wat Pa Pong complained that they had not been consulted and called Ajahn Brahm to a meeting in Northeast Thailand this past Sunday, November 1st, where they voted to expel him from the Wat Pa Pong community.

Ajahn Sujato, another central figure in the ceremony, has been posting regular updates on his blog as events unfold. Ajahn Brahm’s comments from the time of the ordination can be heard here. There is also apparently a group on Facebook with lively discussion of the event and its ramifications.

Karma Lekshe Tsomo, a Buddhist nun and a professor of Religious Studies at the University of San Diego, says in Dignity and Discipline, “Just as countries who refuse women the right to vote are considered backward today, Buddhists will certainly go down on the wrong side of history if they deny fundamental rights and freedoms to women…Recognizing full ordination for women is not only a matter of social justice, it is also simply a matter of common sense.”

Dignity and Discipline goes into these issues in great detail. I would highly suggest reading it when it comes out. The analyses of scripture presented in that book would indicate that the means exist to pursue bhikkhuni ordination in keeping with the Vinaya,  but that what is missing is the will to do so.

For photo’s from the event click here.

New Low Price for The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha

Wisdom has recently reprinted the classic, The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the Majjhima Nikaya.

In this new printing we have lowered the price from $65.00 to $49.95. The book remains in its hardcover format.

The 152 discourses of this major collection combine a rich variety of contextual settings with deep and comprehensive teachings that illuminate the suttas of the Pali Canon.Winner of the 1995 Choice Magazine Outstanding Academic Book Award, and the Tricycle Prize for Excellence in Buddhist Publishing for Dharma Discourse.

Order your copy here.

“What Mindfulness Does” — An excerpt from Mindful Teaching and Teaching Mindfulness

From Shambhala SunSpace.

In this excerpt from Deborah Schoeberlein’s new book, Mindful Teaching and Teaching Mindfulness: A Guide for Anyone Who Teaches Anything, we learn what mindfulness is, what it isn’t, and how the benefits of its practice might show themselves.

Mindfulness isn’t a panacea for the world’s problems, but it does provide a practical strategy for working directly with reality. You might not be able to change certain things in your life, at work, or at home, but you can change how you experience those immutable aspects of life, work, and home. And the more present you are to your own life, the more choices you have that influence its unfolding.

With mindfulness, you’re more likely to view a really challenging class as just that, “a really challenging class,” instead of feeling that the experience has somehow ruined your entire day. Purposefully taking a mental step back, in order to notice what happened without immediately engaging with intense emotions and reactions, provides a kind of protection against unconstructive responses and the self-criticism that can slip out and make a hard thing even harder. Even just pausing to take a breath can help you slow down, see a broader perspective and redirect the energy of the situation.

I’ve had moments (as I’m sure have you) when a cascade of little annoyances gathered momentum and I lost it—only to regret my outburst later. Developing mindfulness promotes awareness of the cascade, but from a distance. This way, I have a better chance of working with my assumptions without losing my perspective. Annoyances can be events that don’t have to gain momentum, rather than triggers for more and more difficulty. Mindfully noticing the discrepancy between what I wanted to accomplish and what I actually achieved provides useful information without the distraction of unproductive anger, frustration, or disappointment.

I’ve also known days when one challenging class rattled me to my core and poisoned whatever came next. Even after school, such experiences often lingered—as if the actual class weren’t bad enough, the ongoing mental repercussions were worse. If this has happened to you, then you’ll know exactly how painful and frustrating this feels. It’s easy to torment yourself by questioning your competence as a teacher when a forty-five minute class can cause you to take students’ poor behavior personally and lose your center. Even reflecting, “I should have handled that differently since I’m a professional after all—and I’m the adult in a room full of kids!” doesn’t really provide any practical guidance for the future.

So what’s the answer? Put simply, part of it is all about mindfulness: practice and application, and more practice and yet more application. Practice begins with developing mindfulness in a calm, quiet place, a place where the practice is comparatively easy. Application is about walking into a more challenging situation in real life, like your most difficult class, with increased skills and the confidence to help you stay focused, present, flexible, and available. Should you lose the quality of mindfulness you’ll eventually notice what’s happened. And when you do, you can practice returning your attention to paying attention, and redirect your awareness onto the experience of awareness. As you practice and apply mindfulness, you’ll gain skills that will help you accurately assess challenges and handle them with greater ease.

Having techniques that help you manage your own experiences and emotions is more comfortable than feeling powerless as a result of your emotions and habits or, worse, buffeted about by the changing winds of other people’s behaviors and the environment. It’s a simple fact of life that we cannot change other people to suit our will. Yet you can change your own habits and your relationship to your reactions—but reaching that goal requires effective strategies.

For more check out the book here.

How Mindfulness Can Make for Better Doctors

From The New York Times

PAULINE W. CHEN, M.D.

Published: October 15, 2009

One night during my training, long after all the other doctors had fled the hospital, I found a senior surgeon still on the wards working on a patient note. He was a surgeon with extraordinary skill, a doctor of few words whose folksy quips had become the stuff of department legend. “I’m sorry you’re still stuck here,” I said, walking up to him.

He looked up from the chart. “I’m not working tomorrow, so I’m just fine.”

I had just reviewed the next day’s operating room schedule and knew he had a full day of cases. I began to contradict him, but he held his hand up to stop me.

“Time in the O.R.,” he said with a broad grin, “is not work; it’s play.”

For several years my peers and I relished anecdotes like this one because we believed we knew exactly what our mentor had meant. All of us had had the experience of “disappearing” into the meditative world of a procedure and re-emerging not exhausted, but refreshed. The ritual ablutions by the scrub sink washed away the bacteria clinging to our skin and the endless paperwork threatening to choke our enthusiasm. A single rhythmic cardiac monitor replaced the relentless calls of our beepers; and nothing would matter during the long operations except the patient under our knife.

We had entered “the zone.” We were focused on nothing else but our patients and that moment.

But my more recent conversations with surgical colleagues and physicians from other specialties have had a distinctly different timbre. While we continue to deal with many of the same pressures that my mentor dealt with — decreasing autonomy, increasing administrative requirements, less control over our practice environment — the demands on our attention have gone, well, viral.

Extreme multitasking has invaded the patient-doctor relationship.

Click here to read the entire article.

For related Wisdom titles click here.

Jane Dobisz at Boston University

One Hundred Days of Solitude author Jane Dobisz ( Zen Master Bon Yeon ) will give a dharma talk and a question and answer session on Wednesday, October 21 from 7:30 to 8:30 PM on the Boston University campus at Sargent College, room 101.

In One Hundred Days of Solitude: Losing My Self and Finding Grace on a Zen Retreat,American teacher of Korean Zen Jane Dobisz (Zen Master Bon Yeon), recalls her first solitary meditation stint in the woods. Luckily, this is not just a recounting of a winter’s worth of cabin fever. Instead, Dobisz takes us into her cabin, and into her mind, as she tries–at least temporarily–to live a Walden-like existence.

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.

Click here for more.

Buddhism Roots Deeply in America

From New America Media, Commentary, Andrew Lam, Posted: Oct 18, 2009 //

While the Dalai Lama was snubbed by President Barack Obama, who refused to meet with him last week, there was an open door policy everywhere else in our nation’s capital – from congressional receptions to synagogues and schools.

One scene in particular is striking: the most famous monk of the 20th Century on the dais, lecturing on wisdom in the modern world as hundreds of enthralled monks and laymen look on below. The scene harks back to the golden era of Tibet, with the halls festooned with hundreds of strings of colorful Tibetan prayer flags, except the event took place at American University.

In the last half of the 20th Century, America cunningly exported itself overseas, marketing its images, ideologies, products and religions with ingenuity and zeal, but what it has not been able to fully assess or prepare for are the effects in reverse. For if Americanization is a large part of globalization, the Easternization of the West, too, is the other side of the phenomenon.

I take it as some cosmic law of exchange that if Disneyland pops up in Hong Kong and Tokyo, Buddhist temples can sprout up in Los Angeles, home of the magic kingdom. Indeed, it comes as no surprise to many Californians that scholars have agreed that the most complex Buddhist city in the world is nowhere in Asia but Los Angeles itself, where there are more than 300 Buddhist temples and centers, representing nearly all of Buddhist practices around the world.

Over the past 25 years, Buddhism has become the third most popular religion in America behind Christianity and Judaism, according to a 2008 report from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. Evidence of Buddhism spreading deep roots in America is abundant.

Read the rest here.

Momentary Buddhahood in Elephant Journal

“In this well-written book by Anyen Rinpoche, the connection between mindfulness and Vajrayana practice is explored. Rinpoche advocates for the idea that mindfulness is not something to be focused on solely at the beginning of practice, but should be continued throughout. Momentary Buddhahood also discusses the idea that achieving enlightenment isn’t an all or nothing proposition; that it happens incrementally; and from time to time, each of us experiences glimpses of total enlightenment, however fleeting. At the base of all of it though, is mindfulness, which should not be thought of as exclusive to Zen nor should it be thought of as non-essential to Tantric practice; it is essential to all phases and all aspects of Buddhism, and especially to those who have taken the Bodhisattva Vow. Anyen Rinpoche will be at the Boulder Bookstore tonight to speak about and sign his book. “–Elephant Journal