Freedom Through Understanding

An eBook version of this title can be found on Google Play. In Lama Yeshe’s and Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s first trip to Europe in 1975 they offered a weekend seminar based on their famous month-long Kopan meditation courses. Preceded by Lama Yeshe’s lecture on meditation at Kensington Town Hall, these teachings at Royal Holloway College, Surrey, encompass the entire Buddhist path to enlightenment. This short course was also videotaped and is available on a historic DVD also entitled Freedom Through Understanding. This book is made possible by kind supporters of the Archive who, like you, appreciate how we make these teachings freely available in so many ways, including in our website for instant reading, listening or downloading, and as printed and electronic books. Our website offers immediate access to thousands of pages of teachings and hundreds of audio recordings by some of the greatest lamas of our time. Our photo gallery and our ever-popular books are also freely accessible there. Please help us increase our efforts to spread the Dharma for the happiness and benefit of all beings. You can find out more about becoming a supporter of the Archive and see all we have to offer by visiting our website. Thank you so much, and please enjoy this book.

Extinguish anger forever and find true happiness with this step-by-step guide. Anger is a potent poison that ruins health and damages relationships. In today’s world of Twitter feuds, road rage, and internet trolls, it is all too easy for anger to grab hold of us. This timely book offers practical advice on how to put aside anger and ego and embrace laughter and reason. Like a friendly family physician, Venerable Sumanasara helps you see what triggers your anger, what affect it has on you, and what you can do about it. Maybe you have trouble at work or at home, maybe you had a difficult childhood, or maybe you just get angry in traffic. In short, bite-sized chapters, he offers wisdom, along with a laugh, that you can use. Drawing on easy-to-follow metaphors and parables from a variety of cultural traditions, in an accessible, conversational style free of dogma, Venerable Sumanasara shows us how to manage our emotions so that we can lead healthier, happier lives finally freed from anger.

"This book offers the first comprehensive introduction to academic freedom, surveying its history and application to research, teaching, and public expression, as well as its treatment in the legal arena and its applicability to students"--

The Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive (LYWA) is the collected works of Lama Thubten Yeshe and Kyabje Lama Thubten Zopa Rinpoche. The Archive was founded in 1996 by Lama Zopa Rinpoche, its spiritual director, to make available in various ways the teachings it contains. In this book, Lama Zopa Rinpoche gives us the answer to the perennial question of how to integrate Dharma with our daily lives - not only Dharma, but the best Dharma, bodhicitta: the determination to attain enlightenment for the sake of all sentient beings. It contains a public talk explaining the purpose of life in general and the practice of guru devotion, a wide array of techniques for transforming ordinary actions into causes for enlightenment and advice on establishing a daily practice. By putting these precious teachings into practice, beginners and advanced students alike will truly be able to make the lives highly meaningful.

The path to freedom is filled with questions and uncertainty. Is it possible to truly know who we are? Do our lives have a purpose, or are we just accidental? What are we meant to contribute? What are we meant to become, to create, and to share? In The Book of Understanding, Osho, one of the most provocative thinkers of our time, challenges us to understand our world and ourselves in a new and radical way. The first step toward understanding, he says, is to question and doubt all that we have been taught to believe. All our lives we’ve been handed so-called truths by countless others—beliefs we learned to accept without reason. It is only in questioning our beliefs, assumptions, and prejudices that we can begin to uncover our own unique voice and heal the divisions within us and without. Once we discover our authentic self, we can embrace all aspects of the human experience—from the earthy, pleasure-loving qualities that characterize Zorba the Greek to the watchful, silent qualities of Gautam the Buddha. We can become whole and live with integrity, able to respond with creativity and compassion to the religious, political, and cultural divides that currently plague our society. In this groundbreaking work, Osho identifies, loosens, and ultimately helps to untie the knots of fear and misunderstanding that restrict us—leaving us free to discover and create our own individual path to freedom.

This book is drawn from Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s graduated path to enlightenment teachings given over a four decade period, starting from the early 1970s, and deals with how rare and precious it is to receive not just a human rebirth but a perfect human rebirth, with eight freedoms and ten richnesses, the best possible conditions for practicing Dharma. FPMT Lineage is a series of books of Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s teachings on the graduated path to enlightenment (lam-rim). This series will be the most extensive contemporary lam-rim commentary available and comprises the essence of the FPMT’s education program. This book is made possible by kind supporters of the Archive who, like you, appreciate how we make these teachings freely available in so many ways, including in our website for instant reading, listening or downloading, and as printed and electronic books. Our website offers immediate access to thousands of pages of teachings and hundreds of audio recordings by some of the greatest lamas of our time. Our photo gallery and our ever-popular books are also freely accessible there. Please help us increase our efforts to spread the Dharma for the happiness and benefit of all beings. You can find out more about becoming a supporter of the Archive and see all we have to offer by visiting our website. Thank you so much, and please enjoy this e-book!

The pinnacle of Buddhism's understanding of reality is the emptiness of all things. Exploring reality towards the realization of emptiness is shockingly radical. It uncovers an exhilarating freedom with nowhere to stand, while engendering a loving joy that engages the world. This path-breaking book employs the emptiness teachings in a fresh, innovative way. Goode and Sander don't rely solely on historical models and meditations. Instead, they have created over eighty original meditations on the emptiness of the self, issues in everyday life, and spiritual paths. These meditations are guided both by Buddhist insights and cutting-edge Western tools of inquiry, such as positive psychology, neuroscience, linguistic philosophy, deconstruction, and scepticism. The result is a set of liberating and usable tools for Buddhists and non-Buddhists alike.