Impermanent Ways Special

Powerful Buddhist teachings, demystified—from the spiritual mentor of Jon Kabat-Zinn, Sharon Salzberg, and Jack Kornfield Previous books by Ajahn Chah have consisted of collections of short teachings on a wide variety of subjects. This new book focuses on the theme of impermanence, offering powerful remedies for overcoming our deep-seated fear of change, including guidance on letting go of attachments, living in the present, and taking up the practice of meditation. Everything Arises, Everything Falls Away also contains stories and anecdotes about this beloved master's life and his interactions with students, from his youth as a struggling monk to his last years when American students were coming to study with him in significant numbers. These stories help to convey Ajahn Chah's unique spirit and teaching style, allowing readers to know him both through his words and the way in which he lived his life.

In 1987, the original Oxford Publishing Company produced an amalgam of two paperback books written by former Branksome fireman Peter Smith. Mendips Engineman and Footplate over the Mendips told the story of a young railway fireman and his driver Donald Beale. Enthralling the reader with stories of working trains over the old Somerset & Dorset line, the two books encompassed not just ordinary workings, but also early footplate experiences of Peter's own railway career, driving the very last northbound 'Pines Express' in 1962. This edition contains the complete original text and also includes a new set of black and white images with which to illustrate what remains a still lamented cross-country railway. The Somerset and Dorset: From the Footplate is a book to be savored, not just by those who remember this line, but by a whole generation of railway enthusiasts.

As with many other counties, the railway network of Hampshire has diminished to a shadow of its former size over the last two generations. It was not simply the effects of the famous Beeching report that rendered the various routes extinct, but also the actions of the operators themselves. They had already begun to take measures to reduce the number of lines operating, with closures taking place in almost every decade from the 1910s through to the 1970s. As a result of these changes, Hampshire now boasts an impressive network of closed lines, most of which are covered within this book, with stunning vistas capturing their final days as moribund railways. This new album takes readers on a lovely journey back to a time within living memory when the last vestiges of a larger network were still in existence. Compiled by well-known railway historian Jeffery Grayer, this book will be essential reading for all enthusiasts.

• Shows how the certainty of change and loss can support rather than diminish love • Shares practices and meditations to help love endure in the face of loss, disappointment, change, or any of the ways relationships and circumstances are altered by time • Explores how to cultivate gratitude for every expression of love we encounter, strengthen compassion for others, and recognize the power of love after life Collaborating with his late son, Jordan, psychologist Matthew McKay offers five ways to keep love alive in a world of impermanence. He explores how to see and know what we love, how to actively care for what we love, how to have compassion for the suffering of others, how to set the daily intention to act with love, and how to turn toward rather than away from the pain of impermanence. McKay shares practices and meditations to help love endure in the face of loss, disappointment, change, or any of the ways relationships and circumstances are altered by time. He examines what love is and is not, including how not to mistake yearning and neediness for love, sex for love, and attraction to beauty for love. He shows how to cultivate gratitude for every expression of love we encounter, learn to care for things we don’t like, and recognize the power of love after life--a love that reaches beyond death. He also provides concrete exercises for communicating with and channeling messages from loved ones who have crossed over. Ultimately, McKay shows that, by running from pain, we run from love. By avoiding pain, we lose the pathway to connection. Yet, by recognizing love in the heart of pain and loss, by knowing that change and impermanence are inevitable, we can navigate life with a compass pointing to love as true north, learning to love more deeply and making what we love more cherished.

Architects have long operated based on the assumption that a building is 'complete' once construction has finished. Striving to create a perfect building, they wish for it to stay in its original state indefinitely, viewing any subsequent alterations as unintended effects or the results of degeneration. The ideal is for a piece of architecture to remain permanently perfect and complete. This contrasts sharply with reality where changes take place as people move in, requirements change, events happen, and building materials are subject to wear and tear. Rumiko Handa argues it is time to correct this imbalance. Using examples ranging from the Roman Coliseum to Japanese tea rooms, she draws attention to an area that is usually ignored: the allure of incomplete, imperfect and impermanent architecture. By focusing on what happens to buildings after they are ‘complete’, she shows that the ‘afterlife’ is in fact the very ‘life’ of a building. However, the book goes beyond theoretical debate. Addressing professionals as well as architecture students and educators, it persuades architects of the necessity to anticipate possible future changes and to incorporate these into their original designs.

As I leave my time on this earth I know that my footprints on it are silent, invisible and impermanent upon its surface. My existence is only recorded by those I’ve known in my life in their memories of me. These too are impermanent and will in time fade and become no more. This is the cycle of life. I write this book as a personal record of my viewpoints, interpretations of what I have viewed and experienced whilst on my earth walk. My motivation to write it is like many before me and many more after I am gone. To leave a vision in print for others to reference to or use as a signpost towards a path upon which they might like to journey themselves. I write this book of reference mainly for my sons, for when I am gone they will in time forget my voice of guidance and this book will be a way of keeping my teachings and guidance available for them to tap into if they need once I am no longer here physically. I began to write this book in the year 2007. I am now reaching my mid 40’s and am beginning to start my reflective years of living. My generation has been given the name of the X generation, which is interesting due to the content of my book falling into the X factor. However if you ask my sons they would have you believe that I’m well into being OLD. In history men and women were respected in their elder years as the tribes and cultures of those times valued their wisdom, which they contributed to the younger members of the tribe. Storytelling was a valued tradition as it was in that time the only way to hand down knowledge so it could continue on through the younger generations. In our modern society this tradition is considered barbaric and youth is valued now and society continues to endorse how to stay YOUNG!

In Thundering Silence Thich Nhat Hanh presents the early teachings of the Buddha on not becoming so attached to his teachings that we don’t see reality clearly anymore and become stuck in notions and ideologies, however noble they may be. These teachings can liberate us from the prisons of our mental constructions and allow us to enjoy life fully and be a resource for others. Near the end of his life, the Buddha declared, "during forty-five years, I have not said to encourage his disciplines not caught by words or ideas. Thich Nhat Hanh calls this "the roar of a great lion, the thundering silence of a Buddha". The attitude of openness, non-attachment from views, and playfulness offered by the Buddha in this sutra is an important door for us to enter the realm of Mahayana Buddhist thought and practice. In Thich Nhat Hanh's commentaries he makes use of such classic Buddhist allegories, as The Raft is not the Shore, and The Finger Pointing at the Moon and demonstrate the practical applications of these teachings in everyday life. This revised edition contains new material based on Thich Nhat Hanh’s more recent teachings. The new material makes commentaries on the Sutra on Knowing the Better Way to Catch a Snake more accessible and broader in scope.

The first English translation of a classic treatise on how the Tibetan practice of Dzogchen, or Great Perfection, is in fact the culmination of the path of Mahayana Buddhism. Rongzom Chökyi Zangpo wrote this treatise in the eleventh century during the renaissance of Buddhism in Tibet that was spurred by the influx of new translations of Indian Buddhist texts, tantras, and esoteric transmissions from India. For political and religious reasons, adherents of the “new schools” of Tibetan Buddhism fostered by these new translations cast the older tradition of lineages and transmissions as impure and decadent. Rongzompa composed the work translated here in order to clearly and definitively articulate how Dzogchen was very much in line with the wide variety of sutric and tantric teachings espoused by all the Tibetan schools. Using the kinds of philosophic and linguistic analyses favored by the new schools, he demonstrates that the Great Perfection is indeed the culmination and maturation of the Mahāyāna, the Great Vehicle. The central topic of the work is the notion of illusory appearance, for when one realizes deeply that all appearances are illusory, one realizes also that all appearances are in that respect equal. The realization of the equality of all phenomena is said to be the Great Perfection approach to the path, which frees one from both grasping at, and rejecting, appearances. However, for those unable to remain effortlessly within the natural state, in the final chapter Rongzompa also describes how paths with effort are included in the Great Perfection approach.