The Heart Attack Sutra

A guide to the famous Heart Sūtra that reveals the tenderness and compassion underlying the striking rhetoric of this popular Buddhist text The radical message of the Heart Sūtra, one of Buddhism’s most famous texts, is a sweeping attack on everything we hold most dear: our troubles, the world as we know it, even the teachings of the Buddha himself. Several of the Buddha’s followers are said to have suffered heart attacks and died when they first heard its assertion of the basic groundlessness of our existence—hence the title of this book. Overcoming fear, the Buddha teaches, is not to be accomplished by shutting down or building walls around oneself, but instead by opening up to understand the illusory nature of everything we fear—including ourselves. In this book of teachings, Karl Brunnhölzl guides practitioners through this ‘crazy’ sutra to the wisdom and compassion that lie at its core.

A fifth-century Indian Buddhist monk, Bodhidharma is credited with bringing Zen to China. Although the tradition that traces its ancestry back to him did not flourish until nearly two hundred years after his death, today millions of Zen Buddhists and students of kung fu claim him as their spiritual father. While others viewed Zen practice as a purification of the mind or a stage on the way to perfect enlightenment, Bodhidharma equated Zen with buddhahood and believed that it had a place in everyday life. Instead of telling his disciples to purify their minds, he pointed them to rock walls, to the movements of tigers and cranes, to a hollow reed floating across the Yangtze. This bilingual edition, the only volume of the great teacher's work currently available in English, presents four teachings in their entirety. "Outline of Practice" describes the four all-inclusive habits that lead to enlightenment, the "Bloodstream Sermon" exhorts students to seek the Buddha by seeing their own nature, the "Wake-up Sermon" defends his premise that the most essential method for reaching enlightenment is beholding the mind. The original Chinese text, presented on facing pages, is taken from a Ch'ing dynasty woodblock edition.

This short gem of a book shows how distorted perceptions and disturbing emotions—arising from our misunderstanding of reality—can be completely uprooted, resulting in freedom from suffering.

Lex Hixon's "contemplative expansion" of forty passages from the Prajnaparamita Sutra, the basic scripture of all schools of Mahayana Buddhism, yields a text of devotional beauty that is at once dramatic and uplifting. The text sets forth the Bodhisattva path to enlightenment. Features a foreword by renowned American Buddhist scholar Dr. Robert A. Thurman.

The beauty and luster of passion and love counterpointed by the darkness of the criminal underworld and the Cambodian holocaust taunt Jason, a young American college grad. He and Rachany, a beautiful woman who works at the Russian Market, are pursued by a mysterious foe, and they flee across Cambodia, Laos and Thailand. They see elephants in misty forests, exotic tribes, ancient cities... They end up in Burma's rebellion, where they are pulled into the violence, into the core of journeys - the adventure of life tinged with the search for meaning, purpose and love. It's a coming-of-age story that shows we all should be careful what we wish for. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Richard Marranca has published many stories, essays and poems and has three online books available. He has taught for twenty-five years, culminating in a Fulbright to teach American studies at the University of Munich. He is president of the New Jersey chapter of Fulbright and a trustee of New Jersey College English Association. Richard has a doctorate from New York University where he studied world literature, comparative religion and creative writing. He has traveled extensively and also received six National Endowments for the Humanities summer grants. He enjoys outdoor activities, yoga and exploration. RichardMarranca.com

Thunderous Silence throws light on the Heart Sutra--a pithy encapsulation of the essence of Perfection of Wisdom literature--using stop-by-step analysis and an easy, conversational voice. Dosung Yoo examines the sutra phrase by phrase, using rich explanations and metaphors drawn from Korean folklore, quantum physics, Charles Dickens, and everything in between to clarify subtle concepts for the reader. This book invites us to examine the fundamentals of Buddhism--the Four Noble Truths, emptiness, enlightenment--through the prism of the Heart Sutra. Both those new to Buddhism and longtime practitioners looking to revisit a core text from a fresh perspective will find this work appealing.

A key Dzogchen text—available together with its Tibetan commentaries, including from the fifteenth Karmapa—from a preeminent translator. The Aspiration Prayer of Samantabhadra, one of the most famous and often-recited Dzogchen texts, is at once an entreaty by the primordial buddha, Samantabhadra, that all sentient beings recognize the nature of their minds and thus become buddhas, and also a wake-up call by our own buddha nature itself. This monumental text outlines the profound view of Dzogchen in a nutshell and, at the same time, provides clear instructions on how to discover the wisdom of a buddha in the very midst of afflictions. In this volume, Karl Brunnhölzl offers translations of three versions of the Aspiration Prayer and accompanies them with translations of the commentaries by Jigmé Lingpa, the Fifteenth Karmapa, and Tsültrim Sangpo. He offers further contextualization with his rich annotation and appendices, which include additional translation from Jigmé Lingpa, Longchenpa, and Patrul Rinpoche. This comprehensive, comprehensible book illuminates this profound text and greatly furthers our understanding of Dzogchen—and of our own nature.

An intoduction to the teachings of Hakuin and the study of Rinzai Zen.