Early Buddhism

Buddhism is practiced by hundreds of millions of people worldwide, from Tibetan caves to Tokyo temples to redwood retreats. To an outside viewer, it might be hard to see what they all have in common. In Buddhism, His Holiness the Dalai Lama and American Buddhist nun Thubten Chodron map out with clarity the convergences and the divergences between the two major strains of Buddhism - the Sanskrit traditions of Tibet and East Asia and the Pali traditions of Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia.

This user’s guide to Buddhist basics takes the most commonly asked questions - beginning with “What is the essence of the Buddha’s teachings?” - and provides simple answers in plain English. Thubten Chodron’s responses to the questions that always seem to arise among people approaching Buddhism make this an exceptionally complete and accessible introduction - as well as a manual for living a more peaceful, mindful, and satisfying Life.

This landmark collection is the definitive introduction to the Buddha's teachings - in his own words. The American scholar-monk Bhikkhu Bodhi, whose voluminous translations have won widespread acclaim, here presents selected discourses of the Buddha from the Pali Canon, the earliest record of what the Buddha taught. Divided into 10 thematic chapters, In the Buddha's Words reveals the full scope of the Buddha's discourses, from family life and marriage to renunciation and the path of insight.

With poetry and clarity, Thich Nhat Hanh imparts comforting wisdom about the nature of suffering and its role in creating compassion, love, and joy – all qualities of enlightenment. “Thich Nhat Hanh shows us the connection between personal, inner peace, and peace on earth.”—His Holiness...

The observations and insights of the Buddha are practical and eminently down to earth, dealing exclusively with awareness in the here and now. Buddhism Plain and Simple offers listeners these fundamental teachings, stripped of cultural trappings that have accumulated around Buddhism over the past 25 centuries.

Andrew Skilton - Senior Research Fellow in Buddhist Studies, Kings College, London - explains the development of the basic concepts of Buddhism and its spread across the continents during its 2,500 years of history. He begins with a close look at Buddhism in India, where it flourished until the 12th/13th century CE, charting the growth of different schools and practices. By the time it disappeared from its homeland midway through the millennium, it had become established in Central Asia and the Far East in a variety of forms.

Before it was a religion, a culture, or even a system of meditation, what was Buddhism? On Buddhism Without Beliefs, celebrated teacher, translator, and former Buddhist monk Stephen Batchelor takes us back to the first years after the Buddha's awakening to reveal the root insights of Buddhism hidden beneath centuries of history and interpretation.

This unique biography, told in a lively manner through six 'voices', presents the Buddha's revolutionary solution for humanity that lends to the end of ill will, craving and delusion. It goes back to the earliest sources of the Buddha's life and teachings, drawing as it does from the Pali Canon which was said to record the words that the Buddha spoke, the events that happened, and his specific teachings on which the world-wide religion was based.

In this simple, beautifully written book, David Michie opens the door to the core teachings of Tibetan Buddhism. With wry, self-deprecating humour, he shows us how he began to incorporate Buddhist practices into his daily life. He explains how he came to understand the difference between the temporary pleasures of ordinary life, and the profound sense of well-being and heart-felt serenity that comes from connecting with our inner nature.

How do we make sense of the Muslims of India? Do they form a political community? Does the imagined conflict between Islam and modernity affect the Muslims' political behaviour in this country? Are Muslim religious institutions-mosques and madrasas-directly involved in politics? Do they instruct...

Around 2500 years ago a thirty-five-year-old man named Siddhartha had a mystical insight under a peepul tree in north-eastern India, in a place now revered as Bodhgaya. Today, more than 300 million people across the globe consider themselves beneficiaries of Gautama Buddha’s insight, and...

Mark Siderits's The Buddha's Teachings As Philosophy explores three different systems of thought that arose from core claims of the Buddha. By detailing and critically examining key arguments made by the Buddha and developed by later Buddhist philosophers, Siderits investigates the Buddha's teachings as philosophy: a set of claims—in this case, claims about the nature of the world and our place in it—supported by rational argumentation and, here, developed with a variety of systematic results.

One of the earliest of all Buddhist texts, the Atthakavagga, or Book of Eights, is a remarkable document, not only because it comes from the earliest strain of the literature - before the Buddha, as the title suggests, came to be thought of as a "Buddhist" - but also because its approach to awakening is so simple and free of adherence to any kind of ideology. Instead the Atthakavagga points to a direct and simple approach for attaining peace without requiring the adherence to doctrine.

The Theragatha is one of the most striking texts in the Pali Canon. It is a collection of 264 poems or verses - some short, some long - by monks who, traditionally, lived at the time of the Buddha, and which expressed their experience of insight, the culmination of their spiritual path. In fact, it is generally recognised now that this collection was added to over the years, so that some of the verses date from a later time.

This remarkable collection of 73 verses contained in the 'Khuddaka Nikaya' section of the Pali Canon dates from the BC 6th century. It is said to be the earliest voices of women in recorded history. The verses, some brief, some more extended, are the utterances of the bhikkhunis, the nuns at the time of the Buddha, concerning their life and their ‘awakening’.