Alubomulle Sumanasara

Freedom from Anger

Anger is a poison that ruins health and damages relationships. In today’s fast-paced and reactionary world, it’s all too easy for anger to grab hold of us and not let go.

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 effect it has on you, and what you can do about it. In short, bite-sized chapters, he offers wisdom, along with a laugh, that you can use to lead a healthier, happier life finally freed from anger.

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The Dharma of Well-Being

Welcome to The Dharma of Well-Being! In this course, drawn on insights and methods from both the Buddhist tradition and Western psychology and philosophy, B. Alan Wallace invites you to investigate the causes of both genuine unhappiness and genuine well-being. You’ll start by looking into what genuine well-being is before delving into what it is not as Alan explores the causes of suffering, mental afflictions, and unhappiness, along with the internal factors that often prevent us from being truly happy. He then turns to the causes of genuine happiness and offers skills, practices, and insights that will help you achieve genuine happiness and well-being in your own life.

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The Dharma of Well-Being

Drawing on insights and methods from both the Buddhist tradition and Western psychology and philosophy, B. Alan Wallace invites you to investigate the causes of both genuine unhappiness and genuine well-being. You’ll start by looking into what genuine well-being is before delving into what it is not as Alan explores the causes of suffering, mental afflictions, and unhappiness, along with the internal factors that often prevent us from being truly happy. He then turns to the causes of genuine happiness and offers skills, practices, and insights that will help you achieve genuine happiness.

We hope you’ll join us and take the next step on your path toward developing genuine well-being in your life.

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Exchanging Air with Trees

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Leo Babauta: Zen Habits (#111)

This episode of the Wisdom Podcast, recorded live as a Wisdom Dharma Chat, features a conversation with simplicity blogger and bestselling author Leo Babauta.

Leo created Zen Habits, a Top 25 blog with over a million readers, when he started writing to chronicle and share what he’s learned while changing a number of habits, including waking early, losing weight, quitting smoking, becoming a runner, eliminating debt, and more. In this wide-ranging conversation, Leo shares some of his approaches to eliminating “bad” habits and developing “good” habits, explaining how bringing awareness to thought and behavior allows for examination of deeply embedded psychological patterns and is thus instrumental in creating sustainable change within oneself. 

Remember to subscribe and give the Wisdom Podcast a 5-star rating in Apple Podcasts if you enjoy our show!

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Storied Companions

“With my diagnosis of grade IV brain cancer, I no longer observe the truth of impermanence from a critical, analytical distance. I am crashing into it, or it into me.”

Facing a terminal cancer diagnosis, Karen Derris—professor, mother, and Buddhist practitioner—instinctually turned to books. By rereading ancient Buddhist stories with fresh questions and a new purpose in mind, she discovered evolving ways to make them immediate and real. Storied Companions interweaves Karen’s memoir of her lived experiences of trauma and terminal illness with stories from Buddhist literary traditions, sharing with the reader how she found ways to live fully even with the reality that she won’t live as long as she needs—or wants.

Using her knowledge, practice, and imagination, Karen illustrates how placing yourself within narratives can turn them from distant and static sources into companions, and from companions into guides. Reading along with her, you’ll realize how this practice of reading and these ancient narratives can help us come to terms with impermanence, develop empathy and compassion, and realize our own interconnectedness.

Honest, powerful, and insightful, Storied Companions itself becomes an invaluable companion, guiding the reader to discover new ways of facing and experiencing life, death, and impermanence.

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Courageous Compassion

Courageous Compassion, the sixth volume of the Library of Wisdom and Compassion, continues the Dalai Lama’s teachings on the path to awakening. The previous volume, In Praise of Great Compassion, focused on opening our hearts with love and compassion for all living beings, and the present volume explains how to embody compassion and wisdom in our daily lives. Here we enter a fascinating exploration of bodhisattvas’ activities across multiple Buddhist traditions—Tibetan, Theravāda, and Chinese Buddhism. 

After explaining the ten perfections according to the Pāli and Sanskrit traditions, the Dalai Lama presents the sophisticated schema of the four paths and fruits for śrāvakas and solitary realizers and the five paths for bodhisattvas. Learning about the practices mastered by these exalted practitioners inspires us with knowledge of our minds’ potential. His Holiness also describes buddha bodies, what buddhas perceive, and buddhas’ awakening activities. 

Courageous Compassion offers an in-depth look at bodhicitta, arhatship, and buddhahood that you can continuously refer to as you progress on the path to full awakening.

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Mark Van Buren: Your Life Is Meditation (#107)

This episode of the Wisdom Podcast features an interview with Mark Van Buren, a mindful living trainer, yoga and meditation instructor, personal trainer, and musician who has been promoting health and wellness for over a decade. He’s the author of A Fool’s Guide to Actual Happiness and Your Life IS Meditation. 

Mark discusses:

• how it can sometimes feel like everyday life is in opposition to practice, and how we can transform our understanding of this seeming conflict;
• the ways in which he applies mindfulness in daily life, including how driving to work can be like working on a koan;
• how to turn interactions with difficult people into opportunities for practice;
• what it means to experience a “profound okayness”;
• and much more.

Correction: In this episode, Mark mentions 10,000 chants; he meant to say 100,000.

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Meditations on the Trail

Meditations on the Trail offers a rich array of do-anywhere meditations that will help you explore and deepen your connection to nature, and yourself, in new ways, making the most of your time on the trail.

This small book—perfect for throwing in a daypack or a back pocket as you head out for the trail—is filled with practices to take you into the heart of the natural world and uncover your most vibrant self. You’ll return home grateful, more aware of interconnection, and maybe just a little wiser.

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The Dharma of Poetry

In The Dharma of Poetry, John Brehm shows how poems can open up new ways of thinking, feeling, and being in the world. Brehm demonstrates the practice of mindfully entering a poem, with an alertness, curiosity, and open-hearted responsiveness very much like the attention we cultivate in meditation. Complete with poetry-related meditations and writing prompts, this collection of lively, elegantly written essays can be read as a standalone book or as a companion to the author’s acclaimed anthology The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy.

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Buddhism and Science: Body, Breath, and Mind

The human mind and body remain mysterious to us in innumerable ways—and both spiritual seekers and scientists have been delving deep into their mysteries for millennia, trying to understand why our human experience is the way that it is, and how we can improve it, for the sake of both ourselves and others. Now more than ever before, spiritual thinkers and scientists around the world are becoming increasingly curious about the places where their two disciplines overlap in these investigations.

In Buddhism and Science: Body, Breath, and Mind (recorded live during the 2020 Serenity Ridge Dialogues online summit), you’ll be introduced to some of the most exciting, groundbreaking ideas in this interdisciplinary field as you witness dialogues between spiritual and scientific leaders from around the world, discovering pioneering research and ideas about how science and spirituality bridge our human experience and inform our practice.

Learn more about the teachers for this course.

Please note: the views and opinions expressed in this course belong solely to the speakers and do not represent the views and opinions of Wisdom Publications.

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Planting a Tree

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The Grand Delusion

In The Grand Delusion, bestselling author Steve Hagen drills deeply into the most basic assumptions, strengths, and limitations of religion and belief, philosophy and inquiry, science and technology. In doing so, he shines new light on the great existential questions—Why is there Something rather than Nothing? What does it mean to exist? What is consciousness? What is the nature of truth?—and does so from an entirely unexpected direction.

Ultimately, this book reveals how all of our fundamental questions stem from a single error, a single unwarranted belief—a single Grand Delusion.

Upcoming Author Events

Steve Hagen will be leading a weekly online Grand Delusion study group beginning January 6 at 7:30 p.m. CST, providing a chance for readers to consider in greater detail subtleties in the text that might not be immediately apparent. These observations will include additional material that was culled from the original text in preparation for publication. Depending on how many are in attendance, this study may also provide an opportunity for readers to take on the role of ANYONE and question the author.  Visit the study group website for access to live Zoom meetings and for audio archives of the study group. Please contact the Dharma Field Zen Center office for more information.

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The Buddhist Analysis of Matter

The Buddhist Analysis of Matter is an in-depth study of the Buddhist view of the nature and composition of matter as interpreted in Theravāda Buddhism. The study is mainly based on the seven treatises of the canonical Abhidhamma as well as the subsequent commentarial exegesis. However, in order to bring the subject into a wider perspective and to present it with a measure of precision, it takes into consideration the parallel doctrines of the Vaibhāṣika and Sautrāntika schools of Buddhism. These were two of the leading non-Mahāyāna schools with which the Theravādins had much in common. Both subscribed to a realistic view of existence: while the former had a tendency to extreme realism, the latter had a predilection, but not a commitment, to subjectivism.

Acclaimed scholar Y. Karunadasa’s Buddhist Analysis of Matter provides a much-needed micro view of the topic with a detailed examination of the Theravādins’ list of rūpa-dhammas—the ultimate irreducible factors into which material existence is analyzed. It exposes the nature of the basic material elements and explains their interconnection and interdependence on the basis of conditional relations. It concludes with an attempt to understand the nature and relevance of the Buddhist analysis of matter in the context of Buddhism as a religion.

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Turning Poison Into Beauty

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Working with the Three Kinds of Attachment

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Zen and Psychotherapy

This book is an intimate dialogue that examines the interplay of emotional and spiritual development through the lens of Zen Buddhism and psychotherapy. Zen and Psychotherapy artfully illuminates the intrinsic connections between the two practices, and demonstrates how the traditions can be complementary in helping to live a truly fulfilled and contented life.

Zen teacher and psychologist Joseph Bobrow deftly shows how the major themes of trauma, attachment, emotional communication, and emotional regulation play out in the context of Zen and of psychotherapeutic practice, and how, in concert, both provide a comprehensive, interactive model of fully functioning human life.

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Joy of Seclusion

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The Foundations of Mindfulness

In this course, you’ll discover some of the most meaningful and profound applications of mindfulness, under the guidance of renowned scholar-monk Venerable Bhikkhu Anālayo and a group of expert guest teachers.

Note: As an act of Dhammadāna, Ven. Anālayo has waived royalty payments for this course.

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