What is tantra? Who is qualified to practice it? How should it be practiced? What are the results? According to Buddhism, every human being has the potential to achieve profound and lasting happiness. And according to the tantric teachings of Buddhism, this remarkable transformation can be realized very quickly if we utilize all aspects of our human energy—especially the energy of our desires. Introduction to Tantra is the best available clarification of a subject that is often misunderstood. Tantra recognizes that the powerful energy aroused by our desire is an indispensable resource for the spiritual path. It is precisely because our lives are so inseparably linked with desire that we must make use of desire’s tremendous energy not just for pleasure, but to transform our lives. Lama Yeshe presents tantra as a practice leading to joy and self-discovery, with a vision of reality that is simple, clear, and relevant to 21st-century life.

This second volume of the five-volume commentary by the renowned Buddhist scholar Geshe Lhundub Sopa focuses on the key Buddhist concepts of karma, or cause and effect, and dependent origination. Considered one of the finest living Buddhist scholars, Geshe Sopa provides commentaries essential for anyone interested in a sound understanding of Tibetan Buddhist practice and philosophy. Never has a book gone into such clear detail on karma and dependent origination—concepts which, despite many references in contemporary culture, are too often misunderstood. Here, Geshe Sopa starts from the beginning with a faithful reading of the Lamrim Chenmo and, in the end, leaves readers with the proper tools for incorporating core Buddhist concepts into their study, teaching, and practice. 

Read Tsongkhapa’s biography at the Treasury of Lives.

We think of enlightenment as something that happens all at once, like a tidal wave that cleans away everything impure. In truth, however, realization happens incrementally, from moment to moment. And in any moment when true wisdom is recognized, all concepts and afflictions are freed right on the spot and we can affirm for ourselves that the experience of enlightenment is possible. When we do, we experience a moment of the mind of a buddha—“momentary buddhahood.”

In this tantalizing presentation, Anyen Rinpoche offers a vision of the crucial necessity of mindfulness in any exploration of the Buddha’s path—especially the path of tantric practice.

Hidden Spring is the first book to demonstrate in moment-to-moment detail how Buddhist meditation and practice can help us cope with the ordeal of life-threatening disease. In 1995, Sandy Boucher—a well-known Buddhist and feminist writer—was diagnosed with stage III colon cancer. In vivid prose, she describes her year-long encounter with the disease, and reveals how meditation techniques and understanding of Buddhist principles prepared her to meet the mental and physical challenges of her illness.

This intimate account of the development of a Western Buddhist meditator is a triumphant tale of the human spirit in its struggle with mortality, and a guide for anyone looking for strength and comfort for their own struggles.

This is an inspiring and practical introduction for parents, health workers, policy makers, educators, spiritual students, and others to an integrated system of health care that includes body, emotions, mind, spirit, relationships, and environment. An invaluable guide for anyone interested in anything from holistic healthcare to the myths, legends, and child-rearing practices of the Tibetan people.

In One Hundred Days of Solitude: Losing My Self and Finding Grace on a Zen Retreat, American teacher of Korean Zen Jane Dobisz (Zen Master Bon Yeon), recalls her first solitary meditation stint in the woods. Luckily, this is not just a recounting of a winter’s worth of cabin fever. Instead, Dobisz takes us into her cabin, and into her mind, as she tries—at least temporarily—to live a Walden-like existence.

All the bowing and meditating and wood-chopping that is part and parcel of her retreat is hardly first nature, but the good-humored and tenacious Dobisz is able to adapt, and to relate her hundred days with moving insight and humanity. Her Solitude in fact offers us all a chance to commune with her and to look inside and rediscover our own grace.

When we break free from the habits that limit us, a new world of possibilities opens up. In Let Go, Martine Batchelor leads the way there.

Negative patterns of mind may manifest as fear, avoidance, depression, addiction, judgment of self or other, and any of a host of other physical, mental, or psychological forms. Let Go aims at understanding what really lies at the root of these behaviors so we can reclaim control. Each chapter concludes with an exercise or guided meditation as a tool for the reader to work with negative habits in new and creative ways. You don’t have to be a Buddhist for them to work. You just need to want to move on.

Helpful exercises and guided meditations—designed to build understanding of our negative habits, as well as the confidence and skill needed to instead embrace our greatest qualities—appear throughout the book.

Batchelor also looks at Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) for depression, Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz’s use of meditation to deal with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), successful combinations of meditation and Twelve-Step programs, and offers her own innovations.

The desire to act generously arrives like uninvited guest, unexpectedly, like a lightning bolt, in a mere moment. A gesture, a news story, a quotation in a book, a passing remark can change everything. For many, that moment is enough for generosity to move into their hearts and minds and become central to their lives.

This book will help readers open their hearts to the power of their own innate generosity, their desire to make a difference in the world, to help make someone’s day a little brighter or their world a bit more secure. It will kindle a spark in readers’ hearts that moves them into the sunshine of a more generous life. If one life is more generous, we all prosper. That is one of generosity’s most wonderful qualities: it is utterly contagious.

Barbara Bonner’s Inspiring Generosity is an invitation to savor a sampling of the very best inspirations on the subject of generosity. It includes fourteen contemporary stories of “generosity heroes” whose lives have been transformed by the power of generosity. Sprinkled throughout these stories are writings, poems, and quotes from Shakespeare, Hafiz, Emily Dickinson, George Eliot, Wendell Berry, Sharon Olds, Naomi Shibab Nye, Donald Justice, Winston Churchill, Mother Teresa, Maya Angelou, Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., John Steinbeck, James Joyce, Leo Tolstoy, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Goethe, Seneca, Albert Schweitzer, Anne Frank, and many others.

Steps on the Path to Enlightenment: The Foundation Practices marks the first volume of a much-anticipated, comprehensive commentary on the Lamrim Chenmo by the renowned Buddhist scholar, Geshe Sopa.

This landmark commentary on what is perhaps the most elegant Tibetan presentation of the Buddhist path offers a detailed overview of Buddhist philosophy, especially invaluable to those wanting to enact the wisdom of the Buddha in their lives.

In the Lamrim Chenmo, Tsongkhapa explains the path in terms of the three levels of practitioners: those of small capacity who seek happiness in future lives, those of medium capacity who seek liberation from the cycle of suffering, and those of great capacity who seek full enlightenment in order to benefit all beings. This volume covers the topics common to the first level: Tsongkhapa’s explanations of the role of the teacher, his exhortation to take the essence of human existence, the contemplation of death and future lives, and going for the refuge.

Given his vast knowledge and his experience in both Tibetan and Western contexts, Geshe Sopa is the ideal commentator of this work for the modern student of Tibetan Buddhism.

Read Tsongkhapa’s biography at the Treasury of Lives.

Odds are that you or someone you know could truly benefit from Meditation and Relaxation in Plain English. After all, who wouldn’t like to have less stress—and more enjoyment—from life?

Meditation and Relaxation in Plain English teaches us how to achieve just that, with potent tools that are easy to learn, enjoy, and keep doing. And these practices do so much more than allow us freedom from anxiety and stress: they allow us to be a better friend to ourselves, and to the people around us.

“We cannot find ourselves, or be ourselves, alone.”—from Mixing Minds

Mixing Minds explores the interpersonal relationships between psychoanalysts and their patients, and Buddhist teachers and their students. Through the author’s own personal journey in both traditions, she sheds light on how these contrasting approaches to wellness affect our most intimate relationships. These dynamic relationships provide us with keen insight into the emotional ups and downs of our lives—from fear and anxiety to love, compassion, and equanimity. Mixing Minds delves into the most intimate of relationships and shows us how these relationships are the key to the realization of our true selves.

Welcome to One City—Population: Everyone—where everything you do matters: What you wear. What you say. What you think/ignore/buy/don’t buy… You’ve lived here your whole life, whether you know it or not.

Ethan Nichtern, the charismatic and creative force behind New York’s Interdependence Project is your guide to the beauty that is everywhere in the urban jungle—in the rattling of subway trains, the screechings of traffic, the hum and drone of millions scurrying for work, food, sustenance, art, culture, and meaning. There may be no greater setting for exploring the great truth that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. expounded: “Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

With its pop-culture savvy, humor, and literary liveliness, One City melds Dr. King’s message with modern Buddhist wisdom to explain how we might best live together—no matter who we are, and no matter where.

This calendar is no longer available for purchase.

Poster-sized reproductions of classical paintings produced to the highest standards. Wisdom’s Tibetan Art Calendar is an annual favorite.

The antique scroll-art masterpieces seen in Wisdom’s Tibetan Art Calendar 2010 are called thangkas. While the thangka is common to Tibetan Buddhists, its finest examples are highly sought-after in the international art community and have become hot properties in the same vein as Oriental rugs and ceramics. As a result, the best of these works are seldom, if ever, available for public viewing.

This is why Wisdom’s Tibetan Art Calendar is so special. It’s an affordable way to enjoy incredibly rare and meaningful works of sacred art, year-round. These thirteen sacred paintings by Tibet’s master painters represent a variety of classical images, mandalas, deities, and icons. Each poster-sized picture is produced to the highest German printing standards, and is suitable for framing. Complete with in-depth explanations of their cultural and philosophical significance, these exquisite fine art reproductions will be treasured for years to come.

Please note that calendars are unable to ship via USPS Media Mail. If you are ordering a calendar and Wisdom books, you should place the book orders separately to ensure the least expensive shipping.

Images in the 2011 calendar are:

• Arhat Abheda
• Vajrabhairava
• Dharmaraja
• Buddha’s Miracles
• Shri Heruka
• Prayer to Padmasambhava
• Bardo of Ultimate Reality
• Mandala of Guhyasamaja
• Shakyamuni and sixteen Arhats
• Mandala of Vajrabhairava
• Bardo and Yama
• Begtse
• Four Armed Mahakala

Anyen Rinpoche’s wise and reassuring voice guides readers through the Tibetan Buddhist teachings on death and dying, while providing practical tools for end-of-life and estate planning. Dying with Confidence reads like a remarkable how-to guide, laying out in clear and straightforward language the preparations we must make and the best practices to use while dying to further our goal of enlightenment.

In this inspiring and incisive offering, Barry Magid uses the language of modern psychology and psychotherapy to illuminate one of Buddhism’s most powerful and often mysterious technologies: the Zen koan. What’s more, Magid also uses the koans to expand upon the insights of psychology (especially self psychology and relational psychotherapy) and open for the reader new perspectives on the functioning of the human mind and heart. Nothing Is Hidden explores many rich themes, including facing impermanence and the inevitability of change, working skillfully with desire and attachment, and discovering when “surrender and submission” can be liberating and when they shade into emotional bypassing. With a sophisticated view of the rituals and teachings of traditional Buddhism, Magid helps us see how we sometimes subvert meditation into just another “curative fantasy” or make compassion into a form of masochism.

The print version of this book is currently out of stock. Check back soon.

One of the great classics of Buddhist literature, the Bodhicharyavatara, or Way of the Bodhisattva, is required reading for understanding Tibetan Buddhism. Shantideva was a seventh-century Buddhist master who taught at the great monastic university of Nalanda. Presented in the form of a personal meditation in verse, the Bodhicharyavatara outlines the path of the bodhisattvas—those who renounce the peace of their own salvation, vowing instead to attain enlightenment for the sake of all others. The Dalai Lama once remarked that his own understanding of the bodhisattva path is based entirely upon Shantideva’s text.

As long as space endures,
As long as sentient beings remain,
May I likewise remain
To dispel the sorrows of the world.
—Shantideva

The Way of Awakening is without question the most comprehensive single commentary on this text available. Expounded by an accomplished scholar and deeply realized meditator, it is a resource for a lifetime of study. Chapter by chapter and verse by verse, it maps the Bodhicharyavatara, helping us to deepen our understanding of its teachings and apply them to our lives.

As seen in Newsweek.

Got a few minutes? You can:

• Reduce your stress, even when under pressure
• Sleep better
• Get re-energized
• Think more clearly, and more creatively
• Reconnect with the people who count on you
• Learn to recognize and encourage the best in yourself

You know that meditation would probably be good for you, just like you know that you should floss your teeth. First, though, you need the motivation to make it happen. This book, with its jargon—free tone and incredibly simple exercises-little but effective things you can do in just a minute at work, in the car, wherever-will make you want to meditate. You’ll realize: it’s just a good thing to do. Like flossing—only for your mind.

Real Meditation in Minutes a Day is an easygoing, always-encouraging mental workout buddy, ready to teach and train you. Throughout the book, composite everypersons “Maria” and “Brian” recount their efforts, reinforcing the basics, answering FAQs, and removing common obstacles and quandaries.

With its clear language and exercises that even the busiest of us can find time for, Real Meditation in Minutes a Day can help anyone to make meditation’s very real benefits part of everyday life.

Know Where You’re Going provides a full course of instruction in Buddhist meditation and reflection, and contains a wealth of exercises and advice to help the reader grow. As we put these teachings into practice over time, we learn to see things as they really are and discover transcendence right here in our everyday lives.

Ayya Khema shows us how to live a wholehearted spiritual life, even amid our day to day concerns and responsibilities. Her teachings unfold simply, free of jargon, and are ideal for the contemporary world. Grounding the practice of more advanced meditations in a deeply cultivated sense of mindfulness, love, and altruism, Khema shows us, step by step, how to access to liberation and freedom. Originally published as When the Iron Eagle Flies.

An excellent, practical introduction to Zen meditation. Written in a warm and easily accessible style, this book appeals to anyone with an interest in meditation, Zen, or, as is often the case today, a combination of the two. The book emphasizes the importance of receiving good instruction and of finding groups to practice with, yet it lays out the necessary steps to practice Zen meditation on your own. The book includes easily followed exercises to help the reader along. For anyone looking to uncover a clear and insightful path into the philosophy and practice of Zen meditation, this book represents the culmination of that search.

While on a very important mission from the King, young Jaya encounters the deities Shiva, Inanna, and Hercules. Leaping from gold coins on her mother’s golden necklace, they help Jaya achieve her goal and discover strengths she didn’t know she had.

Jaya’s Golden Necklace is the first children’s book to tell of the origin and cultural roots of the beloved Buddha image. A story of East and West, it teaches lessons and entertains while also opening a door into Asian culture. Set along the Silk Road, Jaya’s journey highlights the interconnected and multicultural worlds of yesterday and today.

This engaging, fast-moving tale of empowerment will help children relate better to the powerful beings in human history’s rich religions and myths. It also conveys the independence, resilience, and creativity that make Jaya a true heroine for today.

Watch a video about Jaya’s Golden Necklace: