Buddhism: An Introduction to the Buddha's Life, Teachings, and Practices (The Essential Wisdom Library)

by Joan Duncan Oliver

Overview

A modern guide to the teachings of Buddhism

Buddhism: An Introduction to the Buddha’s Life, Teachings, and Practices is an indispensable guide to a 2,600-year-old wisdom tradition that has transformed the lives of millions across centuries and around the world. Readers will learn how Siddhartha Gautama became the Buddha, one of the most influential spiritual leaders of all time, and discover how they too can follow his revolutionary methods to attain happiness and inner freedom. Along with accessible overviews of central teachings—the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path, karma, core virtues like kindness and compassion, and more—Buddhism covers such basics as:

- the three main Buddhist traditions—Theravada, Mahayana, and Vajrayana—historically and their relevance today

- the role of meditation and mindfulness in Buddhist practice

- step-by-step instruction in key Buddhist practices

Writing in an engaging, approachable style, author Joan Duncan Oliver outlines the fundamentals of Buddhism for every reader, revealing its timeless truths and their relevance for finding peace in uncertain times. A practitioner of Buddhist meditation for forty years, Oliver has written extensively on Buddhist wisdom and its application to daily life. Her practical approach makes Buddhism an essential modern guidebook to an ancient tradition.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250313683
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	04/30/2019
Series:	The Essential Wisdom Library
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	595,522
Product dimensions:	8.10(w) x 5.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

JOAN DUNCAN OLIVER is a contributing editor at Tricycle: The Buddhist Review and an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in such publications as The New York Times, O: the Oprah Magazine, Health, Shambhala Sun, and The Best Buddhist Writing 2005. Her books include Happiness, Good Karma, Coffee with the Buddha, The Meaning of Nice, and Commit to Sit, an anthology of articles from Tricycle. A Buddhist practitioner for 40 years, she has studied with teachers from the Zen, Vipassana, and Tibetan Buddhist traditions, and from Bön, the indigenous religion of Tibet.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1 The Buddha

Chapter 2 The History

Chapter 3 The Teachings

Chapter 4 The Practices

Endnotes

Glossary

Resources

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Editorial Reviews

03/04/2019

Oliver (Coffee with the Buddha), editor at Buddhist magazine Tricyle, provides a shaky introduction to the history, traditions, theories, and practices of Buddhism in this unconvincing primer. She considers her topic not Buddhism, but “more accurately titled Buddhisms, plural.” Oliver’s prose, peppered with Sanskrit and Pali—the languages in which many important Buddhist texts were written—is friendly and welcoming, and she’s generally adept at making advanced meditation techniques and the many facets of the Buddha’s teachings understandable to readers unfamiliar with the material. However, she presents Buddhism as a potpourri of mutually reinforcing and never contradicting conventions and customs, not only congruous across traditions, but compatible with other religious beliefs as well. This simplistic approach often overlooks the tensions and divisions that can and do exist between Buddhists of different lineages across the globe. While the book is intended as an introduction, the eliding of well-known conflicts and divisions within Buddhism undermines the authority of the work. While readers with no knowledge of Buddhism might find this a satisfactory invitation to learn more, Oliver’s overview is disappointingly incomplete. (May)

Publishers Weekly