Lives Of Great Monks And Nuns Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle version is available to download in english. Read online anytime anywhere directly from your device. Click on the download button below to get a free pdf file of Lives Of Great Monks And Nuns book. This book definitely worth reading, it is an incredibly well-written.
The life of Aśvaghos̥a Bodhisattva / translated from the Chinese of Kumārajīva by Li Rongxi -- The life of Nāgārjuna Bodhisattva / translated from the Chinese of Kumārajīva by Li Rongxi -- Biography of Dharma Master Vasubandhu / translated from the Chinese of Paramārtha by Albert A. Dalia -- Biographies of Budhist nuns / translated from the Chinese of Baochang by Li Rongxi -- The journey of the eminent monk Faxian / translated from the Chinese of Faxian by Li Rongxi
This book contains the biographies of 65 Chinese women who were Buddhist monks in early China. It is a great read for anyone interested in Buddhism or women in religion.
The Community of Buddhist Nuns is one of the oldest women’s organizations in human history. In this book Dr. Wijayaratna explains how this community was started by the Buddha in the 5th century BCE, and how it developed gradually. To show the motivation and the way of life of these ordained women, the author uses the oldest texts of the Pali canon. Several chapters of this book discuss the position of Buddhist nuns in the field of the three famous monastic themes: poverty, chastity and obedience. This book describes in detail the structure of the organization of their Community, their day-to-day practices, and the virtues and mental discipline through which they strove to attain the sublime goal, Nibbana.
“The best kind of memoir, revealing, refreshing, and reflective enough to make readers turn many of the questions on themselves.” —Booklist (starred review) With humor and opinions aplenty, a woman embarks on an unconventional quest to see if she is meant to be a nun. Just as Jane Christmas decides to enter a convent in mid-life to find out whether she is “nun material,” her long-term partner Colin, suddenly springs a marriage proposal on her. Determined not to let her monastic dreams be sidelined, Christmas puts her engagement on hold and embarks on an extraordinary year-long adventure to four convents—one in Canada and three in the UK. In these communities of cloistered nuns and monks, she shares—and at times chafes and rails against—the silent, simple existence she has sought all of her life. Christmas takes this spiritual quest seriously, but her story is full of the candid insights, humorous social faux pas, profane outbursts, and epiphanies that make her books so relatable and popular. And Then There Were Nuns offers a seldom-seen look inside modern cloistered life, and it is sure to ruffle more than a few starched collars among the ecclesiastical set. “A lovely, heartfelt tale. Get thee to a bookstore and buy it.” —A. J. Jacobs, New York Times bestselling author of The Year of Living Biblically “In fluid and often playful prose, she introduces women and men (she spent a week at a monastery on the Isle of Wight) who have devoted their lives to prayer, including a skydiving 90-year-old nun.” —Maclean’s
A Guide to Meditation and Mindfulness for the Modern Day In our never-ending search for happiness we often find ourselves looking to external things for fulfillment, thinking that happiness can be unlocked by buying a bigger house, getting the next promotion, or building a perfect family. In this profound and inspiring book, Gelong Thubten shares a practical and sustainable approach to happiness. Thubten, a Buddhist monk and meditation expert who has worked with everyone from school kids to Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and Benedict Cumberbatch, explains how meditation and mindfulness can create a direct path to happiness. A Monk’s Guide to Happiness explores the nature of happiness and helps bust the myth that our lives and minds are too busy for meditation. The book can show you how to: - Learn practical methods to help you choose happiness - Develop greater compassion for yourself and others - Learn to meditate in micro-moments during a busy day - Discover that you are naturally ‘hard-wired’ for happiness Reading A Monk’s Guide to Happiness could revolutionize your relationship with your thoughts and emotions, and help you create a life of true happiness and contentment.
They may shave their heads, don simple robes, and renounce materialism and worldly desires. But the women seeking enlightenment in a Buddhist nunnery high in the folds of Himalayan Kashmir invariably find themselves subject to the tyrannies of subsistence, subordination, and sexuality. Ultimately, Buddhist monasticism reflects the very world it is supposed to renounce. Butter and barley prove to be as critical to monastic life as merit and meditation. Kim Gutschow lived for more than three years among these women, collecting their stories, observing their ways, studying their lives. Her book offers the first ethnography of Tibetan Buddhist society from the perspective of its nuns. Gutschow depicts a gender hierarchy where nuns serve and monks direct, where monks bless the fields and kitchens while nuns toil in them. Monasteries may retain historical endowments and significant political and social power, yet global flows of capitalism, tourism, and feminism have begun to erode the balance of power between monks and nuns. Despite the obstacles of being considered impure and inferior, nuns engage in everyday forms of resistance to pursue their ascetic and personal goals. A richly textured picture of the little known culture of a Buddhist nunnery, the book offers moving narratives of nuns struggling with the Buddhist discipline of detachment. Its analysis of the way in which gender and sexuality construct ritual and social power provides valuable insight into the relationship between women and religion in South Asia today.
Author : Thubten Chodron Publisher : North Atlantic Books Page : 246 pages File Size : 41,7 Mb Release : 1999 Category : Buddhist monasticism and religious orders for women ISBN : 1556433255
In the first book to reflect the voices of Buddhist nuns from every major tradition, 14 contributors describe their experiences, explain their order's history, and discuss their lives. 14 photos.
The seventeenth century is generally acknowledged as one of the most politically tumultuous but culturally creative periods of late imperial Chinese history. Scholars have noted the profound effect on, and literary responses to, the fall of the Ming on the male literati elite. Also of great interest is the remarkable emergence beginning in the late Ming of educated women as readers and, more importantly, writers. Only recently beginning to be explored, however, are such seventeenth-century religious phenomena as "the reinvention" of Chan Buddhism—a concerted effort to revive what were believed to be the traditional teachings, texts, and practices of "classical" Chan. And, until now, the role played by women in these religious developments has hardly been noted at all. Eminent Nuns is an innovative interdisciplinary work that brings together several of these important seventeenth-century trends. Although Buddhist nuns have been a continuous presence in Chinese culture since early medieval times and the subject of numerous scholarly studies, this book is one of the first not only to provide a detailed view of their activities at one particular moment in time, but also to be based largely on the writings and self-representations of Buddhist nuns themselves. This perspective is made possible by the preservation of collections of "discourse records" (yulu) of seven officially designated female Chan masters in a seventeenth-century printing of the Chinese Buddhist Canon rarely used in English-language scholarship. The collections contain records of religious sermons and exchanges, letters, prose pieces, and poems, as well as biographical and autobiographical accounts of various kinds. Supplemental sources by Chan monks and male literati from the same region and period make a detailed re-creation of the lives of these eminent nuns possible. Beata Grant brings to her study background in Chinese literature, Chinese Buddhism, and Chinese women’s studies. She is able to place the seven women, all of whom were active in Jiangnan, in their historical, religious, and cultural contexts, while allowing them, through her skillful translations, to speak in their own voices. Together these women offer an important, but until now virtually unexplored, perspective on seventeenth-century China, the history of female monasticism in China, and the contributionof Buddhist nuns to the history of Chinese women’s writing.
This book offers for the first time a comprehensive account of Buddhist nuns and Tibetan Buddhist nuns in particular... Based on historical research and an extensive period of fieldwork in an exile nunnery in India, the present study gives a detailed description of the life of Buddhist nuns past and present. Particular attention is paid to the relationship between the normative view of women in Buddhism and how in fact Tibetan nuns adjust to, or try to alter, to these norms.
Family Matters in Indian Buddhist Monasticisms by Shayne Clarke Pdf
Scholarly and popular consensus has painted a picture of Indian Buddhist monasticism in which monks and nuns severed all ties with their families when they left home for the religious life. In this view, monks and nuns remained celibate, and those who faltered in their “vows” of monastic celibacy were immediately and irrevocably expelled from the Buddhist Order. This romanticized image is based largely on the ascetic rhetoric of texts such as the Rhinoceros Horn Sutra. Through a study of Indian Buddhist law codes (vinaya), Shayne Clarke dehorns the rhinoceros, revealing that in their own legal narratives, far from renouncing familial ties, Indian Buddhist writers take for granted the fact that monks and nuns would remain in contact with their families. The vision of the monastic life that emerges from Clarke's close reading of monastic law codes challenges some of our most basic scholarly notions of what it meant to be a Buddhist monk or nun in India around the turn of the Common Era. Not only do we see thick narratives depicting monks and nuns continuing to interact and associate with their families, but some are described as leaving home for the religious life with their children, and some as married monastic couples. Clarke argues that renunciation with or as a family is tightly woven into the very fabric of Indian Buddhist renunciation and monasticisms. Surveying the still largely uncharted terrain of Indian Buddhist monastic law codes preserved in Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Chinese, Clarke provides a comprehensive, pan-Indian picture of Buddhist monastic attitudes toward family. Whereas scholars have often assumed that monastic Buddhism must be anti-familial, he demonstrates that these assumptions were clearly not shared by the authors/redactors of Indian Buddhist monastic law codes. In challenging us to reconsider some of our most cherished assumptions concerning Indian Buddhist monasticisms, he provides a basis to rethink later forms of Buddhist monasticism such as those found in Central Asia, Kaśmīr, Nepal, and Tibet not in terms of corruption and decline but of continuity and development of a monastic or renunciant ideal that we have yet to understand fully.
This volume includes five texts by Kukai (On the Differences between the Exoteric and Esoteric Teachings; The Meaning of Becoming a Buddha in This Very Body; The Meanings of Sound, Sign, and Reality; The Meanings of the Word Hum; The Precious Key to the Secret Treasury), and two by Kakuban (The Illuminating Secret Commentary on the Five Cakras and the Nine Syllables; The Mitsugonin Confession). On the Differences between the Exoteric and Esoteric Teachings aims to highlight the differences between Exoteric and Esoteric Buddhism and explain why the latter is superior to the former. The Meaning of Becoming a Buddha in This Very Body is a collection of discussions and remarks on the possibility of attaining enlightenment in ones lifetime. The Meanings of Sound, Sign, and Reality concerns the problem of expressing ultimate reality through language. It extends the connotations of "language" to embrace all phenomena. The Meanings of the Word Hum demonstrates how the entire teachings of Buddhism can be encapsulated in a single word or syllable. The Precious Key to the Secret Treasury is an abridged version of the teachings of the Shingon school. It discusses the ten stages of Buddhism and how each successive stage overcomes the limitations of previous stages. The Mitsugonin Confession is a text recited in the daily services of Shingi-Shingon temples throughout Japan and reflects the actual conditions of monastic life on Koyasan during its founder Kakuban's lifetime. The Illuminating Secret Commentary on the Five Cakras and the Nine Syllables is a work assimilating the Shingon and Pure Land schools from the standpoint of the Shingon teachings established by Kukai. It argues that attaining enlightenment in one's present body through esoteric practices is the same ultimately as being born in the Western Paradise through chanting Amitabha's name.
Contemporary Coptic Nuns by Pieternella van Doorn-Harder Pdf
A rare and engaging encounter with Egyptian cloistresses Contemporary Coptic Nuns reveals a world rarely seen by outsiders--the world of nuns who worship and serve as part of the largest community of indigenous Christians in the Middle East. One of the few people unaffiliated with the Egyptian Coptic Orthodox Church to observe these women, Pieternella van Doorn-Harder offers a compelling portrait of the nuns who devote their lives to this conservative faith. Van Doorn-Harder traces the current vitality of the Coptic monastic tradition to a church-wide renaissance of the mid twentieth-century. She credits Coptic mother superiors with harnessing the revival's energy to usher in an era of expanded opportunity for Egyptian Christian women. At that time they transformed convents into centers of Coptic faith and culture and began providing pastoral, educational, and medicinal services to the community. In depicting the nuns' daily lives, van Doorn-Harder describes their work, their role in the Coptic resurgence, their influence on the Coptic laity, and their position in the larger Islamic society. In presenting their spiritual lives, she attests to the vigor of their prayer, fasting, and devotions as well as to their spiritual gifts, which include clairvoyance, intercession, and healing.
Buddhist Nuns, Monks, and Other Worldly Matters by Gregory Schopen Pdf
Buddhist Nuns, Monks, and Other Worldly Matters: Recent Papers on Monastic Buddhism in India is the fourth in a series of collected essays by one of today’s most distinguished scholars of Indian Buddhism. In these articles Gregory Schopen once again displays the erudition and originality that have contributed to a major shift in the way that Indian Buddhism is perceived, understood, and studied.
Treatise on the Elucidation of the Knowable, The; The Cycle of the Formation of the Schismatic Doctrines by ʼPhags-pa Blo-gros-rgyal-mtshan Pdf
There are two titles in this volume. The Treatise on the Elucidation of the Knowable was written in the Yuan Period by the Tibetan 'Phags-pa for the Chinese Crown Prince at the time as an outline of Buddhist thought, and deals with such subjects as the Buddhist view of life and Buddhist cosmology. The teachings set forth are based on the whole on the Abhidharmakosa-bhasya, but there are also to be found ideas peculiar to this work. The title, "Treatise on the Clarification of What is to be Known," implies that all teachings which it is necessary to know are made clear by the contents of this work. It was originally written in either Tibetan or Mongolian, but only the Chinese translation is extant. The Cycle of the Formation of the Schismatic Doctrines describes the course of the so-called 'Basic Schism' of Buddhism into the Theravada and Mahasamghika Schools, which took place over 100 years after the death of Sakyamuni, and the subsequent division of the Hinayana into 20 minor sects. It is written from the standpoint of the Sarvastivadins, but also describes in detail the doctrinal characteristics of the other sects. This work is thus not only indispensable in the study of the history of sectarian division in Buddhism, but, when one considers that the majority of extant doctrinal treatises of Hinayana belong to the Sarvastivadins, it is also an invaluable source of material in the elucidation of the tenets of sects other than the Sarvastivadins.
A fascinating (and mouthwatering!) look at the wonderful food and drink produced by monks and nuns in America, Belgium, France, and Germany. Part travel guide, part cookbook, A Taste of Heaven is a delightful survey of the fine food and drink made by Catholic religious orders in America, Belgium, France, and Germany. From positively scrumptious beer and cheese to some of the richest chocolate on earth, the treats presented in this book are heavenly indeed, and author Madeline Scherb beautifully captures the heart and spirit of the holy work that goes into producing them. With vivid descriptions of the monasteries, their fascinating histories, and helpful advice for travelers on getting there and getting the most out of their visit, this book will serve as an invaluable guide. A Taste of Heaven also contains more than thirty recipes from notable chefs that incorporate the products found at these monasteries, as well as a helpful guide to buying and ordering these delectable ingredients if you are unable to travel to the monasteries themselves. Recipes include such delights as: * Flamiche (a Belgian version of quiche that uses Postel cheese from the Postel Abbey in Belgium) from chef and food columnist Sandy D'Amato * Brownies à la Mode with Trappistine Caramel Sauce (uses caramel from Our Lady of the Mississippi Abbey, Iowa) * Blackberry Cabernet Sorbet (made with Pinot Noir from St. Hildegard Abbey near Rudesheim, Germany) from Ciao Bella Gelateria in Grand Central Terminal, New York City Featuring lovely original black-and-white illustrations that perfectly capture the tranquil atmosphere of the monasteries, A Taste of Heaven is a treasure for anyone who loves spirited food, drink, and travel.
