In 2010 a Buddhist scroll was found in the ruins of Yankee stadium, and it proved what Buddhist scholar/award-winning author Donald Lopez, Ph.D., had suspected: the Buddha created the game of baseball. Buddha Takes the Mound: Enlightenment in 9 Innings is The Tao of Pooh for baseball. Funny, moving, and enlightening, this is a read that will engross, enrich, and charm any baseball fan. At once a love letter to the sport and an engaging introduction to Buddhism, it shows how the Buddha invented baseball to teach us deep truths about the world, about ourselves, and about each other. Lopez believes that Buddhism provides a lens for us to see baseball in a new way, a way that makes us love the game even more, a way that makes us ponder profound questions about winning and losing, about who we are, about finitude and infinitude, about birth and death. As Lopez reveals, not only is Buddhism integral to baseball; but baseball is Buddhism, and baseball is ourselves.

The Gospel of Buddha According to Old Records told by Paul Carus. Modeled on the New Testament and tells the story of Buddha through parables. It was an important tool in introducing Buddhism to the west and is used as a teaching tool by some Asian sects. Reproduction of 1894 Edition.

Buddha Can Improve Your Sports Performance and Life “No other person has had more influence on my thirty-six years of coaching than Jerry Lynch.”—Missy Foote, Head women's lacrosse coach, Middlebury College #1 New Release in Coaching Hockey, Tennis The Competitive Buddha is about mastery, leadership, spirituality, and the Kobe Bryant Mamba Mentality. Discover how people from all parts of the world have brought together the Buddha and athletics for greater fun, enjoyment, and pleasure during their performances. Connect spirituality to sports. Learn what you need to keep, what you need to discard, and what you need to add to your mental, emotional, and spiritual skill set as an athlete, coach, leader, parent, CEO, or any other performer in life. Understand how Buddhism can help you to be better prepared for sports and life, and how sports and life can teach you about Buddhism. On the court, field, and beyond. Dr. Lynch is an avid runner and biker and he has coached athletes at the high school and AAU level. He earned his doctorate in psychology at Penn State University and has done extensive post-doctoral work in the area of philosophy, Taoist and Buddhist thought, comparative religions, leadership development, and performance enhancement. Dr. Jerry Lynch demonstrates how certain timeless core Buddha values inspire you to embrace and navigate unchartered waters and understand the Buddha-mind and the Kobe Bryant Mamba Mentality. Become a master coach of your own life. When it comes to leadership and coaching, The Competitive Buddha teaches how the best coaches today use the ancient methods for our modern times. Learn specific strategies and techniques for implementing this special way to guide and lead. The Competitive Buddha teaches: • Leadership Skills • How to use Buddhism as an approach to competition • How to master athletics and life Readers who enjoyed Win the Day, Mamba Mentality, or Relentless Optimism will love The Competitive Buddha.

How does a real-life Zen master — not the preternaturally calm, cartoonish Zen masters depicted by mainstream culture — help others through hard times when he’s dealing with pain of his own? How does he meditate when the world is crumbling around him? Is meditation a valid response or just another form of escapism? These are the questions Brad Warner ponders in Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate. During a year that Warner spent giving talks and leading retreats across North America, his mother and grandmother died, he lost his dream job, and his marriage fell apart. In writing about how he applied the Buddha’s teachings to his own real-life suffering, Warner shatters expectations, revealing that Buddhism isn’t some esoteric pie-in-the-sky ultimate solution but an exceptionally practical way to deal with whatever life dishes out.

The first authoritative biography of the Dalai Lama--a story by turns inspiring and shocking--from an acclaimed Tibetan scholar with exceptional access to his subject. The Dalai Lama's message of peace and compassion resonates with people of all faiths and none. Yet, for all his worldwide fame, he remains personally elusive. At last Alexander Norman--acclaimed Oxford-trained scholar of the history of Tibet--delivers the definitive, unique, unforgettable biography. The Dalai Lama recounts an astonishing odyssey from isolated Tibetan village to worldwide standing as spiritual and political leader of one of the world's most profound and complex cultural traditions. Norman reveals that, while the Dalai Lama has never been comfortable with his political position, he has been a canny player--at one time CIA-backed--who has maneuvered amidst pervasive violence, including placing himself at the center of a dangerous Buddhist schism. Yet even more surprising than the political, Norman convinces, is the Dalai Lama's astonishing spiritual practice, rooted in magic, vision, and prophecy--details of which are illuminated in this book for the first time. A revelatory life story of one of today's most radical, charismatic, and beloved world leaders.

In considering medieval illustrated Buddhist manuscripts as sacred objects of cultic innovation, Receptacle of the Sacred explores how and why the South Asian Buddhist book-cult has survived for almost two millennia to the present. A book “manuscript” should be understood as a form of sacred space: a temple in microcosm, not only imbued with divine presence but also layered with the memories of many generations of users. Jinah Kim argues that illustrating a manuscript with Buddhist imagery not only empowered it as a three-dimensional sacred object, but also made it a suitable tool for the spiritual transformation of medieval Indian practitioners. Through a detailed historical analysis of Sanskrit colophons on patronage, production, and use of illustrated manuscripts, she suggests that while Buddhism’s disappearance in eastern India was a slow and gradual process, the Buddhist book-cult played an important role in sustaining its identity. In addition, by examining the physical traces left by later Nepalese users and the contemporary ritual use of the book in Nepal, Kim shows how human agency was critical in perpetuating and intensifying the potency of a manuscript as a sacred object throughout time.

National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry

A successful college baseball coach recounts his transition from a fear-based life to a rewarding career of passionate motivation, outlining the lessons he has learned about opportunity, courage, and failure.

Randall Balmer was a late convert to sports talk radio, but he quickly became addicted, just like millions of other devoted American sports fans. As a historian of religion, the more he listened, Balmer couldn't help but wonder how the fervor he heard related to religious practice. Houses of worship once railed against Sabbath-busting sports events, but today most willingly accommodate Super Bowl Sunday. On the other hand, basketball's inventor, James Naismith, was an ardent follower of Muscular Christianity and believed the game would help develop religious character. But today those religious roots are largely forgotten. Here one of our most insightful writers on American religion trains his focus on that other great passion—team sports—to reveal their surprising connections. From baseball to basketball and football to ice hockey, Balmer explores the origins and histories of big-time sports from the late nineteenth century to the present, with entertaining anecdotes and fresh insights into their ties to religious life. Referring to Notre Dame football, the Catholic Sun called its fandom "a kind of sacramental." Legions of sports fans reading Passion Plays will recognize exactly what that means.