Sheep are seriously underestimated creature when it comes to spirituality and religious feeling. For the first time, this book recognizes their huge potential and offers ovine students of Buddhism everywhere the opportunity to focus their skills and follow the path to enlightenment. From meditation to the essential concepts of Zen, all the fundamentals are set out here in a series of concise interpretations of Buddhist teaching. For anyone searching for something different in their life, this groundbreaking book will be essential reading.

Everyone knows about the immaculate conception and the crucifixion. But what happened to Jesus between the manger and the Sermon on the Mount? In this hilarious and bold novel, the acclaimed Christopher Moore shares the greatest story never told: the life of Christ as seen by his boyhood pal, Biff. Just what was Jesus doing during the many years that have gone unrecorded in the Bible? Biff was there at his side, and now after two thousand years, he shares those good, bad, ugly, and miraculous times. Screamingly funny, audaciously fresh, Lamb rivals the best of Tom Robbins and Carl Hiaasen, and is sure to please this gifted writer’s fans and win him legions more.

An accidental-friendship story packed with humor from author-illustrator Eric Barclay Sheep is an expert at protecting sheep—or so she thinks until one happy afternoon when she bumps into a very hairy someone on the farm. “Who are you?” she asks. “I’m the sheep dog!” the someone says. “I watch the sheep.” Holy begonia! Sheep knows this can’t be right. After all, she’s the pro! So Sheep goes off to get everything Sheep Dog needs to get the job done, but each time she goes, something almost happens to Sheep… And it's Sheep Dog who saves the day! For fans of Goodnight Already! by Jory John, You Will Be My Friend! by Peter Brown, and Little Blue Truck by Alice Schertle, this hilarious and tender friendship story proves that even the best watchers must look out for one another.

“About the subtlest, most sane-making book on contemporary spirituality that I’ve read in years. It’s also the funniest.”—Joanna Macy, author of Active Hope Deciding that her life was insufficiently grounded in real-world experience, Mary Rose O’Reilley, a Quaker reared as a Catholic, embarked on a year of tending sheep. In this decidedly down-to-earth, often-hilarious book, O’Reilley describes her work in an agricultural barn and her extended visit to a Buddhist monastery in France, where she studied with Thich Nhat Hanh. She seeks, in both barn and monastery, a spirituality based not in “climbing out of the body” but rather in existing fully in the world. “O'Reilley has obviously mastered the craft of writing. Her rich, allusive prose draws on Catholicism, Quakerism, Buddhism, monastic tradition, Shakespeare and the Bible. Her short vignettes are luminous with faith matters, yet full of the earthy details of animal husbandry, resulting in a style that's a cross between Kathleen Norris and James Herriot.”—Publishers Weekly “This enjoyable book offers lingering pleasure.”—Library Journal

In Zen Buddhism, a 'koan' is a short anecdote or riddle that is designed by itself to create an experience of enlightenment. It's common for zen masters to provoke through paradoxes, irrational thinking, and misdirection. These are done intentionally to help students break through their desire for logic and reason and thus become more open to enlightenment. And now cartoonist Guruprasad through his lively and entertaining illustrations injects much wit and humour into this modern interpretation of the age-old Zen Koans. He has spiced up each episode with his unique style- to these thought provoking and fascinating Zen koans - to be enjoyed by the young and old alike. The Zen Sheep - your inner Zen Master will give readers not only an insight into one of the greatest collection of Zen Koans, but have them rock-rolling in comic relief.

A groundbreaking manifesto about what our nation’s top schools should be—but aren’t—providing: “The ex-Yale professor effectively skewers elite colleges, their brainy but soulless students (those ‘sheep’), pushy parents, and admissions mayhem” (People). As a professor at Yale, William Deresiewicz saw something that troubled him deeply. His students, some of the nation’s brightest minds, were adrift when it came to the big questions: how to think critically and creatively and how to find a sense of purpose. Now he argues that elite colleges are turning out conformists without a compass. Excellent Sheep takes a sharp look at the high-pressure conveyor belt that begins with parents and counselors who demand perfect grades and culminates in the skewed applications Deresiewicz saw firsthand as a member of Yale’s admissions committee. As schools shift focus from the humanities to “practical” subjects like economics, students are losing the ability to think independently. It is essential, says Deresiewicz, that college be a time for self-discovery when students can establish their own values and measures of success in order to forge their own paths. He features quotes from real students and graduates he has corresponded with over the years, candidly exposing where the system is broken and offering clear solutions on how to fix it. “Excellent Sheep is likely to make…a lasting mark….He takes aim at just about the entirety of upper-middle-class life in America….Mr. Deresiewicz’s book is packed full of what he wants more of in American life: passionate weirdness” (The New York Times).

This book convincingly reassesses the role of political institutions in the introduction of Buddhism under the Tibetan Empire (c. 620-842), showing how relationships formed in the Imperial period underlie many of the unique characteristics of traditional Tibetan Buddhism. Taking original sources as a point of departure, the author persuasively argues that later sources hitherto used for the history of early Tibetan Buddhism in fact project later ideas backward, thus distorting our view of its enculturation. Following the pattern of Buddhism s spread elsewhere in Asia, the early Tibetan imperial court realized how useful normative Buddhist concepts were. This work clearly shows that, while some beliefs and practices per se changed after the Tibetan Empire, the model of socio-political-religious leadership developed in that earlier period survived its demise and still constitutes a significant element in contemporary Tibetan Buddhist religious culture.

Beginning in the nineteenth century and continuing to the present day, both Buddhists and admirers of Buddhism have proclaimed the compatibility of Buddhism and science. Their assertions have ranged from modest claims about the efficacy of meditation for mental health to grander declarations that the Buddha himself anticipated the theories of relativity, quantum physics and the big bang more than two millennia ago. In Buddhism and Science, Donald S. Lopez Jr. is less interested in evaluating the accuracy of such claims than in exploring how and why these two seemingly disparate modes of understanding the inner and outer universe have been so persistently linked. Lopez opens with an account of the rise and fall of Mount Meru, the great peak that stands at the center of the flat earth of Buddhist cosmography—and which was interpreted anew once it proved incompatible with modern geography. From there, he analyzes the way in which Buddhist concepts of spiritual nobility were enlisted to support the notorious science of race in the nineteenth century. Bringing the story to the present, Lopez explores the Dalai Lama’s interest in scientific discoveries, as well as the implications of research on meditation for neuroscience. Lopez argues that by presenting an ancient Asian tradition as compatible with—and even anticipating—scientific discoveries, European enthusiasts and Asian elites have sidestepped the debates on the relevance of religion in the modern world that began in the nineteenth century and still flare today. As new discoveries continue to reshape our understanding of mind and matter, Buddhism and Science will be indispensable reading for those fascinated by religion, science, and their often vexed relation.

As early as AD 781, the writer of the Xi'an Fu inscription described the spread of Syriac Christianity (called Jingjiao in Chinese) to China as a wind blowing eastward. The discovery of the Xi'an Fu Stele, the Dunhuang Jingjiao Manuscripts, the numerous Syriac tombstones and fragments in Central Asia and many parts of China has unearthed a buried history of Syriac Christianity from the Tang Dynasty to the time of the Mongol Empire. The papers in this volume cover a wide range of topics from manuscripts and inscription, to the historical, liturgical and theological perspectives of Syriac Christianity in this geographic realm. Li Tang is Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Biblical Studies and Ecclesiastical History, University of Salzburg.. Dietmar W. Winkler is Professor of Patristic Studies and Ecclesiastical History at the University of Salzburg and Director of the Center for the Study of Eastern Christianity (ZECO) of the University of Salzburg. (Series: Orientalia - Patristica - Oecumenica, Vol. 9) [Subject: Religious Studies, History, Syriac Christianity, Chinese Studies]Ã?Â?