Lemuria Bookstore Blog

Haiku Mind: 108 Poems to Cultivate Awareness and Open Your Heart Edited by Patricia Donegan Shambhala (2008) I enjoy reading good haiku very much.  Sometimes I’m astonished by how much can be said with so few words.  Good haiku is a direct result of understanding complex reality and stating it precisely, correctly and beautifully.  Haiku [...]

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Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears by Pema Chödrön Shambhala, July 2009 Taking the Leap is an attempt by Pema to help us to learn how to look at our attachments and self-absorption. This little book is full of suggestions for how to work skillfully with our own blind spots. An [...]

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This book is not about Buddhism as a religion or a way of life. The Dalai Lama is not interested in converting readers of this book to Buddhism. However, The Leader’s Way is about the application of some fundamental concepts of Buddhism into business decisions. Good decision making and mental exercises improve the performance of [...]

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The Late Poems of Meng Chiao Princeton (1996) Translated by David Hinton Meng Chiao (751-814) wrote most of these experimental poems between 807-814. Late Poems is a radical and major work of deep introspection. Even though it was written over a thousand years ago, many of these poems read fresh and contemporary: Meng Chiao’s “symbolic [...]

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Companions for the Journey is a series showcasing inspirational work by well-known writers in a small-book format designed to be carried along your journey through life. I have enjoyed reading these books and blogged about some of them in this series before. This spring three new titles were issued and I found all three to [...]

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The Practice of Lojong: Cultivating Compassion through Training of the Mind by Traleg Kyabgon Shambala (2007) The word lojong is Tibetan for “mind training.” Lojong is training the mind to be intelligent in a very fundamental way, developing basic intelligence and making intelligent use of our emotional nature which leads to seeing and thinking more [...]

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This isn’t a new book, of course, but Nilgiri Press has just reissued Eknath Easwaran’s Dialogue With Death: The Spiritual Psychology of the Katha Upanishad in a revised edition called Essence of the Upanishads.  This attractive edition includes a previously unpublished introduction and some minor revisions that were suggested by the author before his death [...]

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Classical Chinese Poetry: An Anthology Translated and edited by David Hinton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2008 Before Thanksgiving I began a leisurely read of this “all-star” poetry collection which spans 2700 years (1500 B.C.E. to 1200 C.E.). The anthology of nearly 500 poems “focuses on a relatively small number of poets and provides selections [...]

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The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain Translated by Red Pine Copper Canyon Press (2000) About five years ago during some troubles, a friend visited while he was reading The Collected Songs. Before he left, he gave me his copy with the inscription: “For John, who could use this book.” And I have: reading, rereading and [...]

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Where the World Does Not Follow: Buddhist China in Picture and Poem Translated by Mike O’Connor / Photography by Steven R. Johnson Wisdom Publications: Boston (2002) *     *     * O’Connor’s translation of ancient poems, alongside Johnson’s breathtaking photography, bring these ancient words to the present. Zen and Taoist poetry coupled with timeless images make for [...]

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