Disease and death are undeniably integral parts of human life. Yet when they manifest we are easily caught unprepared. To prepare for these, we need to learn how to skilfully face illness and passing away. A source of practical wisdom can be found in the early discourses that record the teachings given by the Buddha and his disciples. The chief aim of this book is to provide a collection of passages taken from the Buddha's early discourses that provide guidance for facing disease and death...

Analayo investigates the meditative practices of compassion and emptiness by examining and interpreting material from the early Buddhist discourses.

The Satipatthana Sutta is the teaching on mindfulness and the breath and is the basis of much insight meditation practice today. This book is a thorough and insightful guide to this deceptively simple yet profound teaching. 'With painstaking thoroughness, Ven. Analayo marshals the suttas of the Pali canon, works of modem scholarship, and the teachings of present-day meditation masters to make the rich implications of the Satipatthana Sutta, so concise in the original, clear to contemporary...

Join a rigorous scholar and Buddhist monk on a brisk tour of rebirth from ancient doctrine to contemporary debates.German Buddhist monk and university professor Bhikkhu Analayo had not given much attention to the topic of rebirth before some friends asked him to explore the treatment of the issue in early Buddhist texts. This succinct volume presents his findings, approaching the topic from four directions. The first chapter examines the doctrine of rebirth as it i...

An incisive look into the early Buddhist teachings on emptiness, and a manual for bringing those teachings into our everyday lives.Before the growth of the Mahayana and the Perfection of Wisdom, the Buddha gave his own teachings, to his attendant Ananda, on the importance of emptiness (Pali sunnata, Sanskrit sunyata) in formal meditation and everyday practice. In this volume, renowned scholar-monk Bhikkhu Analayo explores these teachings and shows...

A fascinating investigation into the formation and transmission of the early Buddhist oral tradition.For hundreds of years after his death, the Buddha’s teachings were transmitted orally, from person to person. In this volume, acclaimed scholar-monk Bhikkhu Analayo examines the impact of such oral transmission on early Buddhist texts, be these monastic rules, verses, or prose portions of the early discourses. He scrutinizes various oral aspects of these texts, surv...

Bridging early Buddhist thought and ancient Greek philosophy, In Love with Wisdom offers a fresh glimpse into the ethics and metaphysics of the time, revealing how figures like Heraclitus and Socrates were grappling with the same ideas as the early Buddhists.“Is it not also clear that by knowing themselves people experience the most good things, and by being deceived about themselves they suffer the most evils?” This question, posed by Socrates, cuts to th...

Analayo offers an inspiring biography of the Buddha, focusing on his meditative development and practice, including extracts from the early discourses, with commentary by the author. He conveys not only a focus on the Buddha as a meditator, but also that the book's readers are meditators, that this is a life of the Buddha providing inspiration and guidance for meditators. Each of the twenty-four chapters concludes with suggestions for meditative practice or conduct.

Buddhist meditator and scholar Bhikkhu Analayo presents this thorough-going guide to the early Buddhist teachings on Satipaa'-a'-hana, the foundations of mindfulness, following on from his two best-selling books, Satipaa'-a'-hana and Perspectives on Satipaa'-a'-hana. With mindfulness being so widely taught, there is a need for a clear-sighted and experience-based guide. Analayo provides it.

In this new book, Analayo builds on his earlier ground-breaking work, Satipatthana: The Direct Path to Realization. Here, he enlarges our perspective on this seminal teaching by exploring the practices of mindfulness as presented in both the Pali and Chinese versions of this important discourse. The brilliance of his scholarly research, combined with the depth of his meditative understanding, provides an invaluable guide to the liberating practices of the Buddha's teaching. Joseph Goldstei...

See the formative years of Mahayana Buddhist literature through the lens of the Perfection of Wisdom, expertly analyzed by the venerable scholar-monk Bhikkhu Analayo.In this work we have a rare perspective on the early history of Mahayana Buddhism and the Perfection of Wisdom (Prajnaparamita), as far as this is still accessible in surviving texts. With his characteristic clarity and precision, Bhikkhu Analayo critically analyzes e...

Renowned scholar-monk writes accessibly on some of the most contentious topics in Buddhism—guaranteed to ruffle some feathers.Armed with his rigorous examination of the canonical records, respected scholar-monk Bhikkhu Analayo explores—and sharply criticizes—four examples of what he terms “superiority conceit” in Buddhism:the androcentric tendency to prevent women from occupying leadership roles, be these as fully ordained monastics or as advanced bod...