Edited by Vanessa R. Sasson, Little Buddhas brings together a wide range of scholarship and expertise to address the question of what role children have played in Buddhist literature, in particular historical contexts, and their role in specific Buddhist contexts today.

In 1997 journalist Karin Evans walked into an orphanage in southern China and met her new daughter, a beautiful one-year-old baby girl. In this fateful moment Evans became part of a profound, increasingly common human drama that links abandoned Chinese girls with foreigners who have traveled many miles to complete their families. At once a compelling personal narrative and an evocative portrait of contemporary China, The Lost Daughters of China has also served as an invaluable guide for thousands of readers as they navigated the process of adopting from China. However, much has changed in terms of the Chinese government?s policies on adoption since this book was originally published and in this revised and updated edition Evans addresses these developments. Also new to this edition is a riveting chapter in which she describes her return to China in 2000 to adopt her second daughter who was nearly three at the time. Many of the first girls to be adopted from China are now in the teens (China only opened its doors to adoption in the 1990s), and this edition includes accounts of their experiences growing up in the US and, in some cases, of returning to China in search of their roots. Illuminating the real-life stories behind the statistics, The Lost Daughters of China is an unforgettable account of the red thread that winds form China?s orphanages to loving families around the globe.

An exploration of subversive, ribald variations of the most important story in Theravada Buddhism.

The great Buddhist priest Kûkai (774-835) is credited with the introduction and establishment of tantric -or esoteric -Buddhism in early ninth-century Japan. In Ryûichi Abé examines this important religious figure -neglected in modern academic literatu

Culled from Buddhas own sermons, rare books, and manuscripts describing his life and times, this compendium of poetic monologues and dialogues is probably the only one in English that presents salient features of Buddhism of various shades. Satyapal Anand claims to be of the progeny of Anand, the senior most disciple and confidante of Buddha. Poetry and religion mix wonderfully, and Anands poems touch subjects such as ahimsa (nonviolence), sex, meat eating and self-defense. Some of the conventional view have been challenged and laid bare by Buddhas own words. Anands claim to authenticity is his poetic truth that he considers more reliable than mere books. These poems were first published in Urdu and were hailed as the first ever endeavor to present Buddhas teaching through the modern poetic idiom. To render topics like sex desire in young monks and meat eating if it was given as bhiksha (alms) were indeed controversial, but more so were Buddhas own lapses. Does he still feel lust for the other sex? asks Anand, and he replies in affirmative. Doesnt he have a guilty conscience in abandoning his wife and child? asks Anand, and Buddhas answer is still aye, but he defends it too. Is he going to get nirvana (freedom from the birth cycle) after this life? His answer is in the negative. He visualizes that he would be born as Jesus in his next birth and get nirvana only after he is crucified. So are some of his answers on the existence of God, hell or heaven, and whether or not this earth itself is either of these two. Having taught English and comparative literature in universities in India, England, Canada, and USA, Satyapal Anand now lives a secluded life in a suburb of Washington, DC.

BUDDHISM

"Somehow I woke up one day and found myself in bed with a stranger." Meant literally or figuratively, this statement describes one of the best-known plots in world mythology and popular storytelling. In a tour that runs from Shakespeare to Hollywood and from Abraham Lincoln to Casanova, the erudite and irrepressible Wendy Doniger shows us the variety, danger, and allure of the "bedtrick," or what it means to wake up with a stranger. The Bedtrick brings together hundreds of stories from all over the world, from the earliest recorded Hindu and Hebrew texts to the latest item in the Weekly World News, to show the hilariously convoluted sexual scrapes that people manage to get themselves into and out of. Here you will find wives who accidentally commit adultery with their own husbands. You will read Lincoln's truly terrible poem about a bedtrick. You will learn that in Hong Kong the film The Crying Game was retitled Oh No! My Girlfriend Has a Penis. And that President Clinton was not the first man to be identified by an idiosyncratic organ. At the bottom of these wonderful stories, ancient myths, and historical anecdotes lie the dynamics of sex and gender, power and identity. Why can't people tell the difference in the dark? Can love always tell the difference between one lover and another? And what kind of truth does sex tell? Funny, sexy, and engaging, The Bedtrick is a masterful work of energetic storytelling and dazzling scholarship. Give it to your spouse and your lover.

A guide to the famous Heart Sūtra that reveals the tenderness and compassion underlying the striking rhetoric of this popular Buddhist text The radical message of the Heart Sūtra, one of Buddhism’s most famous texts, is a sweeping attack on everything we hold most dear: our troubles, the world as we know it, even the teachings of the Buddha himself. Several of the Buddha’s followers are said to have suffered heart attacks and died when they first heard its assertion of the basic groundlessness of our existence—hence the title of this book. Overcoming fear, the Buddha teaches, is not to be accomplished by shutting down or building walls around oneself, but instead by opening up to understand the illusory nature of everything we fear—including ourselves. In this book of teachings, Karl Brunnhölzl guides practitioners through this ‘crazy’ sutra to the wisdom and compassion that lie at its core.

Koofi's New York Times bestseller, The Favored Daughter, is the true and inspiring story of how one Afghani woman overcame poverty and prejudice to become the first female speaker of the Afghani Parliament and a leading contender for president. The nineteenth daughter of a local village leader in rural Afghanistan, Fawzia Koofi was left to die in the sun after birth by her mother. But she survived, and perseverance in the face of extreme hardship has defined her life ever since. Despite the abuse of her family, the exploitative Russian and Taliban regimes, the murders of her father, brother, and husband, and numerous attempts on her life, she rose to become the first Afghani woman Parliament speaker. Here, she shares her amazing story, punctuated by a series of poignant letters she wrote to her two daughters before each political trip—letters describing the future and freedoms she dreamed of for them and for all the women of Afghanistan.

The Product Of Several Years Of Research, The Penguin Book Of Hindu Names Is A Comprehensive Compilation Of Hindu Names In Current Use. The Meaning Of Each Of The Approximately 20,000 Names In The Volume Is Extensively Discussed And Information On Sources And Usage Is Also Provided. The Book Is Cross-Referenced To Make It Easier To Use. The Aim Of The Work Is Twofold: To Serve As A Practical Guide For Parents Choosing A Name For Their Offspring; And To Provide A Precise And In-Depth Sourcebook For Scholars, Pandits And Lay Readers Who Like To Know What Familiar (And Not So Familiar) Hindu Names Actually Mean.