Essential Buddhism: A Complete Guide to Beliefs and Practices

276 Pages·2001·13.64 MB·English

by  Jack Maguire

At its core, Buddhism is a uniquely practical faith,
with a small body of basic principles.
ESSENTIAL BUDDHISM focuses on this core and discusses:
• Living as a buddha: moral and ethical conduct
• Cultivating wisdom and compassion
• Exploring questions of life, death, and rebirth
• Engaging in Buddhist liturgy
• Buddhism and the new millennium
• And much more
OTHER BOOKS BY JACK MAGUIRE
Waking Up: A Week Inside a Zen Monastery
The Power of Personal Storytelling
Creative Storytelling
Care and Feeding of the Brain
Night and Day: Using Dreams to Transform Your Life
East-West Medicine: Combining Chinese and Western Health Care
(with Dr. May Loo)
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An Original Publication of POCKET BOOKS
POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
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Copyright © 2001 by Jack Maguire and Roundtable Press, Inc.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce
this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue
of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
ISBN: 0-671-04188-6
First Pocket Books trade paperback printing June 2001
10 9876543
POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of
Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Cover design by Brigid Pearson
Front cover photo by Grant V. Faint/The Image Bank
Printed in the U.S.A.
This book is dedicated to
LAURA (LULU) TORBET
my good friend who pointed the way
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction xi
Notes on the Text xix
Chapter I: The Great Awakening:The Buddha and His Legacy /
Chapter 2: The Three Vehicles of Buddhism:
Theravada, Mahayana, and Vajrayana 33
Chapter 3: The Path to Enlightenment: Buddhist Beliefs 75
Chapter 4: Walking the Way: Buddhist Practices / / 5
Chapter 5: The Dharma Comes to the West / 55
Chapter 6: Buddhism and the New Millennium 201
Glossary 233
Bibliography 247
Index 253
Acknowledgments
While putting together Essential Buddhism, I drew on the works and
teachings of many different authorities, past and present, to provide
multiple perspectives on key aspects of the religion, its history, and its
applications. Expressing in Buddhist terms my indebtedness to these
individuals, I can only say that myriad labors went into this book be
sides my own.
I credit the source of each quotation as it occurs in the text, so that
readers can know its exact origin as they encounter it. For a full list of
the books that I consulted, all of which I recommend for further read
ing, see the bibliography.
I am especially grateful for the words and deeds of three prominent
Buddhists in the contemporary American Buddhist scene who have
had a significant, positive impact on my life as well as this book. They
are John Daido Loori Roshi, abbot of Zen Mountain Monastery and
my Dharma teacher; Robert Thurman, professor of Indo-Tibetan
Buddhist studies at Columbia University; and Jack Kornfield, founding
teacher of the Insight Meditation Society and the Spirit Rock Center,
representing the vipassana tradition of Theravada Buddhism.
I also thank Daido Roshi for allowing me to reprint his "Invocation
of a New Millennium," and Dharma Communications for permitting
me to use its formulations of several Buddhist chants and scriptures, in
cluding the "Heart Sutra."
Quotations from other Buddhist scriptures in the book represent
my own adaptations based on numerous different English, Sanskrit,
Pali, Japanese, and Tibetan versions. Researching with dictionaries, I
Acknowledgments
chose the English words that were closest in meaning to the original
ones or, if I was unable to make such a determination, the English
words most commonly used in widely available scholarly translations.
In certain cases I quoted directly from a particular source, as indicated
in the text.
Marsha Melnick of Roundtable Press and Nancy Miller and Kim-
berly Kanner of Simon & Schuster were the midwives of this book and
enriched it with their excellent counsel. I very much appreciate their
sensitivity to the subject matter as well as their consistently patient and
reliable guidance.
Throughout this project, as in countless others I've undertaken, I
was blessed to have the support, encouragement, inspiration, and mag
ically practical advice of Tom Cowan. Ta gra agam duit,Tom.