Practical Buddhism: Living Everyday Life

About The Book:

Practical Buddhism is a collection of insights and tales about practising dharma in everyday life. These humorous accounts of the mundane successes and failures of the author and his friends offer practical guidance for anyone wishing to align their daily lives with Buddhist values and ideas. Stories about answering the door, quarrelling with dogs, coping with city traffic, living with cellphones, greeting others, etc. employ wit and irony to demonstrate that really effective progress in improving one s character is often made in mundane ways. The anecdotes and reflections that the author shares in this book are straight from his own life. Of course, each of us has grown up in different circumstances and encountered different situations in our lives, but no matter what culture or historical era we're from, our human minds function in very similar ways. Each of us wants to be happy and avoid suffering although different people, possessions, and places may bring us happiness or suffering. Despite this desire for happiness not misery, we lack the knowledge of what the causes for each are. In fact, we often find that the words we said or deeds we did with the conviction that they would bring us joy resulted in the opposite. The moment we get the gorgeous new car we've craved, we've entered "car hell" for the car will surely break down at the most inopportune times. The repairs will cost more than we like and may not completely fix the problem. Alongside "car hell" are situated "computer hell," "iPod and Blackberry hell," "relationship hell," and on and on. We keep looking outside of ourselves for someone or something that will bring us the satisfaction and joy we seek, yet these continually elude us. And to the contrary, the difficulties we shun find us anyway.

About the Author(s)

Kenneth Liberman is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Oregon. He is the author of Dialectical Practice in Tibetan Philosophical Culture (Rowman & Littlefield), Husserl's Criticism of Reason (Lexington Books) and More Studies in Ethnomethodology (SUNY Press). He presently divides his time between Sera Jey Monastic University in Bylakuppe, India, where he serves as the PhD Proctor/Professor, and research assignments as the Hans Christian Anderson Visiting Professor at Suddansk Universitet in Denmark and University Research Fellow at the Universita di Trento in Italy.