/lit/ - Literature

>>6307889
The secret to happiness (i think that's the name, i'm reading it) it's a study about the buddhist ideology

>>6307889
I don't like that book at all, because it has very little to do with Buddhism or Siddhartha's biography as we understand it.

If you are interested specifically in the Buddha's teachings, opposed to the teachings of Buddhism in general, then read the suttas.

read http://santipada.org/aswiftpairofmessengers/

Begin reading academic works on precanonical Buddhism.

For example, Origin of Buddhist Meditation by Alexander Wayne.

The issue is a lot more complicated than merely reading the suttas, which is why studying early/precanonical is critical.

If interested in the broader subject of Buddhism in general, then there is a lot of choose from. Buddhism is a mammoth complex of many different traditions spanning thousands of years and different intellectual steps & contexts. There are more Buddhist texts than all other religions combined.

It takes a lot of reading to truly grasp even a single tradition, let alone all of Buddhism, the stages it went through, & the proper background context needed to understand this or that particular sutra.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/218160907/The-Art-of-Nakedness-Bearing-it-all-for-the-single-nature-of-mind-a-look-at-Buddhist-salvation

Is a brief overview of many traditions, with an emphasis on the advanced traditions in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism.

http://www.amazon.com/Nagarjunas-Madhyamaka-A-Philosophical-Introduction/dp/0195384962

This book is absolutely essential imo. It reconstructs Nagarjuna rather than merely paraphrasing it and it is extremely illuminating as Nagarjuna can be pretty challenging.


I also think http://www.amazon.com/Moonshadows-Conventional-Truth-Buddhist-Philosophy/dp/0199751439

&

Maps Of The Profound: Jam-Yang-Shay-Ba's Great Exposition Of Buddhist And Non-Buddhist Views On The Nature Of Reality' by Jeffrey Hopkins

I cannot stress enough that this is just an extremely small drop in the pond. Many traditions asserting different things that it really takes a tremendous amount of studying to begin having an comprehensive. I have 4000+ books and essays on Buddhism and I still have room to learn.

This also helped me and was presented at the mind and life convention:

http://davidsenouf.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Buddhism-and-Physics-Interdependence-from-classical-causality-to-quantum-entanglement-Michel-Bitbol.pdf

I also find this quote to be illuminating:

"The American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer made an analogy to Buddhism when describing the Heisenberg uncertainty principle:
If we ask, for instance, whether the position of the electron remains the same, we must say 'no;' if we ask whether the electron's position changes with time, we must say 'no;' if we ask whether the electron is at rest, we must say 'no;' if we ask whether it is in motion, we must say 'no.' The Buddha has given such answers when interrogated as to the conditions of man's self after his death; but they are not familiar answers for the tradition of seventeenth and eighteenth-century science."

>>6307889
great book that got me through some hard times

In The Buddha's Words, edited and introduced by Bhikkhu Bodhi.

>>6307889
No one ever fucking recommends the one true fucking buddhist book for people who are interested. It's literally the fucking path of one to buddha for fucks sake but all you faggots post some hipster cock sucking bullshit.

Fuck this pleb piece of shit board.
Pretentious fucking ignorant cunts.

>>6308907
>I can't express myself without going on a middle school-tier tirade

>>6308862
This

and

http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/kn/dhp/
this: The Dhammapada.

>>6308792
I would recommend the following when introducing the teachings to a beginner:
"KISS": Keep It Simple, Stupid!
Confusing people and making everything seem really opaque and complicated is all you are doing.

OP, you don't need a big esoteric 1000 book library to learn the teachings, the basics are what you need. The original teachings of the Buddha: the Sutta Pitaka.

In the Buddha's Words by Bhikku Bodhi.

The Dhammapada translations.

These are essential. If you want to get straight to the texts, look into the Nikaya translations by Bhikkhu Bodhi. The Majjhima Nikaya, Digha Nikaya, and the Samyutta Nikaya.