A Memoir of a Buddhist is a captivating and honest story detailing Nong's experiences as a young girl who grew up in Thailand and then moved to the United States when she was older. This move into a new culture proved to be more difficult than she had anticipated. Her excitement in the new culture not only faded but was replaced by loss and heartbreak. It was when Nong hit rock bottom that she discovered a gift that she had had her entire life. She realized how lucky she was to have been born in Thailand where she grew up practicing mindfulness before she even knew what it was for. Slowly but steadily, Nong returned to her Buddhist practices and committed herself to daily loving-kindness meditation. Nong found out that in order to have love and compassion for other beings, she first had to cultivate love and compassion for herself. While millions in the West are learning about the power of mindfulness practice to help them find a measure of peace and well-being, Nong had only to turn inward and embrace the tradition in which she was raised. By accepting her own imperfections, remembering where she comes from, loving, and respecting who she is, Nong discovered a way to be free.

In August 1968, naturalist-explorer Peter Matthiessen returned from Africa to his home in Sagaponack, Long Island, to find three Zen masters in his driveway—guests of his wife, a new student of Zen. Thirteen years later, Matthiessen was ordained a Buddhist monk. Written in the same format as his best-selling The Snow Leopard, Nine-Headed Dragon River reveals Matthiessen's most daring adventure of all: the quest for his spiritual roots.

OCCUPY THIS BODY is the story of Sharon Suh's struggle to overcome a childhood of cruelty from her Korean immigrant mother. As she matures and awakens to her own body and past suffering, her embrace of Buddhism helps her heal and lay bare the silence surrounding abuse and mental illness in Asian American families.

Can you come sit at the table? Tammy Letherer’s husband of twelve years spoke these words on a Tuesday night, just before Christmas, after he had put their three children in bed. He had a piece of paper and two fingers of scotch in front of him. As he read from the list in his hand, his next words would shatter her world and destroy every assumption she'd ever made about love, friendship, and faithfulness. In The Buddha at My Table, Letherer describes―in honest, sometimes painful detail―the dismantling of a marriage that encompasses the ordinary and the surreal, including the night she finds a silent, smiling Thai monk sitting at the same dining room table. It’s this unexpected visitation, this personification of peace, that sticks with her as she listens to her husband reveal hurtful, shocking things―that he never loved her, he doesn’t believe in monogamy, and he wants to “wrap things up” with her in four weeks―and allows her to find the blessing in her husband’s betrayal. Ultimately, it’s when she realizes that she is participating in her life, not at its mercy, that she discovers the path to freedom.

Compares teachings of Buddhism with principles of modern biology, revealing many significant points of compatibility.

Charles Prebish is world-renowned as a leading Buddhist scholar, with more than 20 books and 100 academic articles to his credit. Since his involvement with Buddhism began in 1965, he has had the privilege and honor to meet all of America's distinguished and visiting Buddhist teachers, to work with Buddhist scholars around the world, and to deepen the academic study of Buddhism. While his specialization is in monastic discipline, he is most widely known as the first scholar to seriously examine Buddhism in America as a distinct field of study. His pioneering efforts in this regard have had a profound impact on the study of Buddhism's history in North America, which is now one of the most active areas of global Buddhist research. Dr Prebish was Founding Co-Chair of the Buddhism Section of the American Academy of Religion in 1981, Founding Co-Publisher of the first online peer-reviewed journal in the field of religious studies - "The Journal of Buddhist Ethics," and five years later another online journal - "The Journal of Global Buddhism." He recently retired as Professor Emeritus from Utah State University, after a 35-year career teaching at Pennsylvania State University. "An American Buddhist Life" is his story, with reflection on where Buddhism in America has been and where it's going.

Tendrel tells the story of a gifted young man who grows up in a sophisticated Upper East Side household in the 1940s, 50s, and early 60s he rubs elbows with many famous people-Noël Coward, Truman Capote, Greta Garbo, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Dwight Eisenhower, and others. After he's dismissed from St. Paul's School his senior year, he frequents gay bars and discovers his sexuality. As an intellectually precocious teenager he finds himself drawn to Medieval studies, French literature, and Buddhism. While at Harvard he converts to Catholicism. After many twists and turns, traveling to France, Greece, and Italy, making friends and indulging in flings, he graduates. Two weeks later, his mother jumps to her death from a window of their upper Fifth Avenue apartment. Months later, the author suffers a nervous breakdown. His recovery connects him with the renowned piano duo, Arthur Gold and Bobby Fizdale, and through them many of New York's great artists, including Tanny and George Balanchine, Samuel Barber, Stella Adler, John Housman, and Cicely Tyson, all of whom are part of Tendrel's melody. In 1967 his mentor, the Benedictine monk and theologian Dom Aelred Graham, invites the author to accompany him as his secretary on a year-long journey to Asia to meet with non-Christian religious leaders. During that year the author is accepted as a private student by the Dalai Lama, who tells him, "I will¿make you my monk in America." In 1968 the author acts as Thomas Merton's guide to Tibetan lamas in the Indian Himalayas; he houses the great Cistercian monk in his small bungalow in Darjeeling. Merton confronts the author, telling him: "You've got to get it straight kid: what the Tibetan tradition has to offer us is dzogchen and that's where it's at¿[So] if you want to know¿find a dzogchen yogi." Merton dies a month later in a Bangkok hotel. The author finds his Dzogchen yogi, Lama Gyurda-la, outside Darjeeling. He enters the path of Dzogchen and discovers his life's work: understanding the mind's nature mind, of being liberated from life's ups and downs.