Teachings on "dependent origination," which is the key to understanding the teachings of the Buddha and transforming our disruptive emotions into true wisdom and compassion.

If everything is empty, then what ceases in Nirvana and is born in rebirth? How can you live in the world without feeling trapped by it? Guy Armstrong tackles these questions and more in this richly informed, practical guide to emptiness for the meditator. It may seem odd for emptiness to serve as the central philosophy of a major religion. In fact, emptiness points to something quite different than “nothingness” or “vacancy.” And by developing a richer understanding of this complex topic, we can experience freedom as we live consciously in the world. Guy Armstrong has been a leading figure and beloved teacher of insight meditation for decades. In this book, he makes difficult Buddhist topics easy to understand, weaving together Theravada and Mahayana teachings on emptiness to show how we can liberate our minds and manifest compassion in our lives.

An in-depth and intimate exploration of Zen Buddhist philosophy, practice and awakening. Specific pointers are offered on working with the mind and emotions, practicing deep zazen meditation and working intensely with koans and inquiry. Chapters on specific topics are followed by questions-and-answers that go the very heart of the issues discussed. Written by Zen teacher, Paul Gerstein, Dharma successor of Roshi Richard Clarke, the founding teacher of The Living Dharma Center, Northampton, Massachusetts.

Wisdom in Exile provides a new insight into Buddhism's encounter with Western culture and the Western mind in the early 21st century. Jampa Thaye has trained for over 40 years with some of the foremost lamas of Tibetan Buddhism, yet is a Westerner, living in Britain, teaching Buddhism to students throughout Europe and North America. He draws on that knowledge and experience to explain the space that now exists for Buddhism in the West, and identifies critical conflicts and tensions that must be resolved for modern Westerners to grasp the essence of the Buddhist teachings. The book culminates with detailed instructions in the meditation system of 'The Four Immeasurables', allowing the reader to properly orientate themselves within the world of Buddhism and learn how to practice. "Wisdom in Exile proposes a fresh approach to Buddhism, one in which the fundamental tenets of the Buddha's teachings are rediscovered." His Holiness Sakya Trichen, 41st Head of the Sakya School of Tibetan Buddhism

This sustained and distinctively Buddhist challenge to the ontology of Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness resolves the incoherence implicit in the Sartrean conception of nothingness by opening to a Buddhist vision of emptiness. Rooted in the insights of Madhyamika dialectic and an articulated meditative (zen) phenomenology, Nothingness and Emptiness uncovers and examines the assumptions that sustain Sartre's early phenomenological ontology and questions his theoretical elaboration of consciousness as "nothingness." Laycock demonstrates that, in addition to a "relative" nothingness (the for-itself) defined against the positivity and plenitude of the in-itself, Sartre's ontology requires, but also repudiates, a conception of "absolute" nothingness (the Buddhist "emptiness"), and is thus, as it stands, logically unstable, perhaps incoherent. The author is not simply critical; he reveals the junctures at which Sartrean ontology appeals for a Buddhist conception of emptiness and offers the needed supplement.

A pattern is a word that consists of variables and terminal symbols. The pattern language that is generated by a pattern A is the set of all terminal words that can be obtained from A by uniform replacement of variables with terminal words. For example, the pattern A = xaxa (where x is a variable, and a is a terminal symbol) generates the set of all squares that end on a. Due to their simple definition, pattern languages have various connections to a wide range of other areas in computer science and mathematics. On the other hand, many of the canonical questions are surprisingly difficult for pattern languages. The present thesis discusses various aspects of the inclusion problem of pattern languages. It can be divided in two parts. The first one examines the decidability of the inclusion problem under various restrictions, and the related question of minimizability of regular expressions with repetition operators. The second part deals with descriptive patterns, the smallest generalizations of arbitrary languages through pattern languages ("smallest" with respect to the inclusion relation). Main topics are the existence and the discoverability of descriptive patterns.

Security protocols are widely used to ensure secure communications over insecure networks, such as the internet or airwaves. These protocols use strong cryptography to prevent intruders from reading or modifying the messages. However, using cryptography is not enough to ensure their correctness. Combined with their typical small size, which suggests that one could easily assess their correctness, this often results in incorrectly designed protocols. The authors present a methodology for formally describing security protocols and their environment. This methodology includes a model for describing protocols, their execution model, and the intruder model. The models are extended with a number of well-defined security properties, which capture the notions of correct protocols, and secrecy of data. The methodology can be used to prove that protocols satisfy these properties. Based on the model they have developed a tool set called Scyther that can automatically find attacks on security protocols or prove their correctness. In case studies they show the application of the methodology as well as the effectiveness of the analysis tool. The methodology’s strong mathematical basis, the strong separation of concerns in the model, and the accompanying tool set make it ideally suited both for researchers and graduate students of information security or formal methods and for advanced professionals designing critical security protocols.