Alan Cole sheds new light on the origin & nature of Mahāyāna Buddhism with close readings of four well-known texts: the Lotus Sūtra, Diamond Sūtra, Tathāgatagarbha Sūtra, & Vimalakīrtinirdeśa.

PART MEMOIR AND PART ELEGY, READING MY FATHER IS THE STORY OF A DAUGHTER COMING TO KNOW HER FATHER AT LAST— A GIANT AMONG TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN NOVELISTS AND A MAN WHOSE DEVASTATING DEPRESSION DARKENED THE FAMILY LANDSCAPE. In Reading My Father, William Styron’s youngest child explores the life of a fascinating and difficult man whose own memoir, Darkness Visible, so searingly chronicled his battle with major depression. Alexandra Styron’s parents—the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Sophie’s Choice and his political activist wife, Rose—were, for half a century, leading players on the world’s cultural stage. Alexandra was raised under both the halo of her father’s brilliance and the long shadow of his troubled mind. A drinker, a carouser, and above all “a high priest at the altar of fiction,” Styron helped define the concept of The Big Male Writer that gave so much of twentieth-century American fiction a muscular, glamorous aura. In constant pursuit of The Great Novel, he and his work were the dominant force in his family’s life, his turbulent moods the weather in their ecosystem. From Styron’s Tidewater, Virginia, youth and precocious literary debut to the triumphs of his best-known books and on through his spiral into depression, Reading My Father portrays the epic sweep of an American artist’s life, offering a ringside seat on a great literary generation’s friendships and their dramas. It is also a tale of filial love, beautifully written, with humor, compassion, and grace.

"Fathering Your Father is indubitably an important, timely work. In this incisive re-reading of the sources for the early history of Chinese Chan Buddhism, Cole conveys a new understanding of material familiar to scholars that might well make students engage with these sources more imaginatively. Hitherto scholars have pored over the five or six key sources; now we are invited to read them as successive literary inventions. In short, this study has no competition and is bound to provoke debate."—T. H. Barrett, Professor of East Asian History, School of Oriental and African Studies, London, and author of The Woman Who Discovered Printing

Father's Love Letter by Barry Adams is a series of paraphrased Scriptures that take on the form of a love letter from God and will impact your heart, soul and spirit. Experience the love you have been looking for all your life. This gift book contains beautiful full-color photographs and fifty-seven powerful devotional thoughts. A prayer that will help you put into words your response to God follows each devotional thought.

”Tiny Python Projects is a gentle and amusing introduction to Python that will firm up key programming concepts while also making you giggle.”—Amanda Debler, Schaeffler Key Features Learn new programming concepts through 21-bitesize programs Build an insult generator, a Tic-Tac-Toe AI, a talk-like-a-pirate program, and more Discover testing techniques that will make you a better programmer Code-along with free accompanying videos on YouTube Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications. About The Book The 21 fun-but-powerful activities in Tiny Python Projects teach Python fundamentals through puzzles and games. You’ll be engaged and entertained with every exercise, as you learn about text manipulation, basic algorithms, and lists and dictionaries, and other foundational programming skills. Gain confidence and experience while you create each satisfying project. Instead of going quickly through a wide range of concepts, this book concentrates on the most useful skills, like text manipulation, data structures, collections, and program logic with projects that include a password creator, a word rhymer, and a Shakespearean insult generator. Author Ken Youens-Clark also teaches you good programming practice, including writing tests for your code as you go. What You Will Learn Write command-line Python programs Manipulate Python data structures Use and control randomness Write and run tests for programs and functions Download testing suites for each project This Book Is Written For For readers familiar with the basics of Python programming. About The Author Ken Youens-Clark is a Senior Scientific Programmer at the University of Arizona. He has an MS in Biosystems Engineering and has been programming for over 20 years. Table of Contents 1 How to write and test a Python program 2 The crow’s nest: Working with strings 3 Going on a picnic: Working with lists 4 Jump the Five: Working with dictionaries 5 Howler: Working with files and STDOUT 6 Words count: Reading files and STDIN, iterating lists, formatting strings 7 Gashlycrumb: Looking items up in a dictionary 8 Apples and Bananas: Find and replace 9 Dial-a-Curse: Generating random insults from lists of words 10 Telephone: Randomly mutating strings 11 Bottles of Beer Song: Writing and testing functions 12 Ransom: Randomly capitalizing text 13 Twelve Days of Christmas: Algorithm design 14 Rhymer: Using regular expressions to create rhyming words 15 The Kentucky Friar: More regular expressions 16 The Scrambler: Randomly reordering the middles of words 17 Mad Libs: Using regular expressions 18 Gematria: Numeric encoding of text using ASCII values 19 Workout of the Day: Parsing CSV files, creating text table output 20 Password strength: Generating a secure and memorable password 21 Tic-Tac-Toe: Exploring state 22 Tic-Tac-Toe redux: An interactive version with type hints