The Buddhist Jataka tales are simple lessons in living with honesty, wisdom, and compassion that contain the power to transform the hearts and minds of those who hear them. They are stories of the Buddha’s past lives—in such forms as a boar, a parrot, a monkey, or a peacock—that have enchanted children and adults for millennia. Their animal characters powerfully and sometimes humorously demonstrate the virtues and foibles to which we humans are prone, and they point the way to more enlightened ways of living. Mark McGinnis retells the Jatakas in poetic and accessible language, rendering the Buddhist teachings they contain abundantly clear. Each tale is brought to life by Mark’s full-color illustration, making the book a visually stunning entrée to this edifying and highly entertaining literary tradition.

A provocative and playful exploration of the Zen koan tradition that reveals how everyday paradoxes are an integral part of our spiritual journey Bring Me the Rhinoceros is an unusual guide to happiness and a can opener for your thinking. For fifteen hundred years, Zen koans have been passed down through generations of masters, usually in private encounters between teacher and student. This book deftly retells more than a dozen traditional koans, which are partly paradoxical questions dangerous to your beliefs and partly treasure boxes of ancient wisdom. Koans show that you don’t have to impress people or change into an improved, more polished version of yourself. Instead you can find happiness by unbuilding, unmaking, throwing overboard, and generally subverting unhappiness. Author and Zen teacher John Tarrant brings the heart of the koan tradition out into the open, reminding us that the old wisdom remains as vital as ever, a deep resource available to anyone in any place or time.

What will help when the blues leave you feeling as though you’re crushed beneath an elephant? Will a smile do the trick? A gentle nudge? Chocolate? A walk? Can anyone—or anything—make the elephant go away? Warm, empathetic, hopeful, and often funny, My Elephant Is Blue is an inviting exploration of the experience of living under the weight of sadness. A reading guide with discussion questions based on the book, activities to help children explore its themes, and a list of resources for more information will be available April 2023 at flyawaybooks.com/resources.

Stanley Bing follows his enormously successful What Would Machiavelli Do? with another subversively humorous exploration of how work would be different—if the Buddha were your personal consultant. What would the Buddha do—if he had to deal with a rampaging elephant of a boss every day? That is the premise of Stanley Bing’s wickedly funny guide to finding inner peace in the face of relentlessly obnoxious, huge, and sometimes smelly bosses. Taking the concept of managing up to a new cosmic plateau, Bing urges no less than a revolution of the spirit in the American workplace, turning overwrought, oppressed, stressed-out employees into models of Zen-like powers of concentration, able to take their elephant-like bosses and grey, lumbering companies and twirl them around the little finger of their consciousness. In Bing’s unique tradition of social criticism cum business self-help, Throwing the Elephant presents Four Truths (or possibly Five), a Ninefold Path, and one useful, hilarious guide to workplace sanity, success, and enlightenment that surpasses all understanding, survival.

A handbook on the Buddhist mindfulness practice of Calm Abiding Meditation or shamatha (sanskrit). It includes instructions on the practices of Mindfulness of Body and Mindfulness of Feeling the Buddha taught. There are teachings on the five obstacles and eight antidotes, five experiences and nine stage of Calm Abiding meditation.

Around the beginning of the common era, Indian Buddhists began to collect fables, or jataka tales, illuminating various human virtues and foibles—from kindness, cooperation, loyalty and self-discipline on the one hand to greed, pride, foolishness, and treachery on the other. Instead of populating these stories with people, they cast the animals of their immediate environment in the leading roles—which may have given the tales a universal appeal that helped them travel around the world, surfacing in the Middle East as Aesop's fables and in various other guises throughout East and Southeast Asia, Africa, Russia, and Europe. Author and painter Mark McGinnis has collected over forty of these hallowed popular tales and retold them in vividly poetic yet accessible language, their original Buddhist messages firmly intact. Each story is accompanied with a beautifully rendered full-color painting, making this an equally attractive book for children and adults, whether Buddhist or not, who love fine stories about their fellow wise (and foolish) creatures.