In this foundational text of the Mahayana Buddhist tradition, Nagarjuna offers intimate counsel on how to conduct one's life so as to improve one's condition and to gain release from all types of suffering, culminating in Buddhahood.

How do we live wisely? This is the question Sangharakshita seeks to answer in this commentary on Precious Garland of Advice for a King. In the companion volume, Living Ethically, Sangharakshita showed us that to live a Buddhist life we need to develop an ethical foundation, living in a way motivated increasingly by love, contentment and awareness. However, from a Buddhist viewpoint, 'being good' is not good enough. We need to use our positive ethical position to develop wisdom, a deep understanding of the true nature of existence.

In a world of increasingly confused ethics, Living Ethically looks back over the centuries for guidance from Nagarjuna, one of the greatest teachers of the Mahayana tradition. Drawing on the themes of Nagarjuna's famous scripture, Precious Garland of Advice for a King, this book explores the relationship between an ethical lifestyle and the development of wisdom. Covering both personal and collective ethics, Sangharakshita considers such enduring themes as pride, power and business, as well as friendship, love and generosity.

Precious Garland: Buddhist Approach to Life, Polity and Liberation is book of advice composed by the renowned Buddhist monk philosopher Arya Nagarjuna for his royal friend King Satakarni of the Indian Satavahana dynasty in circa, first century AD. Strung in 500 quatrains, the book is presented in five chapters, each shedding light on concepts and realities such as life, death, beauty, love, power, and virtue. It also provides deep philosophical insight into relevant Buddhist views of Karmic causality, impermanence, emptiness, relativity or interdependence, and Nirvana. More importantly, it delineates Nagarjuna’s quintessential Madhyamaka philosophy, which remained a central philosophy theme in various Buddhist traditions for centuries. The book is intended at helping readers develop a healthy outlook to life, spirituality and practice. Carry a universal message, the book, originally composed for a king, will serve as an effective advice manual for those in responsible positions of power and also those bound by a sense of civic duty. Set in bilingual format, the book contains a new Tibetan rendition of the text drawn primarily from its five major editions -- Derge, Chone, Narthang, Peking and Zhol -- with a lightly annotated English translation that opts literally over readability

How do we create a universe of truthful and verifiable information, available to everyone? In The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge, MIT Open Learning’s Peter B. Kaufman describes the powerful forces that have purposely crippled our efforts to share knowledge widely and freely. Popes and their inquisitors, emperors and their hangmen, commissars and their secret police—throughout history, all have sought to stanch the free flow of information. Kaufman writes of times when the Bible could not be translated—you’d be burned for trying; when dictionaries and encyclopedias were forbidden; when literature and science and history books were trashed and pulped—sometimes along with their authors; and when efforts to develop public television and radio networks were quashed by private industry. In the 21st century, the enemies of free thought have taken on new and different guises—giant corporate behemoths, sprawling national security agencies, gutted regulatory commissions. Bereft of any real moral compass or sense of social responsibility, their work to surveil and control us are no less nefarious than their 16th- and 18th- and 20th- century predecessors. They are all part of what Kaufman calls the Monsterverse. The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge maps out the opportunities to mobilize for the fight ahead of us. With the Internet and other means of media production and distribution—video especially—at hand, knowledge institutions like universities, libraries, museums, and archives have a special responsibility now to counter misinformation, disinformation, and fake news—and especially efforts to control the free flow of information. A film and video producer and former book publisher, Kaufman begins to draft a new social contract for our networked video age. He draws his inspiration from those who fought tooth and nail against earlier incarnations of the Monsterverse—including William Tyndale in the 16th century; Denis Diderot in the 18th; untold numbers of Soviet and Central and East European dissidents in the 20th—many of whom paid the ultimate price. Their successors? Advocates of free knowledge like Aaron Swartz, of free software like Richard Stallman, of an enlightened public television and radio network like James Killian, of a freer Internet like Tim Berners-Lee, of fuller rights and freedoms like Edward Snowden. All have been striving to secure for us a better world, marked by the right balance between state, society, and private gain. The concluding section of the book, its largest piece, builds on their work, drawing up a progressive agenda for how today’s free thinkers can band together now to fight and win. With everything shut and everyone going online, The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge is a rousing call to action that expands the definition of what it means to be a citizen in the 21st century.

Discover the eloquence and insight of the philosopher Nagarjuna, held by tradition to be a second Buddha, in this concise instruction for a king that is considered a masterpiece of Buddhist literature. In this profound work of five hundred verses, we encounter a presentation of Buddhism that integrates both the worldly and the transcendent. The clear and sagacious advice laid out on every page serves as a road map to one’s highest goal—whether that goal is a better life, here called the Dharma of ascendance, or the ultimate one of spiritual freedom, the Dharma of the highest good. The verses, written for an unnamed ruler, touch on questions of statecraft, but their broader themes speak to us today because they tackle the difficulty of integrating one’s spiritual journey with the social and political demands of daily life. Nagarjuna was an Indian Buddhist teacher, probably of the second century CE, who was renowned for his astute articulation of the philosophy of the Middle Way (Madhyamaka). His thoroughgoing critique of all forms of essentialism became a touchstone for Mahayana Buddhism in India, Tibet, and throughout East Asia, and his importance for the development of the Mahayana tradition can scarcely be exaggerated. The translators here first rendered Nagarjuna’s letter for the Dalai Lama’s teachings on the work in Los Angeles in 1997. While that commemorative edition was translated from the Tibetan, the present volume prioritizes the surviving Sanskrit verses along with the only known Indian commentary, by the eleventh-century scholar Ajitamitra. This is the first complete translation in English of the Precious Garland that takes the Indian text and commentary as its primary authorities. In addition, the translators provide rigorous working editions of the Sanskrit and Tibetan verses they translate. This elegant and precise rendering of Nagarjuna’s work is certain to become the touchstone translation of this celebrated Buddhist text.