Imaginative, tasty, and nutritious, the recipes compiled here originated at South Africa's Buddhist Retreat Center, renowned for more than 30 years of innovative vegetarian cuisine. Created by an exceptionally talented chef, it argues for a change in attitude toward this seemingly mundane human need--the need to eat--in order to make it a joyful, flavorful journey, full of delights and surprises. Peppered with meditations and spiritual poetry, this cookbook also includes photographs and anecdotes that will offer a glimpse into the center's magnificent setting and varied workshops.

Fresh out of college, Gesshin Claire Greenwood found her way to a Buddhist monastery in Japan and was ordained as a Buddhist nun. Zen appealed to Greenwood because of its all-encompassing approach to life and how to live it, its willingness to face life’s big questions, and its radically simple yet profound emphasis on presence, reality, the now. At the monastery, she also discovered an affinity for working in the kitchen, especially the practice of creating delicious, satisfying meals using whatever was at hand — even when what was at hand was bamboo. Based on the philosophy of oryoki, or “just enough,” this book combines stories with recipes. From perfect rice, potatoes, and broths to hearty stews, colorful stir-fries, hot and cold noodles, and delicate sorbet, Greenwood shows food to be a direct, daily way to understand Zen practice. With eloquent prose, she takes readers into monasteries and markets, messy kitchens and predawn meditation rooms, and offers food for thought that nourishes and delights body, mind, and spirit.

A fascinating collection about Buddhist women translated from the thirteenth-century Sinhala Buddhist text, the Saddharmaratnāvaliya, these stories provide insights into the social status and roles of women in medieval India and Sri Lanka and the Buddhist doctrinal ideal. They also reflect the changes that took place as the Buddhist position on gender and female sexuality accommodated the social realities of the time. Translating, contextualizing, and commenting on the narratives, Ranjini Obeyesekere highlights the differences in perspective between the celibate monks who were the literary authors of the Saddharmaratnāvaliya and the social world of their audience.

A beautifully crafted and inviting account of one woman’s life, Safekeeping offers a sublimely different kind of autobiography. Setting aside a straightforward narrative in favor of brief passages of vivid prose, Abigail Thomas revisits the pivotal moments and the tiny incidents that have shaped her life: pregnancy at 18; single motherhood (of three!) by the age of 26; the joys and frustrations of three marriages; and the death of her second husband, who was her best friend. The stories made of these incidents are startling in their clarity and reassuring in their wisdom. This is a book in which silence speaks as eloquently as what is revealed. Openhearted and effortlessly funny, these brilliantly selected glimpses of the arc of a life are, in an age of excessive confession and recrimination, a welcome tonic.

The purpose of the book is to continue the tradition of excellent vegetarian food, centred on Mediterrrean flavors, served at the BRC which has always had the personal touch of the head chef in charge of the menus and that of his co-chefs: the lovely, friendly local Zulu women who have worked in the kitchen for many years to great acclaim from visitors. These ladies were taught the skills of traditional Zulu cooking from their mothers, which they then readily adapted to cooking the vegetarian cuisine served at the BRC. These women could hold their own in the kitchen of any up-market restaurant anywhere. With this book, the BRC also wanted to showcase the exquisite indigenous environment in which it is set, which has become a spiritual haven for South African and international visitors.

What was eating them? And vice versa. In What the Great Ate, Matthew and Mark Jacob have cooked up a bountiful sampling of the peculiar culinary likes, dislikes, habits, and attitudes of famous—and often notorious—figures throughout history. Here is food • As code: Benito Mussolini used the phrase “we’re making spaghetti” to inform his wife if he’d be (illegally) dueling later that day. • As superstition: Baseball star Wade Boggs credited his on-field success to eating chicken before nearly every game. • In service to country: President Thomas Jefferson, America’s original foodie, introduced eggplant to the United States and wrote down the nation’s first recipe for ice cream. From Emperor Nero to Bette Davis, Babe Ruth to Barack Obama, the bite-size tidbits in What the Great Ate will whet your appetite for tantalizing trivia.

The Jataka tales compose a large collection of Buddhist morality stories in which the Buddha recounts some of his past lives on his long road to enlightenment. Even though they’re a part of the Pali Canon and contain words attributed to the Buddha himself, they’re more folktale than religious text, and their popularity stems as much from their entertainment value as their moral messages. Often compared with Aesop’s Fables, the Buddha-to-be is sometimes born as an animal, and he frequently overcomes difficult situations and solves problems in creative and comical ways. This book features abridged, plain-language versions of all 547 classical Jataka tales, the first-ever complete collection of this sort in English. Much easier to read than the stodgy translations done by scholars more than a century ago, these concise stories are as enjoyable as they are enlightening and appeal to everyone, not just Buddhists. “With these modern English renderings of Cowell's nineteenth century translations, Tim Bewer has offered freshly readable versions of the entire jataka collection . . . This enormous labor of love makes these delightful, but long obscured, texts elegantly accessible to modern readers. They will be valued by all lovers of Buddhist art and literature for their spiritual and aesthetic qualities, but also by those who simply admire the fabulous Indian imagination, for these tales make their wisdom charming with entertainment and fun.”—Stephen Jenkins, Professor Emeritus of Religion at Cal Poly Humboldt “Easy to read and understand, these versions of the Jataka tales are a delight.”—Phra Saneh Dhammavaro, Founder of the Monk Chat Program and International Meditation Center at Wat Suan Dok, Chiang Mai