An End to Suffering is a deeply original and provocative book about the Buddha's life and his influence throughout history, told in the form of the author's search to understand the Buddha's relevance in a world where class oppression and religious violence are rife, and where poverty and terrorism cast a long, constant shadow. Mishra describes his restless journeys into India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, among Islamists and the emerging Hindu middle class, looking for this most enigmatic of religious figures, exploring the myths and places of the Buddha's life, and discussing Western explorers' "discovery" of Buddhism in the nineteenth century. He also considers the impact of Buddhist ideas on such modern politicians as Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. As he reflects on his travels and on his own past, Mishra shows how the Buddha wrestled with problems of personal identity, alienation, and suffering in his own, no less bewildering, times. In the process Mishra discovers the living meaning of the Buddha's teaching, in the world and for himself. The result is the most three-dimensional, convincing book on the Buddha that we have.

This spiritual inquiry into the nature of truth draws on Buddhism and quantum physics to liberate us from limited understandings of ourselves and others. The hopeful teaching of this book is that while everybody suffers, most of this suffering is unnecessary—it can be overcome. The belief that things must be either true or untrue leads us to think in terms of polarities: good or evil, right or wrong. This friend-or-foe approach may seem to make life easier, but in The End of Suffering, Russell Targ and J. J. Hurtak assert that this worldview only increases our experience of suffering. In an effort to overcome the polarity of opposites and the accompanying suffering, Targ and Hurtak combine the wisdom of the East with the findings of quantum physics, uncovering a middle ground that shows opposing sides are really the same. Buddha taught us to live a helpful and compassionate life and to surrender our ego to the peace of spaciousness. The middle path of Buddhism also shows that things may be neither true nor not true, or both true and untrue. The End of Suffering puts the perceived opposites of Buddhism and physics together, showing step-by-step how we can learn to surrender the story of who we think we are and experience an end to our suffering.

The End of Suffering is about the shared human experience and our universal desire to be free of the burden of suffering. It is about healing. Even though the causes of our pain are different, the nature of what we share is identical. All of us at one time hurt and we all carry events which sometimes break us. But we are not alone, we can feel better, and there is a way forward. The End of Sufferi ng contains everything a person needs to find their way through whatever they are going through. It gives hope and soothes our pain and sometimes thats more than enough.

“The extreme greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural remedy for suffering, but a supernatural use for it.” –Simone Weil “Like most people I, too, have been blindsided by personal grief now and again over the years. And I have an increasingly keen sense that, wherever I am, someone nearby is suffering now. For that reason, I lately have settled in to mull the matter over, gathering my troubled wits to undertake a difficult essay, more like what we used to call an assay, really—an earnest inquiry. I am thinking of it just now as a study in suffering, by which I hope to find some sense in affliction, hoping—just as I have come to hope about experience in general—to make something of it.” –from the book Is there meaning in our afflictions? With the thoughtfulness of a pilgrim and the prose of a poet, Scott Cairns takes us on a soul-baring journey through “the puzzlement of our afflictions.” Probing ancient Christian wisdom for revelation in his own pain, Cairns challenges us toward a radical revision of the full meaning and breadth of human suffering. Clear-eyed and unsparingly honest, this new addition to the literature of suffering is reminiscent of The Year of Magical Thinking as well as the works of C. S. Lewis. Cairns points us toward hope in the seasons of our afflictions, because “in those trials in our lives that we do not choose but press through—a stillness, a calm, and a hope become available to us.”

Both Buddhism and the Christian gospel promise the ending of suffering. However, each defines and interprets morality, compassion, proof, and truth according to starkly different worldviews. This is why adjudicating rival claims between these religions has proven so difficult. Two alternate approaches have emerged: treating religious claims as mere personal opinions, or postulating some higher standard outside of religion to which each religion much submit. However, both of these approaches to comparative religious research implicitly deny that any religion can present a story about the totality of reality, including ultimate standards for proof and truth. This book takes a different approach entirely, demonstrating a way that religions can self-critically engage one another using their own respective standards. Within this framework, early Buddhist philosophy and the Christian faith enter into philosophical dialogue. In the process, To End All Suffering pointedly demonstrates that on its own terms, Buddhism cannot account for the very doctrines necessary to show that the Buddha's teachings end suffering. Written primarily for Christians and Buddhists interested in interreligious dialogue, To End All Suffering is a course book suitable for individual study or for college or seminary courses in comparative philosophy or religion.

Originally published in India as: The path of Tibetan Buddhism.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • An "extraordinary ... profoundly moving" history (The New York Times Book Review) of the American Civil War that reveals the ways that death on such a scale changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation. An estiated 750,000 soldiers lost their lives in the American Civil War. An equivalent proportion of today's population would be seven and a half million. In This Republic of Suffering, Drew Gilpin Faust describes how the survivors managed on a practical level and how a deeply religious culture struggled to reconcile the unprecedented carnage with its belief in a benevolent God. Throughout, the voices of soldiers and their families, of statesmen, generals, preachers, poets, surgeons, nurses, northerners and southerners come together to give us a vivid understanding of the Civil War's most fundamental and widely shared reality. With a new introduction by the author, and a new foreword by Mike Mullen, 17th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.