The Heroic Heart
Awakening Unbound Compassion
-
- $24.99
-
- $24.99
Publisher Description
A guidebook to making life meaningful by cultivating compassion, embracing adversity, and training the mind—from one of the foremost living Buddhist nuns.
Freeing ourselves from our habitual emotional patterns starts with taming the mind. Why is this so important? Because a wild mind tends to hurt rather than heal. Taming the mind helps us uncover our true nature and connect with those around us from a grounded place of self-awareness. Through caring for others you can walk the Buddhist path of bodhisattvas, becoming a spiritual hero of compassion.
Based on the classic fourteenth-century mind training text of Tibetan Buddhism called the Thirty-Seven Practices of a Bodhisattva, this guidebook shares pithy advice on how to act as bodhisattvas in our everyday lives, enabling us to possess compassion in an authentic way. Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo, an exemplary spiritual teacher who spent over a dozen years meditating in the Himalayas and one of the first Buddhist nuns to be ordained in the West, shares her reflections on this famous teaching and how to live a life of mindfulness and selflessness.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This sterling study by Palmo (Into the Heart of Life) looks at what the 14th-century Buddhist text The Thirty-Seven Practices of a Bodhisattva has to say about living as a Buddhist today. She unpacks each of the 37 verses on changing one's attitude and "the habitual ways that we respond to situations that happen to us" so as to live free of "delusion and ignorance." For example, Palmo suggests the verse, "To abandon my native land is the practice of a bodhisattva," encourages readers to question habits and thought patterns that might be stalling them on the path to enlightenment. The author says of the 12th verse—which concerns dedicating one's "body" and "possessions" to someone who "seizes all my wealth"—that readers should embrace adversity because it's the repayment of karmic debt and tests whether one has really let go of one's anger and material concerns. Palmo's compassionate voice and lucid explanations are a winning combination, though readers with some background in Buddhism will get the most out of it. The perceptive interpretations provide plenty of food for thought.
