South Indian Sambar from Everyday Ayurveda

Check out this free recipe for tomato, dal, and tamarind soup from Kate O'Donnell's The Everyday Ayurveda Cookbook:  A Seasonal Guide to Eating and Living Well, available today: South Indian Sambar, pages 124-125. 40% off + free shipping on all books with code FFBF15 through 12/15/15

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Saying Goodbye to B.K.S. Iyengar

20 August 2014 The great, perhaps the greatest living yoga master, B.K.S. Iyengar died today in Pune, India, at the delightfully advanced age of 95. There will be many public tributes and even more private tributes as his innumerable devoted students honor his legacy. In memoriam, we offer Iyengar in his own words from his classic work The Tree of Yoga: "Death is unimportant to a yogi; he does not mind when he is going to die. What happens after death is immaterial to him. He is only concerned with life-with how he can use his life for the betterment of humanity. Having undergone various types of pain in his life and having acquired a certain mastery over pain, he develops compassion to help society and maintains himself in purity and holiness. The yogi has no interest beyond that. "An average individual believes in refinement, in becoming finer and finer. He is like an artist who wants to improve the quality of his life and to be better than he is. The yogi, too, knows that he has to refine himself more and more. He accepts death happily and believes in rebirth as he strives to be finer and finer in his way of thinking and acting. When seeds are sown, the plants come up, and when the plants are mature they give new seeds to sow for the next crop and the next harvest. Thus the yogi develops the quality of his life so that a good seed may emerge, and his next life may bring the harvest of spiritual fragrance. "   B. K. S. IYENGAR TITLES

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The Story behind the Bodhicharyavatara

by Nikko Odiseos   The text with the Sanskrit title Bodhicharyavatara (shortened from the longer Bodhisattvacharyavatara) - usually known in English as either The Way of the Bodhisattva or A Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life - is by far the best-known work attributed to the eighth-century Indian monk Shantideva. It would be impossible to adequately summarize its importance and impact in this small space, but what follows is a brief account of the origin of this classic that has come to be considered an indispensable guide for anyone on the Mahayana path. Shantideva Shantideva was born a prince in a kingdom located in the present-day Indian state of Gujarat. Moved by the Buddhist teachings - and by a vision of Manjushri - he renounced his royal inheritance and became a simple monk at Nalanda, that vast center of Buddhist learning that flourished for more than seven hundred years in what is today the state of Bihar, near the sites where the Buddha is said to have given many of the teachings recorded in the sutras. Related Books As the story goes, some of his fellow monks observed that Shantideva seemed to spend his time doing nothing other than sleeping, eating, and wandering about. Judging him to be lazy or to be wasting the generosity of the monastery's patrons, they hatched a plan to expel him: Every week at Nalanda a public teaching was given, usually by one of the senior monks. Thinking to shame Shantideva into leaving, the monks requested that he give the weekly teaching. After declining their first few requests, to their surprise, he finally agreed. On the appointed day, he took his place on the teaching throne set up in front of the monastery. He asked those congregated if they would rather hear a well-known teaching or one they had never heard before. Curious, and perhaps hopeful at the prospect of Shantideva demonstrating his lack of knowledge and diligence in front of a large audience, they asked for a new teaching. Manjushri And so he began. We can imagine that his audience responded with incredulity, followed by humility, inspiration, and, ultimately, awe - for the astonishing words that came out of his mouth were the teaching we now know as The Way of the Bodhisattva. Many reported seeing Manjushri appear in the sky above Shantideva as he taught. When he reached the ninth chapter, on Transcendent Wisdom, both Shantideva and Manjushri ascended into the sky above and disappeared - though Shantideva's voice continued to be heard as he completed his exposition. Members of the congregation, many of whom had extraordinary abilities of recollection, hurried to write down what they had heard, but their accounts varied, and this text was clearly so important that they were concerned about recording it faithfully. When, some time later word reached Nalanda that Shantideva was living in South India, several of the panditas set off to find him in order to confirm the definitive version. Shantideva not only identified the correct rendering of the text for them, he also alerted them to the existence of his other two texts, The Compendium of Sutras and The Compendium of Training, which they found in a place he indicated, hidden in a beam in his meditation hut back at Nalanda. Of these two, only the latter survives. However, several shorter versions of the Bodhicharyavatara were known about in Tibet. They have come to light from the eleventh-century Dunhuang cave manuscripts, rediscovered in the early twentieth-century. For well over a millennium now, Shantideva's Way of the Bodhisattva has been revered and studied as a manual for the development of bodhicitta, the mind of awakening both in the aspiring and engaged forms of relative bodhicitta and absolute bodhicitta. Some of the results of that study can be be found in the books below related to this text, a few of which also include further details of Shantideva's exploits and teachings. Shantideva was a scholar in the eighth century from the monastic university Nalanda, one of the most celebrated centers of learning in ancient India. According to legend, Shantideva was greatly inspired by the celestial bodhisattva Manjushri, from whom he secretly received teachings and great insights. Related Books Online Course Join Judith L. Lief, Buddhist teacher and editor of The Profound Treasury of the Ocean of Dharma, for an online course that explores the second volume of this monumental work The Bodhisattva Path of Wisdom and Compassion. Related Books

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Hand Tai Chi

The following exercise is excerpted from  The Harvard Medical School Guide to Tai Chi  by Peter M. Wayne, PhD, and Mark L. Fuerst. A good way to experience the interactions between gentle, pulsing move ­ments, relaxation, imagery, and intention and their potential to alleviate pain is by practicing a simple exercise I developed called "Hand Tai Chi. " As a Tai Chi teacher, I have found that this exercise is often therapeutic for those who have arthritis or repetitive-stress injury. More generally, I have found that this exercise helps students experience a number of the core principles of Tai Chi. Once they experience therapeutic Tai Chi qualities in the hand, it's easier for them to experience and begin integrating these principles into the rest of the body. Hand Tai Chi Hold your right hand in front of your body in a relaxed way, palm up. If it's tiring to hold it up, rest it on your thigh. Slowly and mindfully, extend all your fingers and separate them, and then relax them. Don't try too hard, no more than 70 percent effort. As you stretch, take time to notice which knuckles and surrounding tissues feel as if they are opening and which ones are not. It's more important at first to just feel and notice without trying to affect any change. Feel the network of elastic fascia in and around each joint, and notice how the gentle stretching and resting begins to allow the surrounding inner ocean or living matrix to rehydrate and nourish the tissues. Compare the front and back of your hand. Invite the warm, inner ocean to spread more deeply and freely into all tissues, with each cycle of the palm stretching and relaxing back to neutral. Now add a bit of imagery or intention. Imagine warm, healing energy, perhaps a miniature radiant yellow sun, in the palm of your hand, relaxing and nourishing the tissues.50 As you open and gently stretch the palm, allow the healing energy to radiate out into every cell of the hand, adding a gentle, charged quality to the inner ocean. As you relax your hand, feel the energy become more focused in the heart of the palm. Each time you open the hand, the movement of the joints and the flow of the energy should be a just a little easier. Do this for three to five min ­utes with your right hand, and then compare it with how your left hand feels. Sometimes, the right hand feels warmer, sometimes more tingly, sometimes a little "bigger. " It's different for each person. Switch to the left hand, and do Hand Tai Chi for three to five minutes. Now feel how the left hand feels compared to your right hand. The principles of Hand Tai Chi are the same as those you use to prac ­tice the essential Tai Chi forms. For example, as you move forward in the "Push, " the palms open to strengthen the connection between the joints and to express energy. Once you "Push, " your palm returns to a more neu ­tral, relaxed (or yin) phase. During the same movement, more experienced Tai Chi practitioners may sense the opening and closing of many more body joints-the spine, ribs, and lower extremity joints. And, during cer ­tain stages of Tai Chi training, the whole body feels like a hand, opening and closing, and being bathed with awareness and energy. From  The Harvard Medical School Guide to Tai Chi

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