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What are some books of Buddha's teachings to read?
msac123
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Dhammapada is great.
Kind of depends on your reading style. The Sutras are great but can be hard to read for someone new. Thich Nhat Hanh is a great Buddhist author, along with Chogyam Trungpa, along with many, many others. There are a lot of options. There are also several threads about book recommendations around here somewhere. You should be able to search for them at the top of the page if you want to see what has been recommended in the past.
Cool, thanks.
It's a bit pricey, but I was always fond of the Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha. In the Buddha's Words: An Anthology of Discourses from the Pali Canon is pretty good too, and less expensive. As far as free stuff goes, I always recommend Access to Insight, which has a fairly large amount of online sutta translations from the Pali Canon available.
Some of the teachings are probably later additions. But they are what people have set down in writing granted that they were enlightened by Buddha's path. We may not know what it means to them to say the Buddha said them. This I am referring to is the Mahayana teachings. It is believed that Buddha communicates with bodhisattvas in the Samboghakaya of Buddha. So in that case you could say the later teachings came from Buddha from that route. It's also argued that there is a teacher to student lineage going from Buddha. But the Sutras say things like 'once the Buddha was dwelling at vulture peak together with a sangha of monks and a sangha of Bodhisattvas. So they are saying that the teaching lineage goes way back and is transmitted to Buddhas students from a long time. And then some lineages believe in extraordinary beings who transmit the teachings such as Nagas.
I like Stephen Hagen as one of my first teachers. He wrote a book called "Buddhism Plain and Simple".
Yes. Anything by Steve Hagen is worth a look.
Wings to Awakening is a pretty good selection of verses that expound the core of Buddhism, IMO.
there are many good books here. free...
http://www.budsas.org/ebud/ebidx.htm
The Teachings of The Buddha, edited by Jack Kornfield. Nice little book to carry around and flip through.
Great books on Buddhism (oh my, the list could be soooo long!), in MHO, are:
-"What the Buddha taught" Walpola Rahula
-"The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching" Thich Nhat Hanh
-"The Pema Chödrön Collection" (with her three fantastic books "The Wisdom of no Escape," "Start where you are" and "When Things fall apart")
-"Buddhism: its doctrine and its methods" Alexandra David-Neel
-"The Dhammapada and the Sutta Nipata" (Max Müller and V. Fausböll - but any version will do, especially for the Dhammapada which is Buddhism Basics)
-"The Big Questions" (Lama Surya Das - you should absolutely get this one, since it could probably cover most of the questions you usually have)
-"The Feeling Buddha" and "Zen Therapy" (David Brazier)
-"Thoughts without a Thinker" (Mark Epstein)
-"The Art of Happiness" and "The Art of Happiness in a troubled world" (Dalai Lama / Howard Cutler)
-"Happiness" (Matthieu Ricard - I bought this one in so many languages as gift to my multinational friends!)
-"Destructive Emotions" (Daniel Goleman)
-"The Teachings of the Buddha" (like Jainarayan said), but also "A path with Heart" by Jack Kornfield
I also like some oldies like T W Rhys Davids' "Buddhism" (very Victorian, but describes the basics so well and has plenty of quotations), Paul Carus' "The Gospel of Buddha," "A Buddhist Bible" (Dwight Goddard - has many transcriptions of important sutras) and "The imitation of Buddha" (by Ernest Bowden- you have a quotation for every day of the year). A super oldy but good to point out some Buddhist basics is Henry Olcott's "The Buddhist Catechism"
If you don't feel like tacking the sutras directly, this list could teach you a lot on Buddhism.
I'm not sure if it's what you are looking for, but "The Joy of Living: Unlocking the Science and Secret of Happiness" by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche is one of my favorite recent reads. The first half is dedicated to the similarities between Buddhism (theory and concepts) and modern science (especially neuroscience and psychology), and the second half goes into do-it-yourself details about Buddhist meditation practice.
lots of free buddhist books here.
http://www.dhammatalks.net/Free_Dhamma_Books.htm