The Truth of Suffering and the Path of Liberation

by Chögyam Trungpa

Edited by Judith L. Lief

Shambhala (2009)

The Truth of Suffering is an ideal introduction and exploration into Buddha’s teaching known as the four noble truths. These four truths are the Buddha’s lessons on suffering, its cause and its cessation. The teachings also include the way to practice in order to overcome anxiety, deception and neurosis. Trungpa explores and explains the four truths masterfully in this text.

The first noble truth is recognizing the reality of suffering and understanding the experience of suffering. Recognition is the first step to being present. After recognition, we begin to dissect the suffering experience by working on our habits and ego.

The second noble truth is understanding the origin of suffering and learning avoidance. We can learn avoidance by examining our flickering thoughts and set patterns of thought and behavior. Understanding these pattern mechanics help us to recognize what is undesirable.

The third truth is cessation of goal attainment. This leads to a gradual transcending into more awareness, a living meditation with a more mindful presence while decreasing fixation.

The fourth noble truth is the path to actualization. It is the realization that the path is yours and the result of your actions alone. Actualizing this awareness with the world leads us towards contentment.

Judith Lief wonderfully edited Trungpa’s helpful and concise presentation. It is easily understood and his teachings are originally laid out as an ideal introduction for the beginner as well as the experienced practitioner in search of deeper understanding.

The Story Behind the Pick: The Surrendered by Chang-rae Lee

Chang-rae Lee has a history of writing award-winning fiction: Native Speaker (1995) won the PEN/Hemingway Award in 1996; A Gesture Life (1999) won the ALA Notable Books in 2000; and Aloft (2004) was a Book Sense Book of the Year nominee in 2005.

Certainly Lee’s personal history also makes him a remarkable addition to our First Edition Club. Born in Seoul, Korea, Lee immigrated with his parents to the United States at the age of three. While his father was on the road to become a psychiatrist, his mother struggled to transfer the vibrant life she had in Korea to her new American home. There is no doubt a young Lee witnessed his parents navigating a new culture and language according to the best of their own abilities. Lee became the writer who happens to have the heart-felt experience of navigating multiple cultures. He remarks on his personal page at Princeton University: “I’m fascinated by people who find themselves in positions of alienation or some kind of cultural dissonance. The characters may not always be Asian Americans, but they will always be people who are thinking about the culture and how they fit or don’t fit into it.”

Perhaps even more importantly, there are those writers you want to read no matter what they are writing about. Chang-rae Lee is one of them.

Lee talks about The Surrendered in an interview on The Leonard Lopate Show on WYNC radio.

Read this: Lisa attempts to capture the lovely buzz at Chang-rae’s reading at Lemuria Books on March 22, 2010.

First Editions Club: January 2010

First Editions Club: February 2010

First Editions Club: March 2010

The Best of It, March 1, 2010, Grove Press

Poet Kay Ryan “starts with details, oddities, categories, then unscrews and rebolts them, magnetizes them so that in turn they draw all the bright filings the world throws out. Each of her poems is like a telescope that keeps the observer at a distance while focusing on her subject with disconcerting intimacy.”  (J. D. McClatchy, Vintage Book of Contemporary Poetry)

Kay Ryan is our Poet Laureate 2008-2010.

I thought that “The Edges of Time” was apt for the season of Spring, when suddenly we shake off the winter funk and ambitious energy flows once again, “a humming begins.”

“The Edges of Time”

It is at the edges
that time thins.
Time which had been
dense and viscous
as amber suspending
intentions like bees
unseizes them. A
humming begins,
apparently coming
from stacks of
put-off things  or
just in back. A
racket of claims now,
as time flattens. A
glittering fan of things
competing to happen,
brilliant and urgent
as fish when seas
retreat.

Since the St Paddy’s day parade is going on somewhere out there in Jackson, I think it’s only appropriate that I write about the book I just started because it’s by an Irish author!  And so if you’re missing the parade and reading this blog instead, you’ll still get your dose…

Brooklyn, by Colm Toibin, came out last year – but it’s just come out this month in a nice little paperback.  It generated some attention in January this year when he won the Costa ‘novel of the year’ prize.  At the time I was reading a book by another Irish author, Patrick McCabe, and I made a mental note to read Brooklyn.  I’d never read Colm Toibin and, as the above article points out, he’s been churning out books for a while.  Apparently really good ones.

Brooklyn is about Eilis Lacey, who rather passively (she doesn’t have any better options, doesn’t know how to say no, is mostly fine with her small-town life) emigrates from Ireland to New York in the years following World War 2.  She leaves her mum and her sister and begins work in a department store, eventually falling in love and effectively planting herself in America.  When news from Ireland calls her back to her hometown, she experiences that strange lurching of place, where home feels foreign and in fact the idea of what ‘home’ means is called into question.

Newsweek wrote that this book ‘captures the essence of homesickness’, and maybe that’s what has drawn me to it so much.  If I so much as go on a weekend trip somewhere, I wind up getting ‘homesick’ for it at some point – maybe everybody does this.  I guess it’s a version of always wanting something you can’t have.

Not to say that this book is dismal; it’s not.  Not so far, anyway.  I’m not done with it yet, so I suppose I can’t well sum up how I feel about it.  Even though I’d only heard great things about this book, I’m still surprised at just how much I like it.  I’ll miss it when I’m done.

Susie

i was reading Eat Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer around thanksgiving.  i was quite tempted to go to kroger and start reading my favorite parts of the book out loud in the meat section.  i really wanted to play the part of the batty traveling religious zealot that you see screaming at people in the middle of college campuses.  don’t get the idea that i’m one of those paint throwing, non-leather-wearing vegetarian crazies but i almost became one while reading this book.  i’ll spare you the truly gory bits that i so wanted to share with grocery shoppers but i do want to share a few little tid bits.

“Americans choose to eat less than .25% of the known edible food on the planet.”

“Modern industrial fishing lines can be as long as 75 miles-the same distance as from sea level to space.”

“Animal agriculture makes a 40% greater contribution to global warming than all transportation in the world combined; it is the number one cause of climate change.”

“In the typical cage for egg-laying hens, each bird has 67 square inches of space…Nearly all cage-free birds have approximately the same amount of space.”

“On average, Americans eat the equivalent of 21,000 entire animals in a lifetime.”

“Nearly one-third of the land surface of the planet is dedicated to livestock.”

“Less than 1% of the animals killed for meat in America come from family farms.”

i’ve been a vegetarian since my sophomore year in college (about six years) and some of the stuff in this book made me gag from just knowing that i once ate animals.  as much as i wanted to share some of the totally bizarre facts i learned, my boyfriend wouldn’t let me.  he eats meat and i don’t blame him for not wanting to know the nasty stuff.  if you’re not already a vegetarian, seriously considering vegetarianism or have a stomach made of steel and be very careful with this book.

by Zita