The Teaching of the Buddha

The reach of this engaging and very readable book is as unique as it is profound. Its scope involves the reader in an integral, yet non-scholarly coming to meet of the freeing, subjective non-conceptual wisdom of the East with the pragmatic objective conceptual knowledge of the West. The result is a potential personal and collective unification of our two human cognitive voices--exoteric objective material, and esoteric subjective spiritual--the prior and present unity of Science and Spirit.

This often-amusing book will serve its readers as a brief, directly experiential introduction to the profound teaching of the Buddha of this present age--Siddhartha Gautama The Buddha. This is a book that will immediately enhance the reader's awakening to "innermost" human happiness by taming "the wild horse of the mind" through calming, selfless mindfulness practice. From this peaceful inner space, the reader will quickly learn to open and directly connect to the "always already present" Presence of bright indwelling Buddha heart/Buddha mind, by whatever name, concept, or belief.

This is an important book. It will benefit both fully engaged Buddhist practitioners and non-practitioners alike. A bit surprisingly, it is also a book for philosophers of physics and cosmology, and for students of metaphysics, philosophy of mind and consciousness studies who wish to integrate their Western understanding with the profundity of Buddhist ontology and epistemology. Thus, will the specialist reader be referred to some mildly scholarly appendices.

The reader will in these pages engage such diverse themes as The Prior Unity of Science and Spirit; Quantum Nonlocality and Buddhist Emptiness; Buddhist Dzogchen; The Primordial Unity of Self and No-Self; and The Buddhist View of Human Happiness.

Dr. David Paul Boaz (Dechen Wangdu) is Founding Director of Copper Mountain Institute, Inc., a tax-exempt Buddhist Temple and Research Institute. He has taught philosophy and religious studies for over forty years. David is author of four books and over fifty articles and essays (visit davidpaulboaz.org). He has been a student of Dzogchen Master Adzom Rinpoche since 1999.