bodhi tree swaying

10.01.10 is the date (US-style) of when my book, Living As a River, is published by Sounds True. The date has a rather symmetrical loveliness.

I just got the MS back from my editor today, along with her suggested changes and with some lovely comments.

She said: “I have totally fallen in love with this book.”

She also said: “It has opened my heart and mind up in countless ways.”

These are nice things to hear.

I’ve been reading a little about the Stoics recently. They were a Greek/Roman school of philosophers who started about 300 BCE and who continued teaching until 529 CE, when the Christian emperor Justinian I banned pagan philosophies.

There are a lot of similarities between Stoicism and Buddhism. Here are two quotes that parallel each other very closely.

“…as the material of the carpenter is wood, and that of statuary bronze, so the subject-matter of the art of living is each person’s own life.”
– Epictetus

“Irrigators guide water; fletchers shape arrows; carpenters bend wood; the wise control themselves.”
– The Buddha

At the source, at the very source are live streams.
Through my body trickles air like birch sap.
And the buzz of bees, the midsummer sun
Ripple inside me and ripple above.

At the source—living streams…
I won’t ask where they flow.
Only blend into the floating shadow of a tree,
wrap myself in a bird’s tremulous melody.

At the very source is a glow.
I don’t ask whither flows the stream.
At the deepest source is a glow.
Through me ripple grasses and the sky,
Birch trees and the midsummer sun.
What am I in this eternal flow?

From “Intermezzo,” by Janina Degutytė, translated by Gražina M. Slavėnas

“Don’t ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. Then, go out and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

Harold Whitman, cited in Ben-shahar (2007)

Welcome to the launch of my book, Vegetarianism: A Buddhist View. All today I’ll be online, doing various things connected with the book and its subject. Do feel free to drop in and say “hi” or “congratulations” or anything else you feel inspired to utter (using the comment form, naturally; you can talk to your computer if you want but I probably won’t hear you!).

As well as the welcome video I’ll be adding new material to the blog all day, and I’ll add links on this post. So this is the “home page” for the party, with different “rooms” where you can mingle.

First you have to dodge the author touting his wares in the hall and spouting his opinions:

• Here’s a list of places

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This post is connected with the launch of my book, Vegetarianism: A Buddhist View.

In my book, Vegetarianism: A Buddhist View, I argue that although the Buddha ate meat, that was because he lived by begging for food. Those of us who shop for food are in a different situation and we should follow his advice “not to kill, or cause to kill, or to approve of others killing.” In other words, to live a compassionate life, don’t eat meat.

A nice little trailer pointing out some of the carbon-related benefits of reducing or eliminating meat from our diet. This is one of the posts that’s part of my book launch party.

…here she explains why.

This post is part of my book launch party.

You can buy my book. Vegetarianism: A Buddhist View at any of the following places:

• Amazon.com in the US
• Consortium Books in the US
• Amazon.ca in Canada
• Windhorse Publications in the UK
• Amazon.co.uk in the UK

Amazon.com and Consortium’s sites are saying that the book’s not yet available, but I’m told it should actually be in stock. In any event, I’d really love it if you bought the book. If you buy the book today on Amazon it will create a nice little blip in sales which will help to get it a bit more attention. Maybe we could make it into Amazon’s list of best-selling Buddhist books?

Another HuffPo article, this time a review of Jonathan Safran Foer’s new book, Eating Animals:

Making a different choice for dinner is the most powerful individual thing we can do to reduce global warming, as Foer points out. How big a sacrifice is that? To just reduce what we are consuming, say by going meatless one night a week as a starter? Remember our grandparents’ dinners. Meat was a special once-a-week treat, for economic reasons and availability reasons. Today we are going in the opposite direction eating it sometimes three times a day, at breakfast, lunch and dinner. The more we eat, the more factory farms have to produce, the further we get from core values of stewardship and morale responsibility.

How we treat our chickens, pigs, fish and cows affects everyone. Whether you eat animals or not, they have an impact on your life in the pollution they create, and

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Jonathan Safran Foer has a piece in HuffPo on vegetarianism. The guy’s everywhere these days, and you might think it was his book launch I was pimping and not my own! (The launch of the second edition of “Vegetarianism: A Buddhist View” is this Friday, November 13. And you’re invited to my online launch party.)

Here’s an extract:

Mark Twain said that quitting smoking is among the easiest things one can do; he did it all the time. I would add vegetarianism to the list of easy things. In high school I became a vegetarian more times than I can now remember, most often as an effort to claim some identity in a world of people whose identities seemed to come effortlessly. I wanted a slogan to distinguish my mom’s Volvo’s bumper, a bake sale cause to fill the self-conscious half hour of school break, an occasion to get closer

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The launch of the second edition of “Vegetarianism: A Buddhist View” is on Friday, November 13 (by the way, you’re invited to my online launch party).

From the Guardian, a couple of days ago.

Eating meat could become as socially unacceptable as drink-driving because of the impact it has on global warming, according to a senior authority on climate change.

Lord Stern of Brentford, former adviser to the government on the economics of climate change, said people will have to consider turning vegetarian to help reduce global carbon emissions.

“Meat is a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases. It puts enormous pressure on the world’s resources. A vegetarian diet is better,” Stern said.

Farmed ruminant animals, including cattle and sheep, are thought to be responsible for up to a quarter of “man-made” methane emissions worldwide.

Stern, whose 2006 Stern Review

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A few weeks back I was interviewed by the awesome Tami Simon, who is the founder and owner of Sounds True, the publisher of spirituality audiobooks. Sounds True just sent me this attractive “e-flier,” which unfortunately I had to scrunch a little to get it to fit into a post. The original looks just a bit nicer. Anyway, there’s a link to the podcast of the interview in the flier. I haven’t listened to it myself and I’m looking forward to hearing what I said. I hope it made sense!

Bodhipaksa: Living as a River

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Natalie Portman has a piece in the Huffington Post responding to Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals, a book she credits with moving her from being a vegetarian to being a vegan activist. I’m experiencing a bit of that myself, having recently returned to veganism, even though I haven’t yet read the book and won’t have time to for months yet. (I’m writing a book of my own).

This is just an extract — do read the whole article.

The human cost of factory farming — both the compromised welfare of slaughterhouse workers and, even more, the environmental effects of the mass production of animals — is staggering. Foer details the copious amounts of pig shit sprayed into the air that result in great spikes in human respiratory ailments, the development of new bacterial strains due to overuse of antibiotics on farmed

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Remember that Friday Nov 13 is the date for my online book-launch party to celebrate the arrival of my book on Buddhism and vegetarianism: Vegetarianism: A Buddhist View.

Slate has an interesting article on the CO2 footprint of tofu:

Soybeans themselves are a highly efficient source of protein: According to one recent study, it takes about 0.2 calories of fossil fuels to make a calorie of soybean protein, a little more than one-thirtieth of the total for chicken. Soy is also much better from a global-warming perspective: In conventional production, a kilogram of raw beans generates about 150 grams to 300 grams of carbon-dioxide equivalent, as opposed to 2,500 grams for the equivalent quantity of edible chicken meat. (Organic soybeans should produce even less CO2 equivalent.

So that’s really an amazing saving in CO2 emissions, especially when you consider that red meat …

New Scientist has a thought-provoking article about work by Robert and Brenda Vale, two architects who specialize in sustainable living at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand and who have looked into the ecological impact of pets. Apparently keeping a dog can be worse for the environment than running an SUV:

They calculated, for example, that a medium-sized dog would consume 90 grams of meat and 156 grams of cereals daily in its recommended 300-gram portion of dried dog food. At its pre-dried weight, that equates to 450 grams of fresh meat and 260 grams of cereal. That means that over the course of a year, Fido wolfs down about 164 kilograms of meat and 95 kilograms of cereals.

It takes 43.3 square metres of land to generate 1 kilogram of chicken per year – far more for beef and lamb – and 13.4 square metres to generate a kilogram of

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I came across this 2006 article thanks to a friend on Twitter. It reports on a study investigating why intelligent people are less likely to get heart disease, and discovering that they are more likely to be vegetarian.

The launch of the second edition of “Vegetarianism: A Buddhist View” is on Friday, November 13 (by the way, you’re invited to my online launch party).

Intelligent children may be more likely to be vegetarian as adults, suggests a University of Southampton-led study published online by the British Medical Journal today.

The study led by Dr Catharine Gale of the University’s MRC Epidemiology Resource Centre looked to see why people with higher IQs appeared to be less likely to suffer from heart disease.

‘We examined the records of 8179 men and women aged 30 years, whose IQ had been tested at the age

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Friday, November 13 is the day that the new and updated edition of my book on Buddhism and Vegetarianism, Vegetarianism: A Buddhist View, will become available. I’m having an online book launch party all that day, but here’s a brief video from a friend of mine, explaining why he decided to become a vegetarian as part of his practice of the Buddhist precepts.

Friday, November 13. An easy date to remember!

It’s the day that the new and updated edition of my book on Buddhism and Vegetarianism, Vegetarianism: A Buddhist View, will become available.

I’m celebrating the day by dedicating my whole time to being on Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/bodhipaksa), (Facebook), and my blog (that’s where you are right now), talking about Buddhism and vegetarianism. And just generally hanging out as well, so that things don’t get too serious.

As well as playing the suave host and urging people to mingle, mingle, mingle, I’ll be posting articles, quotes, and video to feed into a discussion about this important topic. I’ll also be happy to take questions.

I’ll be online all day, from 9 until 9 (Eastern), but you can drop by on any of those three platforms (again, that’s Twitter, Facebook, my blog). Just remember to say “hi”! …