bodhi tree swaying

This is one of the posts that’s a part of my book launch party.

…here she explains why.

This post is part of my book launch party.

This video is being posted as 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?

This recipe comes courtesy of Buddhapalita (Bipin Patel), the founder of Tipu’s Tiger vegetarian East Indian restaurant in Missoula, Montana. He now runs a company that makes the award-winning Tipu’s Chai, which is the best chai I have ever tasted in my life.

Buddhapalita put together a small recipe book based on the meals sold in the restaurant, and the recipe book is available for sale.

Aloo Brinjal (Potato/Eggplant curry)

Serves 6-8

Ingredients

• 1/3 cup canola/vegetable oil
• 1 1/2 tablespoons mustard seed
• 1 1/2 tablespoons cumin seed
• 1 cup diced onions
• 3 tablespoons ginger puree
• 3 tablespoons jalapeño puree
• 2 teaspoons turmeric powder
• 1/2 teaspoon ground red chilis
• 2 teaspoons garam masala
• 1 1/4 teaspoons salt
• 2 cups diced tomatoes, with juice 6 cups diced potatoes, 1/2-inch
• 6 cups diced eggplant, 1/2-inch

Method:

1. Soak eggplant in cold water for at least 30 min.
2. Place potatoes in a

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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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This footage is quite extraordinary and painful. The cruelty is sickening, but then you have a USDA inspector saying he doesn’t want to be told about abuses to animals because then he’d have to shut the slaughterhouse down.

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

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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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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The meal I cooked last night was so good I was moved to swear (mildly) out loud, which is most unfortunate since both kids started cursing. My two-year-old daughter liked it so much she also hugged and kissed me. So here it is — Bhara Hara Kaddoo — or baked courgettes (zucchini) stuffed with vegetarian ground meat and bulgur. The recipe is one I adapted, to make it vegan, from a book by Julie Sahni, Classic Indian Vegetarian Cooking.

(For four persons)

INGREDIENTS
4 six-inch courgettes/zucchini
1 tablespoon sunflower or safflower oil
1 medium onion, finely chopped
4 oz bulgur (uncooked)
8 oz vegetarian ground beef
2 teaspoons madras curry powder (mild to hot depending on taste)

(For the sauce)
3 tablespoons sunflower or safflower oil
1 medium onion, chopped
2 teaspoons ground cumin
1lb fresh ripe tomatoes (puréed)
salt to taste
2 tablespoons chopped fresh coriander (that’s cilantro if you’re American.

METHOD
1. Preheat over to 350F/180C
2. Cut the courgettes in half lengthwise. Use a

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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”! …

I was talking to my publisher this morning about the forthcoming second edition of Wildmind: A Step-by-Step Guide to Meditation, and she showed me no fewer than eight drafts of the cover. A couple of them were particularly stunning, including this one. I love the wildness and boldness of the brush strokes. The hills are a bit too dark, but the artist will be working on that.

The book’s going to be in a new and more conventional format this time. The first edition was in a landscape format and it was also rather large, which meant it was hard for bookstores to shelve it properly. Despite this it’s still one of the publisher’s best-selling titles.

I’ll keep you posted on the release, and perhaps I’ll have some kind of launch party. In fact the other thing we talked about was an online launch …