Your Life Is Your Message by Eknath Easwaran

Your Life Is Your Message by Eknath Easwaran

Our personal example - in every aspect of our lives - is a very powerful instrument of change, more powerful than many of us realize. Your Life Is Your Message is a book of hope, to lift our spirits and give us courage when we're facing problems, and to offer gentle, sometimes surprising answers to the question, But what can I do?

Easwaran is one of the twentieth century's great spiritual teachers and an authentic guide to timeless wisdom. In these short readings on themes such as loving relationships, raising children, living simply, and aging wisely, he presents fresh insights to reveal our fundamental interconnectedness, our unity with all life.

This collection includes inspiration from Gandhi and the world's saints, engaging anecdotes, and practical suggestions, all of which are accessible to readers of any faith, philosophy, or lifestyle. Together, they demonstrate that small daily efforts to improve our own lives and the lives of those around us can add up to a powerful force for renewal - for ourselves and for our world.

Eknath Easwaran (1910-1999) brings to this volume a rare combination of credentials. He was trained from an early age in Sanskrit, of which Pali, the language of the Buddha, is a simplified version. Later he studied English literature and was chairman of the English department at a major Indian university when he came to the United States on a Fulbright fellowship in 1959. Huston Smith writes, His Indian heritage, literary gifts, and spiritual sensibilities here produce a sublime rendering of the words of the Buddha. Verse after verse shimmers with quiet, confident authority.

In 1961 Easwaran founded the Blue Mountain Center of Meditation in California, and in 1967, at the University of California, Berkeley, he taught the first academic course on meditation ever offered for credit at a major American university. He continued to teach passage meditation and his eight-point program for spiritual living to an American and international audience for almost forty years. His thirty-three books on meditation and the classics of world mysticism are translated into twenty-five languages.

From the mid-1970s onwards, Easwaran held classes on the Dhammapada for a primarily American audience. A gifted teacher, he was able to anticipate the problems that Western readers may have with the concepts underlying the classics of Indian spirituality, and to explain them in fresh and profoundly simple ways. But for Easwaran the Dhammapada was not just of intellectual interest. His main qualification for interpreting the Dhammapada, he said, was that he knew from his own experience that these verses could truly transform our lives.