The book we’re currently reading together in our sangha is Steps to Liberation: The Buddha’s Eightfold Path by Gil Fronsdal.
The Buddha’s teachings point to a path to liberation that we can all walk. It is a path to find our way through and beyond any suffering. The Buddha’s most well known teaching on the steps to liberation are his instructions on the Noble Eightfold Path. The eight sets of practices making up the Eightfold Path are equally a holistic path for personal transformation as well as a roadmap for wise involvement with our communities. In this book, Gil Fronsdal provides a practical introduction to the steps in the Eightfold Path based on his years of both practicing and teaching them. For each of the eight factors in the Path, reflections and practices are provided to support an experiential understanding of the relevance and importance of each step. This book is recommended for anyone interested in walking a path to liberation.
About the Author
Gil Fronsdal is the primary teacher for the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California; he has been teaching since 1990. He has practiced Zen and Vipassana in the U.S. and Asia since 1975. He was a Theravada monk in Burma in 1985, and in 1989 began training with Jack Kornfield to be a Vipassana teacher. Gil teaches at Spirit Rock Meditation Center where he is part of its Teachers Council.
Gil was ordained as a Soto Zen priest at the San Francisco Zen Center in 1982, and in 1995 received Dharma Transmission from Mel Weitsman, the abbot of the Berkeley Zen Center. He is currently serving on the SF Zen Center Elders’ Council.
Gil has an undergraduate degree in agriculture from U.C. Davis where he was active in promoting the field of sustainable farming. In 1998 he received a PhD in Religious Studies from Stanford University studying the earliest developments of the bodhisattva ideal. He is the author of The Issue at Hand, Essays on Mindfulness Practice, A Monastery Within: Tales from the Buddhist Path, and the translator of The Dhammapada, published by Shambhala Publications.
Hundreds of Gil’s talks on meditation and Buddhist practice can be found on www.audiodharma.org