Against the Stream: A Buddhist Manual for Spiritual Revolutionaries »

Noah Levine, the author of the national bestseller Dharma Punx, is a Buddhist teacher, counselor, and writer. He has been practicing Buddhist meditation since 1988, was trained to teach by Jack Kornfield, and leads meditation groups and workshops nationally as well as in juvenile halls and prisons. Levine holds a master's degree in counseling psychology and has studied with many well-known and respected teachers in both the Theravada and Mahayana traditions. Levine lives in Los Angeles.

Buddha was a revolutionary. His practice was subversive; his message, seditious. His enlightened point of view went against the norms of his day—in his words, "against the stream." His teachings changed the world, and now they can change you too.

Presenting the basics of Buddhism with personal anecdotes, exercises, and guided meditations, bestselling author Noah Levine guides the reader along a spiritual path that has led to freedom from suffering and has saved lives for 2,500 years. Levine should know. Buddhist meditation saved him from a life of addiction and crime. He went on to counsel and teach countless others the Buddhist way to freedom, and here he shares those life-changing lessons with you. Read and awaken to a new and better life.

Publishers Weekly

Levine's first book, Dharma Punx, was the autobiography of a young hell-raiser. Having escaped juvenile hall and drug addiction through the slow discipline of Buddhist practices, the son of Buddhist author Stephen Levine is now a spiritual teacher. In this book he presents what he has learned about and through Buddhism. The compelling personal narrative may be gone, but the disarming, frank tone that made the first book persuasive remains. He writes about the challenge of celibacy, for example, a different kind of difficulty than that posed by intimate relationships. Levine has taken the Buddha's teachings to heart-he would call it "heart-mind"-and clearly returns to such central ideas as impermanence and suffering, giving his thinking simplicity and consistency. Considering there's a lot of Buddhism here, the book is free of a lot of Buddhist-speak. An appendix includes to-the-point instructions for a variety of meditations that relate to essential Buddhist qualities and ideas. Levine's no-frills approach makes this a short book that will be accessible for young adults with little or no experience of Buddhism. Whether the book is about a revolutionary way of life is arguable, but it is an honest book-what Buddhists would call right speech-driven by right intention. (July)