The Big Questions:
How to Find Your Own Answers to Life's Essential Mysteries
Our instinct to seek & question is what drives us to grow, consciously evolve, and thrive. As humans we are all faced with daunting and pressing questions each day, great to small. We wonder what our purpose is in life and feel perplexed about the mysteries of death and the afterlife. In The Big Questions, best-selling author Lama Surya Das offers his enlightened wisdom and personal experience through incisive instruction in the art of intelligent questioning while unlocking your own crucial questions and helping you discover your pathway in life. The insights he provides helps you transition from a seeker of knowledge to a finder of fulfillment, inner peace, and conviction. The Big Questions is for anyone looking to break through their own personal identity and self-imposed limitations, find the sacred life, and further develop integrity, authenticity, ethical values, meaning and truth.
Lama Surya Das -- Biography and Background
Lama Surya Das is one of the foremost Western Buddhist meditation teachers and scholars. Born Jeffrey Miller, he was raised in Valley Stream on New York's Long Island, where he celebrated his bar mitzvah and earned letters in basketball, baseball, and soccer at Valley Stream Central High School (class of 1968). While a student at the State University of New York at Buffalo, he attended antiwar protests, marched on Washington, and attended Woodstock. After graduating with honors from college, he traveled throughout Europe and the East, and he has spent nearly thirty years studying Zen, vipassana, yoga, and Tibetan Buddhism with many of the great old masters of Asia.
Today, Lama Surya Das teaches and lectures around the world, conducting dozens of meditation retreats and workshops each year. Based on his relationship with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Surya Das founded the Western Buddhist Teachers Network and has organized three week-long conferences of Western Buddhist Meditation Teachers with the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, India. He also teaches regularly at Esalen, Open Center, Omega Institute, Interface, at universities in the United States and abroad, and at spiritual centers of all kinds.
Surya Das is the author of the "Awakening Trilogy"
AWAKENING THE BUDDHA WITHIN: Eight Steps to Enlightenment (Broadway Books, 1997), which appeared on Publishers Weekly Religion Bestseller list, and on lists at the Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, Denver Post, Rocky Mountain News, and Christian Science Monitor;
AWAKENING TO THE SACRED: Building a Spiritual Life from Scratch (Broadway Books, 1999; and
AWAKENING THE BUDDHIST HEART: Integrating Love, Meaning and Connection into Every Part of Your Life (Broadway Books, 2000).
His new book, LETTING GO OF THE PERSON YOU USED TO BE: Lessons on Change, Loss and Spiritual Transformation, was released in August, 2003. A regular contributor to Tricycle Magazine, New Age, and Yoga Journal, he is also the author of THE SNOW LION'S TURQUOISE MANE: 155 Wisdom Tales from Tibet (1992), and coauthor of NATURAL GREAT PERFECTION: Vajra Songs and Dzogchen Teachings (1995). Find out more about his books here.
When he's not meditating, teaching, or attending a retreat, Surya Das enjoys music, dogs, swimming, bicycling, hiking, and haiku poetry.
He resides in Concord, Massachusetts, outside of Boston.
The Big Questions: 
Lama Surya Das is one of the foremost Western Buddhist meditation teachers and scholars. Born Jeffrey Miller, he was raised in Valley Stream on New York's Long Island, where he celebrated his bar mitzvah and earned letters in basketball, baseball, and soccer at Valley Stream Central High School (class of 1968). While a student at the State University of New York at Buffalo, he attended antiwar protests, marched on Washington, and attended Woodstock. After graduating with honors from college, he traveled throughout Europe and the East, and he has spent nearly thirty years studying Zen, vipassana, yoga, and Tibetan Buddhism with many of the great old masters of Asia.
