Zen Traces

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Zen Traces

Author : Kenneth Kraft
Publisher : Paul Dry Books
Page : 184 pages
File Size : 49,5 Mb
Release : 2018-06-05
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781589881280

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Zen Traces by Kenneth Kraft Pdf

As Zen takes root in the West, new forms arise. For centuries Zen masters have tested their students with “koans” and “capping phrases.” A koan is a spiritual paradox that must be solved intuitively. A capping phrase is a trenchant comment. Both are meditative practices that reveal deeper truths about the self and, ideally, lead to enlightenment. In Zen Traces, Buddhist scholar Kenneth Kraft plays off these practices in a new idiom. He selects passages from four sources: traditional Zen, present-day Zen, Henry David Thoreau, and Mark Twain. When a koan-like story about a contemporary Zen teacher is paired with a pithy comment by Mark Twain, something fresh emerges. “In this lovely book, Ken Kraft provides a unique opening for American Buddhism and American wisdom in general. The reader will come to fresh and spacious new insights and enjoyments… Cheers for Zen in America and a deep bow to Ken Kraft!”—POLLY YOUNG-EISENDRATH, Ph.D., author of The Present Heart: A Memoir of Love, Loss and Discovery “I highly recommend this delightful book of East-West wisdom—full of surprise, insight, wit, and piercing beauty.”—KATY BUTLER, author of Knocking on Heaven’s Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death

A Bird in Flight Leaves No Trace

Author : Seon Master Subul
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 381 pages
File Size : 55,8 Mb
Release : 2019-04-30
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781614295525

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A Bird in Flight Leaves No Trace by Seon Master Subul Pdf

Penetrate the nature of mind with this contemporary Korean take on a classic of Zen literature. The message of the Tang-dynasty Zen text in this volume seems simple: to gain enlightenment, stop thinking there is something you need to practice. For the Chinese master Huangbo Xiyun (d. 850), the mind is enlightenment itself if we can only let go of our normal way of thinking. The celebrated translation of this work by John Blofeld, The Zen Teaching of Huang Po, introduced countless readers to Zen over the last sixty years. Huangbo’s work is also a favorite of contemporary Zen (Korean: Seon) Master Subul, who has revolutionized the strict monastic practice of koans and adapted it for lay meditators in Korea and around the world to make swift progress in intense but informal retreats. Devoting themselves to enigmatic questions with their whole bodies, retreatants are frustrated in their search for answers and arrive thereby at a breakthrough experience of their own buddha nature. A Bird in Flight Leaves No Trace is a bracing call for the practitioner to let go and thinking and unlock the buddha within.

Zen Women

Author : Grace Schireson
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 321 pages
File Size : 44,8 Mb
Release : 2009-11-10
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780861719563

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Zen Women by Grace Schireson Pdf

This landmark presentation at last makes heard the centuries of Zen's female voices. Through exploring the teachings and history of Zen's female ancestors, from the time of the Buddha to ancient and modern female masters in China, Korea, and Japan, Grace Schireson offers us a view of a more balanced Dharma practice, one that is especially applicable to our complex lives, embedded as they are in webs of family relations and responsibilities, and the challenges of love and work. Part I of this book describes female practitioners as they are portrayed in the classic literature of "Patriarchs' Zen"--often as "tea-ladies," bit players in the drama of male students' enlightenments; as "iron maidens," tough-as-nails women always jousting with their male counterparts; or women who themselves become "macho masters," teaching the same Patriarchs' Zen as the men do. Part II of this book presents a different view--a view of how women Zen masters entered Zen practice and how they embodied and taught Zen uniquely as women. This section examines many urgent and illuminating questions about our Zen grandmothers: How did it affect them to be taught by men? What did they feel as they trying to fit into this male practice environment, and how did their Zen training help them with their feelings? How did their lives and relationships differ from that of their male teachers? How did they express the Dharma in their own way for other female students? How was their teaching consistently different from that of male ancestors? And then part III explores how women's practice provides flexible and pragmatic solutions to issues arising in contemporary Western Zen centers.

Tracing Back the Radiance

Author : Robert E. Buswell, Jr.
Publisher : University of Hawaii Press
Page : 248 pages
File Size : 40,8 Mb
Release : 1991-11-01
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780824843670

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Tracing Back the Radiance by Robert E. Buswell, Jr. Pdf

Chinul (1158–1210) was the founder of the Korean tradition of Zen. He provides one of the most lucid and accessible accounts of Zen practice and meditation to be found anywhere in East Asian literature. Tracing Back the Radiance, an abridgment of Buswell’s Korean Approach to Zen: The Collected Works of Chinul, combines an extensive introduction to Chinul’s life and thought with translations of three of his most representative works.

Lay Zen in Contemporary Japan

Author : Erez Joskovich
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 203 pages
File Size : 47,6 Mb
Release : 2023-12-29
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781003837497

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Lay Zen in Contemporary Japan by Erez Joskovich Pdf

This book explores the emergence and growth of Zen as a non-monastic spiritual practice in modern Japan. Focusing on several prominent lay Zen associations, most notably Ningen Zen, it explores different aspects of lay Zen as a lived religion, such as organization, ideology, and ritual. Through a combined approach utilizing Buddhist text, historical sources, and ethnographic fieldwork, it explains how laypeople have appropriated religious authority and tailored Zen teachings to fit their needs and the zeitgeist. Featuring the findings of three years of fieldwork, interviews, and archival research, the book comprehensively describes various Zen practices and explores their contemporary meaning and functions. It undermines the distinction between traditional or established Buddhism and the so-called New Religions, emphasizing instead the dynamic relations between tradition and interpretation. Written in accessible language and offering insightful analysis, this book brings to light the essential role of lay Zen associations in modernizing Zen within Japan and beyond. It will be of interest to scholars and students of religious studies, particularly those studying Buddhism, Japanese society, and culture.

Zen Way

Author : Myokyo-ni,
Publisher : Tuttle Publishing
Page : 128 pages
File Size : 43,7 Mb
Release : 2011-12-06
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781462901524

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Zen Way by Myokyo-ni, Pdf

Written by one of today's most distinguished teachers, this Zen book provides an authoritative introduction to Zen training from the perspective of someone who has gone through it. The author begins by setting out the basic Buddhist teaching based on the example of Buddha and then traces the fundamentals of the Zen way through a detail account of workings of a contemporary Zen monastery. She draws on her own experience of twelve year's study in a Rinzai monastery to present the pattern of its life: the harsh introduction that the novice endures, the daily routine of chanting, work and meditation, the seasonal festivals, retreats and rituals. Through all this, Myokyo-ni shows that the Zen way leads to a genuine insight into the Buddhist teachings and provides what is necessary for the development of such insight to occur. Lastly, she demonstrates that this insight is not merely a mental exercise but a genuine restructuring and making whole.

Zen Masters of Japan

Author : Richard Bryan McDaniel
Publisher : Tuttle Publishing
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 40,6 Mb
Release : 2014-01-07
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781462913572

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Zen Masters of Japan by Richard Bryan McDaniel Pdf

Zen Masters of Japan is the second book in a series that traces Zen's profoundly historic journey as it spread eastward from China and Japan, toward the United States. Following Zen Masters of China, this book concentrates on Zen's significant passage through Japan. More specifically, it describes the lineage of the great teachers, the Zen monk pioneers who set out to enlighten an island ready for an inner transformation based on compassionate awareness. While the existing Buddhist establishment in Japan met early Zen pioneers like Dogen and Eisai with fervent resistance, Zen Buddhism ultimately perservered and continued to become further transformed in its passage through Japan. The Japanese culture and Japanese Buddhism practices further deepened and strengthened Zen training by combining it with a variety of esoteric contemplative arts—the arts of poetry, the tea ceremony, calligraphy, and archery. Zen Masters of Japan chronicles this journey with each Zen master profiled. The book shows how the new practices soon gained in popularity among all walks of life—from the lowly peasant, offering a hope of reincarnation and a better life; to the Samurai warrior due to its casual approach to death; to the ruling classes, challenging the intelligentsia because of its scholarly roots. A collection of Zen stories, meditation, and their wisdom, Zen Masters of Japan also explores the illusive state of 'No Mind' achieved in Japan that is so fundamental to Zen practices today.

Now and Zen

Author : Eiyû Murakoshi
Publisher : Penguin UK
Page : 92 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 2020-08-27
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780141991009

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Now and Zen by Eiyû Murakoshi Pdf

'In Japan we have an expression, 'Float like Cloud, Flow like Water'. Its meaning is: to live free and unconstrained' In this short introduction to Zen Buddhism, a practising Japanese monk shares the many lessons he has learned from life inside a temple. With charm and humour, he guides us through everything from meditation to tea-drinking ceremonies, the meaning of koans to preparing Zen food. Accompanied by the author's own illustrations, this book invites you to change your perception through the wisdom of monastic life.

Appalachian Zen

Author : Steve Kanji Ruhl
Publisher : Monkfish Book Publishing
Page : 357 pages
File Size : 41,7 Mb
Release : 2022-12-13
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781948626811

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Appalachian Zen by Steve Kanji Ruhl Pdf

Winner of the 2023 Nautilus Book Awards Gold Prize for Memoir This luminous memoir combines the hardscrabble setting of Appalachia with the spiritual wisdom of Shunryu Suzuki’s classic Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. “Amazing and intense. A unique, entertaining, and valuable contribution to the Dharma literature, Appalachian Zen addresses a part of the Western Dharma world that hasn’t received much attention: class.” —Rev. Sumi Loundon Kim, Yale University, author of Blue Jean Buddha and Sitting Together Appalachian Zen describes a journey we all take, one that Buddhism calls “seeking our true home.” Edgy, lyrical, and lovingly rendered, this book recounts how a kid from a Pennsylvania mill-town trailer park grew up—surrounded by backwoods farms and amid grief, violence, and passionate yearning—to become something improbable: a Buddhist minister teaching Zen. Author Steve Kanji Ruhl takes readers on an adventure of discovery, roving far from the Appalachian Mountains of central Pennsylvania on a footloose Zen pilgrimage to Japan and beyond. Featuring vivid firsthand accounts of spiritual seeking and teaching in Japanese temples, as well as forays to Tokyo and Hiroshima, the alleys of Kyoto, Amish cornfields near the Susquehanna, and a monastery in the Catskills, Appalachian Zen includes robust historical sketches, rapt nature passages, and cultural references ranging from Proust to punk rock. Throughout the book, Ruhl engages Buddhist themes of awakening and the death of the self by confronting the lives and deaths, including two by suicide, of his loved ones. This provocative memoir tells how it feels to practice Zen, and to move toward a life of hard-won forgiveness, healing, and freedom.

Zen and the Brain

Author : James H. Austin
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 876 pages
File Size : 55,9 Mb
Release : 1999-06-04
Category : Medical
ISBN : 0262260352

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Zen and the Brain by James H. Austin Pdf

A neuroscientist and Zen practitioner interweaves the latest research on the brain with his personal narrative of Zen. Aldous Huxley called humankind's basic trend toward spiritual growth the "perennial philosophy." In the view of James Austin, the trend implies a "perennial psychophysiology"—because awakening, or enlightenment, occurs only when the human brain undergoes substantial changes. What are the peak experiences of enlightenment? How could these states profoundly enhance, and yet simplify, the workings of the brain? Zen and the Brain presents the latest evidence. In this book Zen Buddhism becomes the opening wedge for an extraordinarily wide-ranging exploration of consciousness. In order to understand which brain mechanisms produce Zen states, one needs some understanding of the anatomy, physiology, and chemistry of the brain. Austin, both a neurologist and a Zen practitioner, interweaves the most recent brain research with the personal narrative of his Zen experiences. The science is both inclusive and rigorous; the Zen sections are clear and evocative. Along the way, Austin examines such topics as similar states in other disciplines and religions, sleep and dreams, mental illness, consciousness-altering drugs, and the social consequences of the advanced stage of ongoing enlightenment.

The Way of Zen

Author : Alan Watts
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 257 pages
File Size : 44,5 Mb
Release : 2011-02-16
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780307784346

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The Way of Zen by Alan Watts Pdf

In his definitive introduction to Zen Buddhism, Alan Watts ("the perfect guide for a course correction in life" —Deepak Chopra), explains the principles and practices of this ancient religion. With a rare combination of freshness and lucidity, he delves into the origins and history of Zen to explain what it means for the world today with incredible clarity. Watts saw Zen as “one of the most precious gifts of Asia to the world,” and in The Way of Zen he gives this gift to readers everywhere. “Perhaps the foremost interpreter of Eastern disciplines for the contemporary West, Watts had the rare gift of ‘writing beautifully the unwritable.’” —Los Angeles Times

Zen Buddhism - Simple Guides

Author : Diana St. Ruth,Richard St. Ruth
Publisher : Kuperard
Page : 144 pages
File Size : 48,8 Mb
Release : 2008-11-01
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781857336375

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Zen Buddhism - Simple Guides by Diana St. Ruth,Richard St. Ruth Pdf

THIS BOOK WILL HELP YOU• to appreciate the significance of this particular school of Buddhism,famous for its focus on meditation and self-awakening• to understand the history of Zen and the ‘Ways of Zen’• to discover how Zen is a way of life — not a belief system• to avoid faux pas in conversation, in travelling and in personal relationshipsZen (in Chinese, Ch’an) is the form of Buddhism which the great teacher Bodhidharma brought to China from India in the late fifth century. Today it is practised mainly in Japan and Korea,. Based upon the understanding that each of us has the potential for complete awakening, Zen is in fact a coalition of practical ways of stilling the mind in order to attain self-knowledge. Because the realization of the true nature of reality, including one’s own, is not an intellectual pursuit but an experienced truth, Zen teachers transmit the truth (dharma) from mind to mind or heart to heart without the use of words, using different techniques to break through the limitations of the logical mind. This engaging book explains the essence of Zen in simple terms.. It traces its development and looks at its unique methods of teaching, such as meditation, koans — startling paradoxes that stop the intellect — the use of texts, ceremonies, poetry, and the martial arts. It describes life in monasteries and in the everyday world. Because Zen is rooted in Reality, its practitioners often experience a delightful sense of wonder in the commonplace. This democratic and liberating philosophy does not require us to give up our own traditions, but rather helps us to deepen our understanding of them, and continues to inspire growing numbers of followers in the West.ACCESS THE WORLD’S RELIGIONSSimple Guides: Religion is a series of concise, accessible introductions to the world’s major religions. Written by experts in the field, they offer an engaging and sympathetic description of the key concepts, beliefs and practices of different faiths. Ideal for spiritual seekers and travellers alike, Simple Guides aims to open the doors of perception. Together the books provide a reliable compass to the world’s great spiritual traditions, and a point of reference for further exploration and discovery. By offering essential insights into the core values, customs and beliefs of different societies, they also enable visitors to be aware of the cultural sensibilities of their hosts, and to behave in a way that fosters mutual respectand understanding.

The Eight Gates of Zen

Author : John Daido Loori
Publisher : Shambhala Publications
Page : 304 pages
File Size : 45,9 Mb
Release : 2002-09-10
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780834823907

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The Eight Gates of Zen by John Daido Loori Pdf

This accessible introduction to the philosophy and practice of Zen Buddhism includes a program of study that encompasses practically every aspect of life. The American Zen teacher John Daido Loori shows us that Zen practice should include not only meditation, the study of Zen literature and liturgy, and moral and ethical action, but should also manifest in work, artistic, and everyday activities. The Eight Gates are: 1. Zazen, a type of meditation described as "sitting Zen" 2. Face-to-face meetings between teacher and student 3. Academic study of the sutras related to Zen training, other schools of Buddhism, Buddhist history, psychology, and philosophy 4. Zen rites and rituals and their meaning 5. The moral and ethical requirements set in the Buddhist Precepts 6. Art practice as an extension of Zen practice 7. Body practice as an extension of Zen practice 8. Work as an active function of zazen Beautifully illustrated with Loori's own photographs, this edition also includes a new introduction and an updated reading list.

The Other Side of Nothing

Author : Brad Warner
Publisher : New World Library
Page : 402 pages
File Size : 41,7 Mb
Release : 2022-05-10
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781608688050

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The Other Side of Nothing by Brad Warner Pdf

A reader-friendly guide to Zen Buddhist ethics for modern times In the West, Zen Buddhism has a reputation for paradoxes that defy logic. In particular, the Buddhist concept of nonduality — the realization that everything in the universe forms a single, integrated whole — is especially difficult to grasp. In The Other Side of Nothing, Zen teacher Brad Warner untangles the mystery and explains nonduality in plain English. To Warner, this is not just a philosophical problem: nonduality forms the bedrock of Zen ethics, and once we comprehend it, many of the perplexing aspects of Zen suddenly make sense. Drawing on decades of Zen practice, he traces the interlocking relationship between Zen metaphysics and ethics, showing how a true understanding of reality — and the ultimate unity of all things — instills in us a sense of responsibility for the welfare of all beings. When we realize that our feeling of separateness from others is illusory, we have no desire to harm any creature. Warner ultimately presents an expansive overview of the Zen ethos that will give beginners and experts alike a deeper understanding of one of the world’s enduring spiritual traditions.

Zen Buddhism: India and China

Author : Heinrich Dumoulin
Publisher : World Wisdom, Inc
Page : 450 pages
File Size : 47,6 Mb
Release : 2005
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 0941532895

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Zen Buddhism: India and China by Heinrich Dumoulin Pdf

Unparalleled in scope and detail, this classic history of Zen covers all important ideas and developments in the tradition from its beginnings in India through the Sung period in China.