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Zen and Shinto
by Dr Chikao FujisawaHow do the Japanese talk about their native philosophy, Shinto, a decade and a half after the Western Allies abolished it as a state religion? What is its relationship to Buddhism, and particularly to Zen? How modern can this very ancient creed ever be? These are some of the questions considered in this study by Dr. Chikao Fujisawa, who specialized in the study of traditional Japanese philosophy and its effect on modern society. Zen and Shinto is a strong plea to rectify the steps taken to eradicate Shinto, the very substance of Japanese life and thought. At the same time, it offers new insight into the amazing adaptability of the Japanese psyche--its depth, vitality and universality--and its remarkable capacity to assimilate foreign thought and ideas, and thus contribute to the world's hope for permanent peace.
Zen and Shinto: A History of Japanese Philosophy
by Dr. Chikao FujisawaThis history of Japanese philosophical traditions underscores the importance of Zen and Shinto to the development of Japanese culture. How do the Japanese talk about their native philosophy, Shinto, so many years after the Western Allies abolished it as a state religion? What is its relationship to Buddhism, and particularly to Zen? How modern can this very ancient creed ever be? These are some of the questions considered in this analytic work by Dr. Chikao Fujisawa, who specializes in the study of traditional Japanese philosophy and its effect on modern society. Fujisawa&’s work is not only a survey of Zen and Shinto, but also an impassioned plea to restore Shinto as the very substance of Japanese life and thought. At the same time, Zen and Shinto offers new insight into the depth and vitality of Japanese culture, demonstrating its remarkable capacity to assimilate foreign thought and ideas, and thus contribute to the world&’s hope for permanent peace.
Zen and the Art of Dealing with Difficult People
by Mark WestmoquetteThis is a unique guide to coping with challenging people using practical Zen and mindfulness tools. It helps readers explore their reactions, break free from knee-jerk response patterns and see if these people may in fact prove to be useful teachers in life – troublesome Buddhas.This is a guide to applying the teachings of mindfulness and Zen to the troublesome or challenging people in our lives. Perhaps you can see there&’s often a pattern to your behaviour in relation to them and that it often causes pain – perhaps a great deal of pain. The only way we can grow is by facing this pain, acknowledging how we feel and how we&’ve reacted, and making an intention or commitment to end this repeating pattern of suffering. In this book, Mark Westmoquette speaks from a place of profound personal experience. A Zen monk, he has endured two life-changing traumas caused by other people: his sexual abuse by his own father; and his stepfather&’s death and mother&’s very serious injury in a car crash due to the careless driving of an off-duty policeman. He stresses that by bringing awareness and kindness to these relationships, our initial stance of &“I can&’t stand this person, they need to change&” will naturally shift into something much broader and more inclusive. The book makes playful use of Zen koans – apparently nonsensical phrases or stories – to help jar us out of habitual ways of perceiving the world and nudge us toward a new perspective of wisdom and compassion.
Zen and the Art of Insight
by Thomas ClearyThe Prajnaparamita ("perfection of wisdom") sutras are one of the great legacies of Mahayana Buddhism, giving eloquent expression to some of that school's central concerns: the perception of shunyata, the essential emptiness of all phenomena; and the ideal of the bodhisattva, one who postpones his or her own enlightenment in order to work for the salvation of all beings. The Prajnaparamita literature consists of a number of texts composed in Buddhist India between 100 BCE and 100 CE. Originally written in Sanskrit, but surviving today mostly in their Chinese versions, the texts are concerned with the experience of profound insight that cannot be conveyed by concepts or in intellectual terms. The material remains important today in Mahayana Buddhism and Zen. Key selections from the Prajnaparamita literature are presented here, along with Thomas Cleary's illuminating commentary, as a means of demonstrating the intrinsic limitations of discursive thought, and of pointing to the profound wisdom that lies beyond it. Included are selections from: * The Scripture on Perfect Insight Awakening to Essence * The Essentials of the Great Scripture on Perfect Insight * Treatise on the Great Scripture on Perfect Insight * The Scripture on Perfect Insight for Benevolent Rulers * Key Teachings on the Great Scripture of Perfect Insight * The Questions of Suvikrantavikramin
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values (Perennial Classics Ser.)
by Robert M PirsigTHE CLASSIC BOOK THAT HAS INSPIRED MILLIONSA penetrating examination of how we live and how to live betterFew books transform a generation and then establish themselves as touchstones for the generations that follow. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is one such book. This modern epic of a man’s search for meaning became an instant bestseller on publication in 1974, acclaimed as one of the most exciting books in the history of American letters. It continues to inspire millions. A narration of a summer motorcycle trip undertaken by a father and his son, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance becomes a personal and philosophical odyssey into fundamental questions on how to live. The narrator's relationship with his son leads to a powerful self-reckoning; the craft of motorcycle maintenance leads to an austerely beautiful process for reconciling science, religion, and humanism. Resonant with the confusions of existence, this classic is a touching and transcendent book of life.This new edition contains an interview with Pirsig and letters and documents detailing how this extraordinary book came to be.
Zen and the Art of Poker: Timeless Secrets to Transform Your Game
by Larry PhillipsInside the intriguing world of poker lies a fascinating exercise in strategy and extreme concentration--many of the same principles that underpin the one-thousand-year-old philosophy of Zen spirituality. Zen and the Art of Poker is the first book to apply Zen theories to America's most popular card game, presenting tips that readers can use to enhance their game. Among the more than one hundred rules that comprise this book, readers will learn to:* Make peace with folding* Use inaction as a weapon* Make patience a central pillar of their strategy* Pick their times of confrontationUsing a concise and spare style, in the tradition of Zen practices and rituals, Zen and the Art of Poker traces a parallel track connecting the two disciplines by giving comments and inspirational examples from the ancient Zen masters to the poker masters of today.
Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet
by Thich Nhat Hanh“When you wake up and you see that the Earth is not just the environment, the Earth is us, you touch the nature of interbeing. And at that moment you can have real communication with the Earth… We have to wake up together. And if we wake up together, then we have a chance. Our way of living our life and planning our future has led us into this situation. And now we need to look deeply to find a way out, not only as individuals, but as a collective, a species.”-- Thich Nhat HanhWe face a potent intersection of crises: ecological destruction, rising inequality, racial injustice, and the lasting impacts of a devastating pandemic. The situation is beyond urgent. To face these challenges, we need to find ways to strengthen our clarity, compassion, and courage to act.Beloved Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh is blazingly clear: there’s one thing we all have the power to change, which can make all the difference, and that is our mind. Our way of looking, seeing, and thinking determines every choice we make, the everyday actions we take or avoid, how we relate to those we love or oppose, and how we react in a crisis.Mindfulness and the radical insights of Zen meditation can give us the strength and clarity we need to help create a regenerative world in which all life is respected. Filled with Thich Nhat Hanh’s inspiring meditations, Zen stories and experiences from his own activism, as well as commentary from Sister True Dedication, one of his students Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet shows us a new way of seeing and living that can bring healing and harmony to ourselves, our relationships, and the Earth.
Zen and the Beat Way
by Alan WattsZen and the Beat Way is based upon selections from Alan Watts's early radio talks, many of which were first aired on the Pacifica Radio Network in the late fifties and early sixties, and sessions from two of his most compelling seminarsin the mid-sixties.
Zen and the Birds of Appetite
by Thomas Merton"Zen enriches no one," Thomas Merton provocatively writes in his opening statement to Zen and the Birds of Appetite--one of the last books to be published before his death in 1968. "There is no body to be found. The birds may come and circle for a while. . . but they soon go elsewhere. When they are gone, the 'nothing,' the 'no-body' that was there, suddenly appears. That is Zen. It was there all the time but the scavengers missed it, because it was not their kind of prey. " This gets at the humor, paradox, and joy that one feels in Merton's discoveries of Zen during the last years of his life, a joy very much present in this collection of essays. Exploring the relationship between Christianity and Zen, especially through his dialogue with the great Zen teacher D. T. Suzuki, the book makes an excellent introduction to a comparative study of these two traditions, as well as giving the reader a strong taste of the mature Merton. Never does one feel him losing his own faith in these pages; rather one feels that faith getting deeply clarified and affirmed. Just as the body of "Zen" cannot be found by the scavengers, so too, Merton suggests, with the eternal truth of Christ.
Zen and the Unspeakable God: Comparative Interpretations of Mystical Experience
by Jason N. BlumZen and the Unspeakable God reevaluates how we study mystical experience. Forsaking the prescriptive epistemological box that has constrained the conversation for decades, ensuring that methodology has overshadowed subject matter, Jason Blum proposes a new interpretive approach—one that begins with a mystic’s own beliefs about the nature of mystical experience. Blum brings this approach to bear on the experiential accounts of three mystical exemplars: Meister Eckhart, Ibn al-ʿArabi, and Hui-neng. Through close readings of their texts, he uncovers the mystics’ own fundamental assumptions about transcendence and harnesses these as interpretive guides to their experiences.The predominant theory-first path to interpretation has led to the misunderstanding and misrepresentation of individual mystical experiences and fostered specious conclusions about cross-cultural comparability among them. Blum’s hermeneutic invites the scholarly community to begin thinking about mystical experience in a new way—through the mystics’ eyes. Zen and the Unspeakable God offers a sampling of the provocative results of this technique and an explanation of its implications for theories of consciousness and our contemporary understanding of the nature of mystical experience.
Zen and Zen Classics volume 1: From the Upanishads to Huineng
by R. H. BlythThis is not a dry scholarly book on Zen. It is a fascinating introduction into a study of self-enlightenment and inner reason that has been a driving force of all Japanese culture. Written by Reginal Horace Blyth (1898-1964) this is a volume free of the dry pedantry that has hobbled so many well meaning French and English studies of Zen. It is free also of the breathless mystery-mongering that unfortunately has bloated American Zen.Blyth reads easily. The questions he poses; the views he offers....all lead to a sense of inner self and an awakening of an awareness of the surrounding universe and one's relationship to it.After discussing "What is Zen?" (and what isn't) Blyth sketches a history of Zen dating from 1000 B.C. to715 A.D., the year of the death of the Sixth patriarch, Huineg. With a historical background thus established, Blyth next provides translations and commentary on some of the most important and basic Zen literature in existence. For the Zen initiate then, this book is an excellent beginning. For the practitioner, further meaningful revelations await.
Zen and Zen Classics volume 1
by R. H. BlythThis is not a dry scholarly book on Zen.It is a fascinating introduction into a study of self-enlightenment and inner reason that has been a driving force of all Japanese culture. Written by Reginal Horace Blyth (1898-1964) this is a volume free of the dry pedantry that has hobbled so many well meaning French and English studies of Zen. It is free also of the breathless mystery-mongering that unfortunately has bloated American Zen.Blyth reads easily. The questions he poses; the views he offers....all lead to a sense of inner self and an awakening ofan awareness of the surrounding universe and one's relationshipto it.After discussing "What is Zen?" (and what isn't) Blyth sketches a history of Zen dating from 1000 B.C. to715A.D., the year of the death of the Sixth Patriarch, Huineg. With a historical background thus established, Blyth next providestranslations and commentary on some of the most important and basic Zen literature in existence. For the Zen initiate then, this book is an excellent beginning. For the practitioner, further meaningful revelations await.
Zen and Zen Classics volume 1
by R. H. BlythThis is not a dry scholarly book on Zen.It is a fascinating introduction into a study of self-enlightenment and inner reason that has been a driving force of all Japanese culture. Written by Reginal Horace Blyth (1898-1964) this is a volume free of the dry pedantry that has hobbled so many well meaning French and English studies of Zen. It is free also of the breathless mystery-mongering that unfortunately has bloated American Zen.Blyth reads easily. The questions he poses; the views he offers....all lead to a sense of inner self and an awakening ofan awareness of the surrounding universe and one's relationshipto it.After discussing "What is Zen?" (and what isn't) Blyth sketches a history of Zen dating from 1000 B.C. to715A.D., the year of the death of the Sixth Patriarch, Huineg. With a historical background thus established, Blyth next providestranslations and commentary on some of the most important and basic Zen literature in existence. For the Zen initiate then, this book is an excellent beginning. For the practitioner, further meaningful revelations await.
The Zen Arts: An Anthropological Study of the Culture of Aesthetic Form in Japan (Royal Asiatic Society Books)
by Rupert CoxThe tea ceremony and the martial arts are intimately linked in the popular and historical imagination with Zen Buddhism, and Japanese culture. They are commonly interpreted as religio-aesthetic pursuits which express core spiritual values through bodily gesture and the creation of highly valued objects. Ideally, the experience of practising the Zen arts culminates in enlightenment.This book challenges that long-held view and proposes that the Zen arts should be understood as part of a literary and visual history of representing Japanese culture through the arts. Cox argues that these texts and images emerged fully as systems for representing the arts during the modern period, produced within Japan as a form of cultural nationalism and outside Japan as part of an orientalist discourse.Practitioners' experiences are in fact rarely referred to in terms of Zen or art, but instead are spatially and socially grounded. Combining anthropological description with historical criticism, Cox shows that the Zen arts are best understood in terms of a dynamic relationship between an aesthetic discourse on art and culture and the social and embodied experiences of those who participate in them.
Zen Beyond All Words
by Wolfgang Kopp Barbara Wittenberg-HaenauerZen Beyond All Words contains a selection of talks given by MasterWolfgang Kopp at the Tao Ch'an Center in Wiesbaden, Germany, during the summer of 1992. In the spirit of the ancient Chinese Ch'an masters, Wolfgang Kopp teaches a direct and powerful Zen. He conveys neither a theoretical system nor a one-sided dogmatism of sitting, and he neither wears customary robes nor holds a traditional title.
Zen Beyond All Words
by Wolfgang Kopp Barbara Wittenberg-HaenauerZen Beyond All Words contains a selection of talks given by MasterWolfgang Kopp at the Tao Ch'an Center in Wiesbaden, Germany, during the summer of 1992. In the spirit of the ancient Chinese Ch'an masters, Wolfgang Kopp teaches a direct and powerful Zen. He conveys neither a theoretical system nor a one-sided dogmatism of sitting, and he neither wears customary robes nor holds a traditional title.
Zen Body-Being: An Enlightened Approach to Physical Skill, Grace, and Power (Zen Buddhism Ser.)
by Peter Ralston Laura RalstonIn this inspiring guide, Peter Ralston presents a program of "physical education" for anyone interested in body improvement. Using simple, clear language to demystify the Zen mindset, he draws on more than three decades of experience teaching students and apprentices worldwide who have applied his body-being approach. More of a transformative guide than a specific list of exercises devoted to any particular physical approach, Zen Body-Being explains how to create a state of mental control, enhanced feeling-awareness, correct structural alignment, increased spatial acuity, and even a greater interactive presence. Exercises are simple, often involving feeling-imagery and meditative awareness, which have a profound and sometimes instant effect. Where similar guides teach readers what to do, this book teaches readers how to be.From the Trade Paperback edition.
The Zen Book of Life: Wisdom from the Great Masters, Teachers, and Writers of All Time
by Mark ZocchiInspired by the teachings of the Buddha and other great masters, teachers, and writers, this is a book designed to help people connect to their inner divinity and find their spiritual path. It is overflowing with profound quotes, sayings, and insights, each presented alone, allowing the reader to dip in at any time. Each reading is guaranteed to inspire immediately and provide food for thought.Quotations and sayings have been chosen from Gautama Buddha and other "buddhas"--masters of spirituality and inspiration, such as Milarepa, Longchenpa, his Holiness the 14th Dali Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh, and Sogyal Rinpoche, along with other "greats" including Cicero, Rumi, Lao Tzu, Mother Teresa, and Shakespeare. <P><P>A wonderful book to place on your office desk, coffee table, or bookshelf or by your bed, it is designed to provide daily comfort, wisdom, and spiritual nourishment.
Zen Bow, Zen Arrow: The Life and Teachings of Awa Kenzo, the Archery Master from Zen in the Art of A rchery
by John StevensHere are the inspirational life and teachings of Awa Kenzo (1880-1939), the Zen and kyudo (archery) master who gained worldwide renown after the publication of Eugen Herrigel's cult classic Zen in the Art of Archery in 1953. Kenzo lived and taught at a pivotal time in Japan's history, when martial arts were practiced primarily for self-cultivation, and his wise and penetrating instructions for practice (and life)--including aphorisms, poetry, instructional lists, and calligraphy--are infused with the spirit of Zen. Kenzo uses the metaphor of the bow and arrow to challenge the practitioner to look deeply into his or her own true nature.
Zen-Brain Horizons: Toward a Living Zen (The MIT Press)
by Austin James H.In Zen-Brain Horizons, James Austin draws on his decades of experience as a neurologist and Zen practitioner to clarify the benefits of meditative training. Austin integrates classical Buddhist literature with modern brain research, exploring the horizons of a living, neural Zen. When viewed in the light of today, the timeless wisdom of some Zen masters seems almost to have anticipated recent research in the neurosciences. The keen attentiveness and awareness that we cultivate during meditative practices becomes the leading edge of our subsequent mental processing. Austin explains how our covert, involuntary functions can make crucial contributions to the subtle ways we learn, intuit, and engage in creative activities. Austin begins by looking back at ancient Buddhist narratives. He then weaves together the major themes of self, attention, emotion, language, and insight. He goes on to examine Zen and psychology as cultural developments, including recent information about how a clear, calm awareness can change the meditating brain. He considers the pathways through which intuitions develop on their way to becoming realized, exploring the phenomena of the spontaneous color imagery that arises during meditation. Looking out even further into the future, Austin discusses the universal themes of creativity, happiness, openness, and selflessness. Along the way, he bows in homage to William James, explores "Buddhist Botany" and "Avian Zen," demonstrates why living Zen means much more than sitting quietly indoors on a cushion, and provides simplified advice that helps guide readers to the most important points.
Zen-Brain Horizons: Toward a Living Zen (The\mit Press Ser.)
by James H. AustinA neurologist and Zen practitioner clarifies the benefits of meditative training, drawing on classical Buddhist literature and modern brain research.In Zen-Brain Horizons, James Austin draws on his decades of experience as a neurologist and Zen practitioner to clarify the benefits of meditative training. Austin integrates classical Buddhist literature with modern brain research, exploring the horizons of a living, neural Zen. When viewed in the light of today, the timeless wisdom of some Zen masters seems almost to have anticipated recent research in the neurosciences. The keen attentiveness and awareness that we cultivate during meditative practices becomes the leading edge of our subsequent mental processing. Austin explains how our covert, involuntary functions can make crucial contributions to the subtle ways we learn, intuit, and engage in creative activities. He demonstrates why living Zen means much more than sitting quietly indoors on a cushion, and provides simplified advice that helps guide readers to the most important points.
Zen Brushpoems
by Ray GriggZen Brushpoems connects the creative insights of Haiku-like poetry with the dynamic interplay of the written word and painted image. This subtle and profound medium of poetic expression has been inspired by the revolutionary work of Paul Reps
Zen Brushpoems
by Ray GriggZen Brushpoems connects the creative insights of Haiku-like poetry with the dynamic interplay of the written word and painted image. This subtle and profound medium of poetic expression has been inspired by the revolutionary work of Paul Reps
Zen Brushpoems
by Ray GriggZen Brushpoems connects the creative insights of Haiku-like poetry with the dynamic interplay of the written word and painted image. This subtle and profound medium of poetic expression has been inspired by the revolutionary work of Paul Reps
Zen Brushpoems
by Ray GriggZen Brushpoems connects the creative insights of Haiku-like poetry with the dynamic interplay of the written word and painted image. This subtle and profound medium of poetic expression has been inspired by the revolutionary work of Paul Reps