The truth of Chan Buddhism-better known as "Zen"-is regularly said to be beyond language, and yet Chan authors-medieval and modern-produced an enormous quantity of literature over the centuries. To ...make sense of this well-known paradox,Patriarchs on Paperexplores several genres of Chan literature that appeared during the Tang and Song dynasties (c. 600-1300), including genealogies, biographies, dialogues, poems, monastic handbooks, and koans. Working through this diverse body of literature, Alan Cole details how Chan authors developed several strategies to evoke images of a perfect Buddhism in which wonderfully simple masters transmitted Buddhism's final truth to one another, suddenly and easily, and, of course, independent of literature and the complexities of the Buddhist monastic system. Chan literature, then, reveled in staging delightful images of a Buddhism free of Buddhism, tempting the reader, over and over, with the possibility of finding behind the thick façade of real Buddhism-with all its rules, texts, doctrines, and institutional solidity-an ethereal world of pure spirit.Patriarchs on Papercharts the emergence of this kind of "fantasy Buddhism" and details how it interacted with more traditional forms of Chinese Buddhism in order to show how Chan's illustrious ancestors were created in literature in order to further a wide range of real-world agendas.
Dahui's Letters is a compilation of letters of the Linji Chan teacher Dahui Zonggao (1089-1163) to forty scholar-officials and two Chan masters. Each of the letters to laymen is fascinating as a ...document directed at a specific scholar-official with his distinctive social niche and relative level of spiritual development. Dahui's style of practice became dominant throughout East Asia.
An engaging introduction to Zen Buddhism, featuring a new English translation of one of the earliest Zen textsLeading Buddhist scholar Sam van Schaik explores the history and essence of Zen, based on ...a new translation of one of the earliest surviving collections of teachings by Zen masters. These teachings, titledThe Masters and Students of the Lanka, were discovered in a sealed cave on the old Silk Road, in modern Gansu, China, in the early twentieth century. All more than a thousand years old, the manuscripts have sometimes been called the Buddhist Dead Sea Scrolls, and their translation has opened a new window onto the history of Buddhism.Both accessible and illuminating, this book explores the continuities between the ways in which Zen was practiced in ancient times, and how it is practiced today in East Asian countries such as Japan, China, Korea, and Vietnam, as well as in the emerging Western Zen tradition.
"In the thirteenth century Dogen brought Zen to Japan. His tradition flourishes there still today and now has taken root across the world. Abruptly Dogen presents some of his pith writings—startling, ...shifting, funny, spilling out in every direction. They come from all seventy-five chapters of his masterwork, the Eye of Real Dharma (Shōbōgenzō 正法眼藏), and roam through mountains, magic, everyday life, meditation, the nature of mind, and how the Buddha is always speaking from inside our heads. An excerpt from chapter 1, “A Case of Here We Are”: Human wisdom is like a moon roosting in water. No stain on the moon, nor does the water rip. However wide and grand the light, it still finds lodging in a puddle. The full moon, the spilling sky, all roosting in a single dewdrop on a single blade of grass. A man of wisdom is uncut, the way a moon doesn’t pierce water. Wisdom in a man is unobstructed, the way the sky’s full moon is unobstructed in a dewdrop. No doubt about it, the drop’s as deep as the moon is high. How long does this go on? How deep is the water, how high the moon?"
A seasoned Zen practitioner and neurologist looks more deeply at mindfulness, connecting it to our subconscious and to memory and creativity.
This is a book for readers who want to probe more deeply ...into mindfulness. It goes beyond the casual, once-in-awhile meditation in popular culture, grounding mindfulness in daily practice, Zen teachings, and recent research in neuroscience. In Living Zen Remindfully, James Austin, author of the groundbreaking Zen and the Brain, describes authentic Zen training—the commitment to a process of regular, ongoing daily life practice. This training process enables us to unlearn unfruitful habits, develop more wholesome ones, and lead a more genuinely creative life.
Austin shows that mindfulness can mean more than our being conscious of the immediate “now.” It can extend into the subconscious, where most of our brain's activities take place, invisibly. Austin suggests ways that long-term meditative training helps cultivate the hidden, affirmative resource of our unconscious memory. Remindfulness, as Austin terms it, can help us to adapt more effectively and to live more authentic lives.
Austin discusses different types of meditation, meditation and problem-solving, and the meaning of enlightenment. He addresses egocentrism (self-centeredness) and allocentrism (other-centeredness), and the blending of focal and global attention. He explains the remarkable processes that encode, store, and retrieve our memories, focusing on the covert, helpful remindful processes incubating at subconscious levels. And he considers the illuminating confluence of Zen, clinical neurology, and neuroscience. Finally, he describes an everyday life of “living Zen,” drawing on the poetry of Basho, the seventeenth-century haiku master.
By what narrow path is the ineffable silence of Zen cleft by the scratch of a pen? The distilled insights of forty years, Norman Fischer’s Experience: Thinking, Writing, Language, and Religion is a ...collection of essays by Zen master Fischer about experimental writing as a spiritual practice.
Raised in a Conservative Jewish family, Fischer embraced the twin practices of Zen Buddhism and innovative poetics in San Francisco in the early 1970s. His work includes original poetry, descriptions of Buddhist practice, translations of the Hebrew psalms, and eclectic writings on a range of topics from Homer to Heidegger to Kabbalah. Both Buddhist priest and participant in avant-garde poetry’s Language movement, Fischer has limned the fertile affinities and creative contradictions between Zen and writing, accumulating four decades of rich insights he shares in Experience .
Fischer’s work has been deeply enriched through his collaborations with leading rabbis, poets, artists, esteemed Zen Buddhist practitioners, Trappist monks, and renowned Buddhist leaders, among them the Dalai Lama. Alone and with others, he has carried on a deep and sustained investigation into the intersection of writing and consciousness as informed by meditation.
The essays in this artfully curated collection range across divers, fascinating topics such as time, the Heart Sutra, God in the Hebrew psalms, the supreme “uselessness” of art making, “late work” as a category of poetic appreciation, and the subtle and dubious notion of “religious experience.” From the theoretical to the revealingly personal, Fischer’s essays, interviews, and notes point toward a dramatic expansion of the sense of religious feeling in writing.
Readers who join Fischer on this path in Experience can discover how language is not a description of experience, but rather an experience itself: shifting, indefinite, and essential.
The tradition of Chan Buddhism-more popularly known as Zen-has been romanticized throughout its history. In this book, John R. McRae shows how modern critical techniques, supported by recent ...manuscript discoveries, make possible a more skeptical, accurate, and-ultimately-productive assessment of Chan lineages, teaching, fundraising practices, and social organization. Synthesizing twenty years of scholarship,Seeing through Zenoffers new, accessible analytic models for the interpretation of Chan spiritual practices and religious history. Writing in a lucid and engaging style, McRae traces the emergence of this Chinese spiritual tradition and its early figureheads, Bodhidharma and the "sixth patriarch" Huineng, through the development of Zen dialogue andkoans.In addition to constructing a central narrative for the doctrinal and social evolution of the school,Seeing through Zenexamines the religious dynamics behind Chan's use of iconoclastic stories and myths of patriarchal succession. McRae argues that Chinese Chan is fundamentally genealogical, both in its self-understanding as a school of Buddhism and in the very design of its practices of spiritual cultivation. Furthermore, by forgoing the standard idealization of Zen spontaneity, we can gain new insight into the religious vitality of the school as it came to dominate the Chinese religious scene, providing a model for all of East Asia-and the modern world. Ultimately, this book aims to change how we think about Chinese Chan by providing new ways of looking at the tradition.
In the early part of this century, the discovery of a walled-up
cave in northwest China led to the retrieval of a lost early Ch'an
(Zen) literature of the T'ang dynasty (618-907). One of the
...recovered Zen texts was a seven-piece collection, the
Bodhidharma Anthology . Of the numerous texts attributed to
Bodhidharma, this anthology is the only one generally believed to
contain authentic Bodhidharma material. Jeffrey L. Broughton
provides a reliable annotated translation of the Bodhidharma
Anthology along with a detailed study of its nature, content,
and background. His work is especially important for its rendering
of the three Records, which contain some of the earliest Zen
dialogues and constitute the real beginnings of Zen literature. The
vivid dialogues and sayings of Master Yuan, a long-forgotten member
of the Bodhidharma circle, are the hallmark of the
Records . Master Yuan consistently criticizes reliance on
the Dharma, on teachers, on meditative practice, and on scripture,
all of which lead to self-deception and confusion, he says.
According to Master Yuan, if one has spirit and does not seek
anything, including the teachings of Buddhism, then one will attain
the quietude of liberation. The boldness in Yuan's utterances
prefigures much of the full-blown Zen tradition we recognize today.
Broughton utilizes a Tibetan translation of the Bodhidharma
Anthology as an informative gloss on the Chinese original.
Placing the anthology within the context of the Tun-huang Zen
manuscripts as a whole, he proposes a new approach to the study of
Zen, one that concentrates on literary history, a genealogy of
texts rather than the usual genealogy of masters.
The Historical Dictionary of Chan Buddhism contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 400 cross-referenced entries on important ...personalities, schools, texts, vocabularies, doctrines, rituals, temples, events, and otherpractices.
