Chan/Zen

It's no wonder that The Power of Now has sold over 2 million copies worldwide and has been translated into over 30 foreign languages. Much more than simple principles and platitudes, the book takes readers on an inspiring spiritual journey to find their true and deepest self and reach the ultimate in personal growth and spirituality: the discovery of truth and light. In the first chapter, Tolle introduces readers to enlightenment and its natural enemy, the mind.

In the Spirit of Ch’an is a window on the world of Chinese Zen (Ch’an), this little booklet is a short summary of Ch’an Buddhist thought distilled from Master Sheng-yen’s published and unpublished materials. It is published in the hope of providing beginners and the general public with a new and fresh perspective on the self, the mind,and the nature of our relationships and interactions in the world. Students of other spiritual denominations and Buddhist traditions will find it a helpful guide to understanding the basic ideas and methods of Ch’an.

The nine captivatingly meditative essays in The Practice of the Wild display the deep understanding and wide erudition of Gary Snyder in the ways of Buddhist belief, wildness, wildlife, and the world. These essays, first published in 1990, stand as the mature centerpiece of Snyder’s work and thought, and this profound collection is widely accepted as one of the central texts on wilderness and the interaction of nature and culture.

This fascinating and innovative monograph explores the relationship between the philosophical underpinnings of Advaita Vedanta and Zen Buddhism and the experiential journey of spiritual practitioners. Taking the perspective of the questioning student, the author highlights the experiential deconstructive processes that are ignited when students' "everyday" dualistic thought structures are challenged by the non-dual nature of these teachings and practices.

Zen Mind Beginners Mind is a simple series of lectures that may help the reader to see reality a bit clearer (it did that for me). Zen Mind Beginners Mind is a simple series of lectures built around the idea, accept nothing till you verify it for yourself. The idea of not accepting anything till you verify it yourself is one of the bright lights of Zen and creates a huge chasm between itself and other paths on spiritual journeys. Shunryu Suzuki is very clear in the book that Buddhism uses this as the foundation of everything that will come after it.

How to cite this document (a suggested style): Buswell Jr., Robert E. Cultivating Original Enlightenment: Wonhyo's Exposition of the Vajrasamadhi-Sutra. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007.

This book analyses the transplantation, development and adaptation of the two largest Tibetan and Zen Buddhist organizations currently active on the British religious landscape: the New Kadampa Tradition (NKT) and the Order of Buddhist Contemplatives (OBC). The key contributions of recent scholarship are evaluated and organised thematically to provide a framework for analysis, and the history and current landscape of contemporary Tibetan and Zen Buddhist practice in Britain are also mapped out.

According to Modern Cosmology, our Universe came from a primordial state 13.7 billion years ago, with no matter and very little energy. In other words, it was almost empty. Where do the stars and galaxies, and everything else in the present universe come from then? This captivating book provides an answer to this question, and explains the observations and evidence behind the assertion of an almost empty primordial universe. Aimed at a general audience, it assumes no prior knowledge of astronomy or physics.

The Mystique of Transmission is a close reading of a late-eighth-century Chan/Zen Buddhist hagiographical work, the Lidai fabao ji ( Record of the Dharma-Jewel Through the Generations), and is its first English translation. The text is the only remaining relic of the little-known Bao Tang Chan school of Sichuan, and combines a sectarian history of Buddhism and Chan in China with an account of the eighth-century Chan master Wuzhu in Sichuan.

When neurology researcher James Austin began Zen training, he found that his medical education was inadequate. During the past three decades, he has been at the cutting edge of both Zen and neuroscience, constantly discovering new examples of how these two large fields each illuminate the other. Now, in Selfless Insight, Austin arrives at a fresh synthesis, one that invokes the latest brain research to explain the basis for meditative states and clarifies what Zen awakening implies for our understanding of consciousness. Austin, author of the widely read Zen and the Brain, reminds us why Zen meditation is not only mindfully attentive but evolves to become increasingly selfless and intuitive. Meditators are gradually learning how to replace over-emotionality with calm, clear, objective comprehension.

There have been many studies that focus on aspects of the history of Japanese Buddhism. Until now, none have addressed important questions of organization and practice in contemporary Buddhism, questions such as how Japanese Buddhism came to seen as a religion of funeral practices; how Buddhist institutions envision the role of the laity; and how a married clergy has affected life at temples and the image of priests. This volume is the first to address fully contemporary Buddhist life and institutions - topics often overlooked in the conflict between the rhetoric of renunciation and the practices of clerical marriage and householding that characterize much of Buddhism in today’s Japan. Informed by years of field research and his own experiences training to be a Tendai priest, Stephen Covell skillfully refutes this "corruption paradigm" while revealing the many (often contradictory) facets of contemporary institutional Buddhism, or as Covell terms it, Temple Buddhism.

Dogen (1200-1253), the founder of the Soto Zen sect in Japan, is especially known for introducing to Japanese Buddhism many of the texts and practices that he discovered in China. Heine reconstructs the context of Dogen's travels to and reflections on China by means of a critical look at traditional sources both by and about Dogen in light of recent Japanese scholarship. While many studies emphasize the unique features of Dogen's Japanese influences, this book calls attention to the way Chinese and Japanese elements were fused in Dogen's religious vision.

Buddhism first came to the West many centuries ago through the Greeks, who also influenced some of the culture and practices of Indian Buddhism. As Buddhism has spread beyond India, it has always been affected by the indigenous traditions of its new homes. When Buddhism appeared in America and Europe in the 1950s and 1960s, it encountered contemporary psychology and psychotherapy, rather than religious traditions. Since the 1990s, many efforts have been made by Westerners to analyze and integrate the similarities and differences between Buddhism and it therapeutic ancestors, particularly Jungian psychology. Taking Japanese Zen-Buddhism as its starting point, this volume is a collection of critiques, commentaries, and histories about a particular meeting of Buddhism and psychology.

Master Sheng-yen, author of Subtle Wisdom and the head of monasteries in both Taiwan and the United States, has written another inspiring introduction to the Chan Buddhist tradition of China, more familiar to Americans as Zen, its incarnation in Japan. Eastern religion bookshelves these days are crowded with Zen primers and collections of sermons by eminent monks or nuns, but Sheng-yen's work stands out, bridging the two genres in a way that has been much needed.