Download or read book Zen and Western Thought written by Masao Abe and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 1989-02-01 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of Abe's essays is a welcome addition to philosophy and comparative philosophy.
Download or read book Two Shores of Zen an American Monk s Japan written by Jiryu Mark Rutschman-Byler and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2010-01-09 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When a young American Buddhist monk can no longer bear the pop-psychology, sexual intrigue, and free-flowing peanut butter that he insists pollute his spiritual community, he sets out for Japan on an archetypal journey to find True Zen. Arriving at an austere Japanese monastery and meeting a fierce old Zen Master, he feels confirmed in his suspicion that the Western Buddhist approach is a spineless imitation of authentic spiritual effort. However, over the course of a year and a half of bitter initiations, relentless meditation and labor, intense cold, brutal discipline, insanity, overwhelming lust, and false breakthroughs, he grows disenchanted with the Asian model as well. Two Shores of Zen weaves together scenes from Japanese and American Zen to offer a timely, compelling contribution to the ongoing conversation about Western Buddhism's stark departures from Asian traditions. How far has Western Buddhism come from its roots, or indeed how far has it fallen? www.ShoresOfZen.com
Download or read book Zen and the Modern World written by Masao Abe and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2003-01-01 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by one of Japan's foremost contemporary thinkers and scholars, Zen and Modern Society is the third in a series of essay collections on Zen Buddhism as seen in the context of Western thought. Throughout his career, Masao Abe has articulated the meaning of Zen thought in a uniquely compelling way - at once, true to the original tradition and appropriately relevant to a variety of comparative standpoints, ranging from Biblical Judeo-Christianity to modern existentialism, phenomenology, and postmodernism. As a leading representative of the Kyoto School, which has sought a critical, comparative linking of Eastern and Western thought, Abe has based his approach on constructive, mutually respectful yet critical intellectual interaction and dialogue with some of the leading figures in the West (including Paul Tillich, Hans Kung, and Eugene Borowitz) as well as dozens of colleagues, students, and disciples. Together with the previous volumes, this work examines and exemplifies some key features of Kyoto School thought. While the essays presented here should be read in light of the socio-political criticism that has since been lodged against the Kyoto School and, more particularly, i
Download or read book Beat Zen Square Zen and Zen written by Alan W. Watts and published by . This book was released on 2011-10-01 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Encouraging Words written by Robert Aitken and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2010-12-08 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nominated for the Tricycle Prize for Outstanding Contribution to Buddhism in America—a collection of short talks and essays from a renowned meditation teacher. "The inspiration that guided monks and nuns in ancient times is our own deepest incentive as we establish our practice in a world that desperately needs new forms of kinship and love." —Robert Aitken In this inspiring collection, you will find a series of talks and essays that Aitken Rashi has offered his students at meditation retreats during the past two decades. They are arranged according to themes central to all spiritual seekers—attention, emptiness, coming and going, diligence, death and the afterlife, the sacred self, and the moral path. Aitken provides guidance on pursuing religious practice in a lay context, “re-casting the Dharma to include women, jobs, and family.” He also charts his own quest to develop a set of moral codes in keeping with Buddhism's basic precepts and honoring the enormous ethical challenges faced in the twentieth century.
Download or read book Zen Sand written by Victor Sogen Hori and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2003-02-28 with total page 785 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Zen Sand is a classic collection of verses aimed at aiding practitioners of kôan meditation to negotiate the difficult relationship between insight and language. As such it represents a major contribution to both Western Zen practice and English-language Zen scholarship. In Japan the traditional Rinzai Zen kôan curriculum includes the use of jakugo, or "capping phrases." Once a monk has successfully replied to a kôan, the Zen master orders the search for a classical verse to express the monk’s insight into the kôan. Special collections of these jakugo were compiled as handbooks to aid in that search. Until now, Zen students in the West, lacking this important resource, have been severely limited in carrying out this practice. Zen Sand combines and translates two standard jakugo handbooks and opens the way for incorporating this important tradition fully into Western Zen practice. For the scholar, Zen Sand provides a detailed description of the jakugo practice and its place in the overall kôan curriculum, as well as a brief history of the Zen phrase book. This volume also contributes to the understanding of East Asian culture in a broader sense.
Download or read book Western Zen written by Raven Walker and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2000-03 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Western Zen undertakes the task of stripping away the religious trappings of Zen to reveal the practical theory of mind beneath. While Western culture conditions the physical being in hundreds of constructive ways, we are haphazard in our conditioning of the mental being. We teach it to read, write, do numbers, and know facts, but otherwise leave mental life to wander as it pleases. What is missing is a practical theory for conditioning the mind. Zen's intuitive psychology fills this void. It not only describes processes of inner conditioning that can make positive improvements in our conscious life, it unites these results with the arts of performance creating more effective human behavior. Remarkably, this psychology in Zen is no foreign import. Its reality is well explained by Western Psychology, and is fully reflected throughout the course of American Intellectual Tradition. Western Zen takes the hidden truth in Eastern Zen, shines the light of Western Reason upon it, and makes the deeper intuitive psychology universal. The practical conditioning of the mind and the emotions to good effect is possible in terms completely consistent with Western science. The end result is a mastery of your inner life and a finer quality in your human experience.
Download or read book Zen in the Fifties written by Helen Westgeest and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Enthält: Zen in de jaren vijftig: Wisselwerking in de beeldende kunst tussen Oost en West: Samenvatting.
Download or read book Zen written by Philip Kapleau and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1980 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Dude and the Zen Master written by Jeff Bridges and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2013-01-08 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The perfect gift for fans of The Big Lebowski, Jeff Bridges's "The Dude", and anyone who could use more Zen in their lives. Zen Master Bernie Glassman compares Jeff Bridges’s iconic role in The Big Lebowski to a Lamed-Vavnik: one of the men in Jewish mysticism who are “simple and unassuming,” and “so good that on account of them God lets the world go on.” Jeff puts it another way. “The wonderful thing about the Dude is that he’d always rather hug it out than slug it out.” For more than a decade, Academy Award-winning actor Jeff Bridges and his Buddhist teacher, renowned Roshi Bernie Glassman, have been close friends. Inspiring and often hilarious, The Dude and the Zen Master captures their freewheeling dialogue and remarkable humanism in a book that reminds us of the importance of doing good in a difficult world.
Download or read book Zen of the Plains written by Tyra A. Olstad and published by University of North Texas Press. This book was released on 2014-05-15 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although spare, sweeping landscapes may appear "empty," plains and prairies afford a rich, unique aesthetic experience--one of quiet sunrises and dramatic storms, hidden treasures and abundant wildlife, infinite horizons and omnipresent wind, all worthy of contemplation and celebration. In this series of narratives, photographs, and hand-drawn maps, Tyra Olstad blends scholarly research with first-hand observation to explore topics such as wildness and wilderness, travel and tourism, preservation and conservation, expectations and acceptance, and even dreams and reality in the context of parks, prairies, and wild, open places. In so doing, she invites readers to reconsider the meaning of "emptiness" and ask larger, deeper questions such as: how do people experience the world? How do we shape places and how do places shape us? Above all, what does it mean to experience that exhilarating effect known as Zen of the plains?
Download or read book The Master the Monks and I written by Gerta Ital and published by HarperThorsons. This book was released on 1987 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Wild Ways written by Ikkyū and published by White Pine Press (NY). This book was released on 2003 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One hundred poems by a revered Japanese Zen master.
Download or read book Zen Ritual written by Steven Heine and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 2008 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When books about Zen Buddhism began appearing in Western languages just over a half-century ago, there was no interest whatsoever in the role of ritual in Zen. Indeed, what attracted Western readers' interest was the Zen rejection of ritual. The famous 'Beat Zen' writers were delighted by the Zen emphasis on spontaneity as opposed to planned, repetitious action, and wrote inspirationally about the demythologized, anti-ritualized spirit of Zen. Quotes from the great Zen masters supported this understanding of Zen, and led to the fervor that fueled the opening of Zen centers throughout the West.Once Western practitioners in these centers began to practice Zen seriously, however, they discovered that zazen - Zen meditation - is a ritualized practice supported by centuries-old ritual practices of East Asia. Although initially in tension with the popular anti-ritual image of ancient Zen masters, interest in Zen ritual has increased along with awareness of its fundamental role in the spirit of Zen. Eventually, Zen practitioners would form the idea of no-mind, or the open and awakened state of mind in which ingrained habits of thinking give way to more receptive, direct forms of experience. This notion provides a perspective from which ritual could gain enormous respect as a vehicle to spiritual awakening, and thus this volume seeks to emphasize the significance of ritual in Zen practice.Containing 9 articles by prominent scholars about a variety of topics, including Zen rituals kinhin and zazen, this volume covers rituals from the early Chan period to modern Japan. Each chapter covers key developments that occurred in the Linji/Rinzai and Caodon/ Soto schools of China and Japan, describing how Zen rituals mold the lives and characters of its practitioners, shaping them in accordance with the ideal of Zen awakening. This volume is a significant step towards placing these practices in a larger historical and analytical perspective.
Download or read book Self Attitudes and Emotion Work written by Anson Shupe and published by Transaction Publishers. This book was released on 2011-12-31 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about how Western social psychology interfaces with an Eastern Zen Buddhist perspective. It is neither a purely Zen Buddhist critique of the former, nor is it merely a social psychological interpretation of Zen. Rather, it is an attempt to create common ground between each through the systematic comparison of certain shared fundamental concepts and ideas. Anglo-American social psychology is not much more than a century old despite having its roots in a broad philosophical tradition. Alternately, the Zen version of Buddhism can trace its historical origins to roughly 1,500 years ago in China. Even though the two arose at different times and at first glance appear stridently antithetical, the authors show that they share considerable areas of overlap. The logic of Zen contemplates the consequences of the taken-for-granted tyranny created by personal memories and culture. These traits, common to every culture, include hubris, greed, self-centeredness, distrust, prejudice, hatred, fear, anxiety, and violence. Social psychology leans more toward a "nurture" rather than "nature" explanation for behavior. Both areas of research are firmly rooted within the domain of sociological social psychology; the processes are also sometimes referred to as learning or conditioning. Zen challenges in radical terms key assumptions of both sociology and psychology concerning individual identity, human nature, and human motivation. This stimulating volume will provoke new thoughts about an old tradition and a newer area of scholarly work.
Download or read book Zen at War written by Brian Daizen Victoria and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2006-06-22 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A compelling history of the contradictory, often militaristic, role of Zen Buddhism, this book meticulously documents the close and previously unknown support of a supposedly peaceful religion for Japanese militarism throughout World War II. Drawing on the writings and speeches of leading Zen masters and scholars, Brian Victoria shows that Zen served as a powerful foundation for the fanatical and suicidal spirit displayed by the imperial Japanese military. At the same time, the author recounts the dramatic and tragic stories of the handful of Buddhist organizations and individuals that dared to oppose Japan's march to war. He follows this history up through recent apologies by several Zen sects for their support of the war and the way support for militarism was transformed into 'corporate Zen' in postwar Japan. The second edition includes a substantive new chapter on the roots of Zen militarism and an epilogue that explores the potentially volatile mix of religion and war. With the increasing interest in Buddhism in the West, this book is as timely as it is certain to be controversial.
Download or read book A Western Approach to Zen written by Christmas Humphreys and published by Quest Books. This book was released on 1999-11-03 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Satori is a stage along the way, a gateless gate that must be entered on the path to enlightenment. With profound inspiration and consummate compassion, the founder of the Buddhist Society in London invites serious students of spiritual evolution to use Western techniques to achieve satori, the experience of unity and divinity in all aspects of being. Humphreys refocuses the wisdom of Zen for the Western reader and illuminates the arduous path to enlightenment.
