Bring Me the Rhinoceros

Author: John Tarrant
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 159030618X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
A provocative and playful exploration of the Zen koan tradition that reveals how everyday paradoxes are an integral part of our spiritual journey Bring Me the Rhinoceros is an unusual guide to happiness and a can opener for your thinking. For fifteen hundred years, Zen koans have been passed down through generations of masters, usually in private encounters between teacher and student. This book deftly retells more than a dozen traditional koans, which are partly paradoxical questions dangerous to your beliefs and partly treasure boxes of ancient wisdom. Koans show that you don’t have to impress people or change into an improved, more polished version of yourself. Instead you can find happiness by unbuilding, unmaking, throwing overboard, and generally subverting unhappiness. Author and Zen teacher John Tarrant brings the heart of the koan tradition out into the open, reminding us that the old wisdom remains as vital as ever, a deep resource available to anyone in any place or time.

Rhinoceros Success

Author: Scott Alexander
Publisher: Ramsey Press
ISBN: 1937077152
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 78

Book Description
Go get the life you want. Be a Rhinoceros! There is something dangerous about this book. Something big. Something full of power, energy and force of will. It could be about you. You could become three tons of thick-skinned, snorting hard-charging rhinoceros. It is time to go get the life you want.

The Book of Mu

Author: James Ishmael Ford
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0861716434
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 351

Book Description
Examines the Zen principle of mu and presents the writings of over forty teachers on the practice of mu.

The Gateless Gate

Author: Koun Yamada
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0861719719
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 236

Book Description
In The Gateless Gate, one of modern Zen Buddhism's uniquely influential masters offers classic commentaries on the Mumonkan, one of Zen's greatest collections of teaching stories. This translation was compiled with the Western reader in mind, and includes Koan Yamada's clear and penetrating comments on each case. Yamada played a seminal role in bringing Zen Buddhism to the West from Japan, going on to be the head of the Sanbo Kyodan Zen Community. The Gateless Gate would be invaluable if only for the translation and commentary alone, yet it's loaded with extra material and is a fantastic resource to keep close by: An in-depth Introduction to the History of Zen Practice Lineage charts Japanese-to-Chinese and Chinese-to-Japanese conversion charts for personal names, place names, and names of writings Plus front- and back-matter from ancient and modern figures: Mumon, Shuan, Kubota Ji'un, Taizan Maezumi, Hugo Enomiya-Lasalle, and Yamada Roshi's son, Masamichi Yamada. A wonderful inspiration for the koan practitioner, and for those with a general interest in Zen Buddhism.

The Light Inside the Dark

Author: John Tarrant
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0060931116
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 280

Book Description
In this landmark guide to the spiritual journey, respected Zen teacher and psychotherapist John Tarrant brings together ancient Eastern traditions and the Western passion for the soul. Using real-life stories, Zen tales, and Greek myths, The Light Inside the Dark shows how our darkest experiences can be the gates to wisdom and joy. Tarrant leads us through the inevitable descents of our journey--from the everyday world of work and family into the treasure cave of the interior life--from which we return with greater love of life's vivid, common gifts. Written with empathy and a poet's skill, The Light Inside the Dark is the freshest and most challenging work on the soul to he published in years.

The Intimate Way of Zen

Author: James Ishmael Ford
Publisher: Shambhala Publications
ISBN: 0834845679
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 297

Book Description
An intimate mystery encompasses you and tugs upon your heart—what does it mean to follow that tug across the arc of a spiritual life? Reflecting out of more than fifty years of practice in Zen Buddhism, Unitarian Universalism, and other contemplative traditions, James Ishmael Ford invites us into a journey through life's mysteries and the stages of spiritual development. Lightly structured by the archetypal Buddhist oxherding images, Ford’s exploration is rooted in the Zen way while being deeply enriched by various strains of world mysticism. The book, sprinkled with insights and quotes from Buddhist, Daoist, and Christian traditions, serves as a map and a companion to spiritual seekers or pilgrims—whether within one religious tradition or cobbling together a way of one’s own. “Here is the most natural of all natural experiences,” writes Ford. “In the midst of our suffering, our longing, our desperation, we capture a glimpse. Something touches us. And with that, if we are lucky and really notice some movement of some spirit within us, we turn our attention to the intimate way.”

Know Yourself, Forget Yourself

Author: Marc Lesser
Publisher: New World Library
ISBN: 1608680819
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 291

Book Description
We all yearn for clear-cut answers to life's problems, yet we rarely get them. Formulas fail and contradictions mount. In 'Know Yourself, Forget Yourself', executive coach and mindfulness teacher Marc Lesser shows that understanding and embracing the points where life feels most confusing, most contradictory can lead us to more satisfaction and joy.Lesser provides clear guidance and simple practices for embracing five central paradoxes in life and navigating them to increase our effectiveness and happiness. Influenced by the revolutionary mindfulness and emotional intelligence trainings he helped develop at Google, 'Know Yourself, Forget Yourself' is a profound book about cultivating the emotional skills to understand the right path through difficulties and challenges.

Illustrations

Author: David W. Jones
Publisher: Valjean Press
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 201

Book Description
Three frogs are sitting on a log. Two decide to jump. How many frogs are left? Three. Deciding to jump means nothing. Action is everything. Poignant stories, parables, and quotes can not only bring life to a sermon, speech, or presentation, they can help the hearers to take flight and go from listeners to doers.

The Zen of Therapy

Author: Mark Epstein, M.D.
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 059329663X
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Book Description
“A warm, profound and cleareyed memoir. . . this wise and sympathetic book’s lingering effect is as a reminder that a deeper and more companionable way of life lurks behind our self-serious stories."—Oliver Burkeman, New York Times Book Review Drawing on decades of personal and professional experience, Dr. Mark Epstein considers how his practice of psychotherapy and meditation can be used in tandem to lead his patients, and himself, to greater awareness and fulfillment. For much of his career, Dr. Mark Epstein kept his beliefs as a Buddhist separate from his work as a psychiatrist. But as he became more forthcoming with his patients about his personal spiritual leanings, he was surprised to find how many of them were eager to learn more. The divisions between the psychological, emotional, and the spiritual, he soon realized, were not as distinct as one might think. In The Zen of Therapy, Dr. Epstein reflects on a year’s worth of selected sessions with his patients and observes how, in a given hour, his Buddhist background influences his work. He emphasizes how Western therapy can be considered a two-person meditation, and how mindfulness, much like a good therapist, can “hold” awareness, creating the necessary conditions for inner peace. Throughout this deeply personal and wise inquiry, Dr. Epstein illuminates the therapy relationship as a spiritual friendship, and reveals how a therapist can help us realize that there is something magical running through our fraught lives. For when we understand how readily we have misinterpreted ourselves, when we touch the ground of our own being, we come home.

The Great Spring

Author: Natalie Goldberg
Publisher: Shambhala Publications
ISBN: 0834840022
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Book Description
From the beloved writing teacher behind Writing Down the Bones comes a treasury of personal stories reflecting a life filled with journeys—inner and outer—zigzagging around the world and home again Here, Natalie Goldberg shares those vivid moments that have wakened her to new ways of being. We follow alongside her mapless meanderings in the New Mexican desert and her pilgrimages to Bob Dylan’s birthplace and to Larry McMurtry’s dusty Texas ghost town of rare books. We feel her deep hunger while she sits zazen in a monastery in Japan, and her profound loss when she hears of the passing of a dear friend while teaching in the French countryside. Through it all, she remains grounded in a life informed by two constants: the practices of writing and of Zen. With humor and insight, Natalie encircles around the essential questions these paths compel her toward: Where does this life lead? Who are we? This is a book to be relished one awakening at a time. Each story is a reminder that no matter how hard the situation or desolate you may feel, spring will come again, breaking through a cold winter, bringing early yellow forsythia flowers. And the Great Spring of enlightenment—that sudden rush of acceptance, pain cracking open, obstructions shattering—will also burst forth.