Red Thread Zen

Author: Susan Murphy
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 161902876X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 177

Book Description
Love, attachment, the passions, gender, carnality, birth, bodily being, mortality, belonging, suffering, hope, despair, personhood, imagination, vitality, the struggle to be fully human – how do these things dwell wholly in emptiness, how do we reconcile their vivid life with 'no–thingness'? The red (or 'vermilion') thread originally connoted the color of the silk undergarments courtesans were obliged to wear. Most spiritual traditions do their best to distance themselves as thoroughly as possible from such direct and intimate contact with the fact of impassioned human bodily being, if not to declare open war upon the flesh, and the female body that most plainly bears flesh into the world. Spirituality has trouble dealing with the fact that we arrive here covered in blood. But the red thread can never be cut. Why not? Why would no perfectly accomplished saint ever even dream of cutting it? Red Thread Zen will set out to explore every corner of the magnificent koan of being 'still attached to the red thread, or 'line of tears'. This is an argument against the bloodless and socially disengaged form of 'Buddhism' that is generally being gestated in the West, one that shades too readily into the blandest of bland self–help.

Unraveling Zen's Red Thread

Author: Jon Etta Hastings Carter Covell
Publisher: Hollym International
ISBN: 9780930878191
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 341

Book Description

The Red Thread

Author: Bernard Faure
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400822602
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 345

Book Description
Is there a Buddhist discourse on sex? In this innovative study, Bernard Faure reveals Buddhism's paradoxical attitudes toward sexuality. His remarkably broad range covers the entire geography of this religion, and its long evolution from the time of its founder, Xvkyamuni, to the premodern age. The author's anthropological approach uncovers the inherent discrepancies between the normative teachings of Buddhism and what its followers practice. Framing his discussion on some of the most prominent Western thinkers of sexuality--Georges Bataille and Michel Foucault--Faure draws from different reservoirs of writings, such as the orthodox and heterodox "doctrines" of Buddhism, and its monastic codes. Virtually untapped mythological as well as legal sources are also used. The dialectics inherent in Mahvyvna Buddhism, in particular in the Tantric and Chan/Zen traditions, seemed to allow for greater laxity and even encouraged breaking of taboos. Faure also offers a history of Buddhist monastic life, which has been buffeted by anticlerical attitudes, and by attempts to regulate sexual behavior from both within and beyond the monastery. In two chapters devoted to Buddhist homosexuality, he examines the way in which this sexual behavior was simultaneously condemned and idealized in medieval Japan. This book will appeal especially to those interested in the cultural history of Buddhism and in premodern Japanese culture. But the story of how one of the world's oldest religions has faced one of life's greatest problems makes fascinating reading for all.

The Red Thread of Passion

Author: David Guy
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Book Description
Is sex an enemy of spiritual practice, or a powerful and creative vehicle of enlightenment? "The Red Thread of Passion" describes one man's search to understand the connection between the sexual and the spiritual.

Upside-Down Zen

Author: Susan Murphy
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 086171279X
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 298

Book Description
"Upside-Down Zen" invites readers to explore the vivid spirit of Zen Buddhism in fresh ways. Recalling, in another vein, the warm, lyrical style of Lin Jensen's "Bad Dog!, " author Susan Murphy offers a multifaceted take on the spiritual, grounded in the everyday. She uses her skills as storyteller, filmmaker, and poet to uncover the connections between Zen and Western cinema, as well as between Zen and traditions as diverse as Australian aboriginal beliefs and Jewish folktales. In the process, she finds spirituality where it has always belonged -- wherever life is happening. Murphy helps readers make sense of Zen koans, the often oversimplified and misunderstood teaching stories of the tradition, and highlights their wisdom for any reader on the spiritual path. A strong new voice in Western Buddhism, Murphy speaks for the many "unrecorded" women of Zen while bringing a lively, literate approach to a sometimes daunting genre.

Bring Me the Rhinoceros

Author: John Tarrant
Publisher: Shambhala Publications
ISBN: 0834823497
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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.

Wild Ways

Author: Ikkyū
Publisher: White Pine Press (NY)
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 160

Book Description
One hundred poems by a revered Japanese Zen master.

Red Thread Zen

Author: Subhana Barzaghi
Publisher: CreateSpace
ISBN: 9781500539542
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 36

Book Description
Some of us have arrived at this particular point in our spiritual journey with a little extra baggage about passion, love, and sex, and I have noticed that many people on the spiritual path have a tendency in the mind to create a polarisation or a separation between the spiritual path and the sexual life. So what is the Tao of love, passion, and sex? This very body is the lotus of the true law, linking human beings to birth and death by the red thread of passion. This approach was closely related to Tantric Buddhism, that used sexual union as a religious ritual.

Red Thread Sisters

Author: Carol Antoinette Peacock
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101591854
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 242

Book Description
When a girl is adopted from a Chinese orphanage, everything she knew about family, best friends, and sisterhood must change. Wen has spent the first eleven years of her life at an orphanage in rural China, and the only person she would call family is her best friend, Shu Ling. When Wen is adopted by an American couple, she struggles to adjust to every part of her new life: having access to all the food and clothes she could want, going to school, being someone's daughter. But the hardest part of all is knowing that Shu Ling remains back at the orphanage, alone. Wen knows that her best friend deserves a family and a future, too. But finding a home for Shu Ling isn't easy, and time is running out . . .

Waking Up to What You Do

Author: Diane Eshin Rizzetto
Publisher: Shambhala Publications
ISBN: 0834825600
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Book Description
This Zen Buddhist guide to mindful living is “a thoughtful, sensitive examination of how to be a genuinely good person in this world” (Sharon Salzlberg, author of Lovingkindness) Life is rising up to meet us at every moment. The question is: Are we there to meet it or not? Diane Rizzetto presents a simple but supremely effective practice for meeting every moment of our lives with mindfulness, using the Zen precepts as tools to develop a keen awareness of the motivations behind every aspect of our behavior—to “wake up to what we do”—from moment to moment. As we train in mindfulness of our actions, every situation of our lives becomes our teacher, offering priceless insight into what it really means to be happy. It’s a simple practice with transformative potential, enabling us to break through our habitual reactions and to see clearly how our own happiness and well-being are intimately, inevitably connected to the happiness and well-being of everyone around us.