100th Monkey Books

Buddhistic-Zen:
the Path of No-Mind to Now.Here



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Basho's Narrow Road: Spring & Autumn Passages
Matsuo Basho (1644-94) translated with annotations by Hiroaki Sato 186pages

Narrow Road to the Interior and the renga sequence A Farewell Gift to Sora (Stone Bridge Press)





Ch'an and ZenTeaching
translated by Lu K'uan Yu (Chales Luk)
v.1 (1970) 255pages
v.2 (1971) 254pages
v.3 (1973) 304pages

In the first volume, Lu K'uan Yu shows us the practice as taught by the late Ch'an Master, the Venerable Hsu Yun. This practice elaborates upon the technique known as Hus t'ou, a secret technique taught only in Japanese zendos. He presents six representative stories (kung-ans)of Ch'an Masters from the Imperial Selection of Ch'an Sayings. He translates the Diamond and Heart Sutras with the Commentary of Ch'an Master Han Shan, for the study of the Sutras has always been encouraged as a preliminary to the training of Ch'an and Zen Buddhism. (Samuel Weiser, 1993)

In the second volume, Lu Ku'an Yu summarizes the different methods of each of the five Ch'an sects. Included are translations of fifty short poems or gathas with which the essence of Ch'an was transmitted from the Buddha to the sixth and last Chinese Patriarch. Also biographies of the seven founders of the five Ch'an sects from The Transmission of the Lamp and full explanatory notes on the Koans (Kung-ans) they contain. (Samuel Weiser, 1993)

In the third volume, Lu Ku'an Yu presents three vitally important texts: The Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch; The Song of Enlightenment by Yung Chia (Yoka Daishi) describes the condition of enlightenment; The Sutra of Complete Enlightenment with Ch'an Master Han Shan's illuminating commentary. The third text is the key sutra on which the meditational techniques of all five Ch'an and Zen schools is still based. It teaches how to still the mind to gain insight and self-realization. (Samuel Weiser, 1993)



Complete Enlightenment: Zen comments on the Sutra of Complete Enlightenment
Sheng-Yen (1997) 303pages

Complete Enlightenment is an authoritative translation and commentary on The Sutra of Complete Enlightenment , a central text that shaped the development of East Asian Buddhism and Ch'an (Chinese Zen). The sutra's ancient wisdom is brought to life by the commentaries of master Sheng-yen, one of the most revered living Buddhist masters in the Ch'an lineage. (Shambhala)



The Essential Teachings of Zen Master Hakuin: Sokko-roku Kaien-fusetsu
Hakuin (1686-1769) translated by Norman Waddell (1994) 137pagesUS$12 C$16

A fiery and intensely dynamic Zen teacher and artist, Hakuin (1686-1769) is credited with almost single-handedly revitalizing Japanese Zen after three hundred years of decline. As a teacher, he placed special emphasis on koan practice, inventing many new koans himself, including the famous "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" As an artist, Hakuin used calligraphy and painting to create "visual Dharma" - teachings that powerfully express the nature of enlightenment. The text translated here offers an excellent introduction to the work of this extraordinary teacher. Here, Hakuin sets forth his vision of authentic Zen teaching and practice, condemning his contemporaries, whom he held responsible for the decline of Zen, and exhorting his students to dedicate themselves to "breaking through the Zen barrier." Included are reproductions of several of Hakuin's finest calligraphies and paintings. (Shambhala)



From the Zen Kitchen to Enlightenment: Refining Your Life
Dogen (13th c.) & Kosho Uchiyama / Translated by Thomas Wright (1983) 122pages








The Light Inside the Dark: Zen Soul and the Spiritual Life
John Tarrant (1998) 247pages

In this book, two great lineages of inward exploration are brought together. The first is the Asian tradition with its long devotion to the arts of attention and to s spiritual understanding based on inquiry and experience rather than dogma. The second is the Western method of work with the soul, with exploring the life of feeling, thought, and the stories and legends that the soul likes to tell, stories in which we trace our destiny through pain and joy, to find out what happens next....The method of this book is to connect things that are usually far apart, allowing them their natural difference and tension, and so to arrive at balance by amplitude rather than by fasting. It tries to give the feel of the voyage the way a novel does, transforming the journey through our dangerous, beautiful life by bringing an ever-deepening attention to it. - from the author's Chapter One: Invitation to the Journey (HarperSanFrancisco)



Master Yunmen: From the Record of the Chan Teacher "Gate of the Clouds"
translated & edited by Urs App (1994) 252pages

In the main body of the book, I have translated many of Yunmen's talks and dialogues for the first time. The length of the Record of Yunmen necessitated a stringent process of selection; I chose to translate all of the longer talks and a representative sample of the hundreds of short dialogues the Record contains. All dialogues used in the four major Chinese koan collection are included (see table, p.243). Since the first volume of the Record appears to be the oldest and most reliable, I decided to cull from it more than half of the total volume of translated parts. - from the translator's Introduction (Kodansha International)



On Having No Head: Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious
D. E. Harding (1961/1986) 81pages

The best day of my life - my rebirthday, so to speak - was when I found I had no head...It took me no time at all to notice that this nothing, this hole where a head should have been, was no ordinary vacancy, no mere nothing. On the contrary, it was very much occupied. It was a vast emptiness vastly filled, a nothing that found room for everything - room for grass, trees, shadowy distant hills, and far above them snowpeaks like a row of angular clouds riding the blue sky. I had lost a head and gained a world. - from the author's introductory chapter (Penguin Arkana)



Original Dwelling Place: Zen Buddhist Essays
Robert Aitken (1996) 241pages

Robert Aitken presents complex ideas with simplicity and insight in way that both guides and inspires. This collection gathers twenty-three essays that are essential for the light they shed on Aitken's own journey and the effect he has had on American Zen Buddhism. Included here are readings of the texts that were Aitken's early and lasting influences, and meditations on political revolutions and matters of ethics. These essays illuminate the proper use of money, power, and sexual love in a modern world that is often tainted by materialism and decadence. Reflecting on death, on marriage, and on Zen practice, Aitken reveals the path to pleasure in the everyday "dewdrop" world. (Counterpoint)



Ryokan: Zen Monk-Poet of Japan
Ryokan (1758-1831) translated by Burton Watson (1977) 121pages

Ryokan (1758-1831), a Buddhist monk in the Zen sect, was a major figure in Tokugawa poetry. Though a Zen master, he never headed a temple but choose to live alone in simple huts and to support himself by begging. His poems are mainly a record of his daily activities - of chores, lonely snowbound winters, begging expeditions to town, meetings with friends, romps with village children. At the same time they show us how rich a spiritual and intellectual life a man could enjoy in the midst of poverty. Ryokan's unusual personality and outlook are evident in this volume. His Japanese poems ( waka) were influenced by the poets of the eight century Man'yoshu anthology. Eighty-three representative works are presented here. He also wrote Chinese poems ( kanshi), some doctrinal in nature and many inspired by Han-shan , a Buddhist recluse and master of Cold Mountain. Forty-three of these are included in the collection. (Columbia University Press)



Poems of a Mountain Home
Saigyo (1118-1190) Translated by Burton Watson (1991) 240pages

(Columbia University Press)






The World of Zen: An East-West Anthology
edited by Nancy Wilson Ross ((1960) 362pages

This anthology is organized into seven parts: What is Zen?; The Essence of Zen; Zen and the Arts; Humor in Zen; Zen in Psychology and Everyday Life; Universal Zen; Zen and the West. Contributors include D.T. Suzuki, Ruth Fuller Sasaki, Erich Fromm, Hubert Benoit Alan Watts and others. Also included are excerpts from the Shaseki-shu and the Mumonkan as well as some of the brilliantly readable discourses of Huang Po, translated by John Blofeld. While this anthology is primarily drawn from the Rinzai school of Zen training, Chang Cheng-chi contributed a section on the "Serene Reflection" meditation which is typical of Soto training. Through the section on "Universal Zen'', the editor show "that although Zen is indubitably Far Eastern in origin, ...Zen-like intuitions have been experienced and expressed by men and women in all parts of the world, throughout recorded history". - from the editor's (Vintage)



Zen: Direct Pointing to Reality
Anne Bancroft (1979 96pages

'What is the sound of the one hand clapping?' To face the question is to take a step nearer the moment of enlightenment, when the ego is emptied of itself and becomes identified with the reality of existence. 'If you want to see, see directly into it; when you try to think about it, it is altogether missed.' Zen is direct experience; its insights are shadowed in the lives, actions, jokes and paradoxes of the great masters, in the symbols of Zen lore and in the art which reflects the acceptance of the immediate, the absence of striving. Theory is never the answer. A title in the Art and Imagination series, with 107 illustrations, 15 in colour. (Thames & Hudson,1995)



The Zen Doctrine of No-Mind: The Significance of the Sutra of Hui-neng (Wei-lang)
D.T. Suzuki (1972), edited by Christmas Humphreys 160pages

(Samuel Weiser)






The Zen of Living and Dying: A Practical and Spiritual Guide
Philip Kapleau (1989/1997) 273pages

Beings come and beings go, but the flame of life, the generating impulse animating all existences and underlying the whole of creation, neither comes nor goes; it burns eternally, with no beginning, with no end. Aglow with this enlightened awareness, one can die not like someone being dragged kicking and screaming to the scaffold, but like one about to embark on an enticing adventure. Such an exemplary death, let me emphasize, is causally related to a life artfully lived, a life dedicated to the fulfillment of one's physical, mental, moral, and spiritual potential. My hope is that this book, if carefully studied, can help the dying person achieve an easy death and even liberate him from painful bondage to birth and death. And it can hearten the living by making them realize that death, like life, is also transitory. - from the author's Introduction (Shambhala)

[Editor's Note: The Zen of Living and Dying is a revised and considerably edited version of Philip Kapleau's The Wheel of Life and Death , which was originally published in 1989.]



Zen Words for the Heart: Hakuin's Commentary on the Heart Sutra
Hakuin Ekaku ( 1686-1768) translated by Noramn Waddell(1996); with Hakuin's own calligraphy & brush drawings pages

Zen Words for the Heart (Dokugo shingyo in Japanese) is a commentary on the Heart Sutra by the Japanese monk Hakuin Ekaku ( 1686-1768). The comments he makes on the key concepts of wisdom, emptiness, mind, and others strike at themes at the very center of Buddhist experience. He delivers them in his inimitable style, directly from the source, with a vehemence that is designed to assumptions and hardened preconceptions in the minds of students and to free them to find deeper self-understanding in the profound but highly abstract series of negations the sutra offers up to them. (Shambhala)


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