Zen and the Beat Way: (Zen Teachings of Alan Watts)

ISBN-13: 9784805317068 / Angielski / Twarda / 2024

Alan Watts

Opis

"Everything disappears into nothing at all, but out of that same nothing at all come all the new things, forever and ever." --Alan Watts When Jack Kerouac wrote about Zen in his novel Dharma Bums, he was echoing the sentiments of the Beat generation, who found in Zen credence for a way of life unencumbered by the limits of "square" society. And it was Alan Watts who first wrote and spoke about Zen and Eastern culture in terms accessible to mainstream Western audiences. Watts was an engaging speaker and an icon of America's Beat and Counterculture movements whose friends included Aldous Huxley, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, John Cage and Joseph Campbell. Through his popular radio series Way Beyond the West, Alan Watts presented a practical side of Zen, which he described as "a cure for education and culture." By the early sixties, his radio programs were renowned for their synthesis of Eastern wisdom and everyday life. The fascinating essays in this collection include: "The Beat Way of Life": How the Beats lived a Zen life, an uncomplicated life. But no matter how much they were criticized for being unproductive loafers, like Eastern thinkers, the Beats pursued "an arduous course of spiritual and psychological discipline." "Return to the Forest": How the works of Joseph Campbell influenced the earliest Beat traditions by advocating the internal search for individual truth over learned schools of thought. "The Democratization of Buddhism": How Buddhism is actually a "religion of nonreligion," that conveys the spiritual through the everyday and the ordinary and makes no division between the two. In this new and expanded edition, Mark Watts, Alan's son, has selected and edited several of these radio talks to introduce a new generation to Zen and the Beat Way.