Kategoria BISAC: Religion >> Buddhism - Sacred Writings

Gateways to awakening surround us at every moment of our lives. The whole purpose of kōan (gong'an, in Chinese) practice is to keep us from missing these myriad opportunities by leading us to certain gates that have traditionally been effective for people to access that marvelous awakening. The forty-eight kōans of the Gateless Barrier (Chinese: Wumenguan; Japanese: Mumonkan) have been waking people up...

A fifth-century Indian Buddhist monk, Bodhidharma is credited with bringing Zen to China. Although the tradition that traces its ancestry back to him did not flourish until nearly two hundred years after his death, today millions of Zen Buddhists and students of kung fu claim him as their spiritual father.

While others viewed Zen practice as a purification of the mind or a stage on the way to perfect enlightenment, Bodhidharma equated Zen with buddhahood and believed that it had a place in everyday life. Instead of telling his disciples to purify their minds, he pointed them to rock...

For this new English translation, Red Pine, award-winning translator of Chinese poetry and religious texts, has utilized various Sanskrit and Chinese versions, refining the teachings of dozens of ancient teachers together with...

This is an account of the travels in Central Asia and India of the seventh-century Chinese scholar-monk Xuanzang. An epoch-making figure in the history of Chinese Buddhism, the Master had a strong impulse to solve theoretical uncertainties by searching for the missing, untranslated original Sanskrit texts, particularly the Yogacara-bhumi-sastra. Violating a government ban on emigration, he slipped out of the empire without official permission. During his sojourn of sixteen years in India, he studied the said sastra and other texts under the tutelage of the Venerable Silabhadra. He visited...

This volume includes The Recorded Sayings of Linji, Wumen's Gate, and The Faith-Mind Maxim.

The Recorded Sayings of Linji is one of the seminal books of Zen. The great Zen teacher Linji lived and worked in ninth century China, but his teachings continued to guide and influence people for centuries afterward, and he was considered the grand ancestor of major streams of Zen in China, Korea, Vietnam, and Japan. The direct, incisive teachings preserved in his recorded sayings have shown a perennial power to challenge and stimulate would-be seekers of the truth. He strips away the...

There are two titles in this volume.

The Treatise on the Elucidation of the Knowable was written in the Yuan Period by the Tibetan 'Phags-pa for the Chinese Crown Prince at the time as an outline of Buddhist thought, and deals with such subjects as the Buddhist view of life and Buddhist cosmology. The teachings set forth are based on the whole on the Abhidharmakosa-bhasya, but there are also to be found ideas peculiar to this work. The title, Treatise on the Clarification of What is to be Known, implies that all teachings which it is necessary to know are made clear by the contents...

The result of a dialogue between poets and scholars on the meaning and making of the sacred, this book endeavours to determine how the sacred emerges in sacred script as well as in poetic discourse. It ranges through scholarship in areas as apparently disparate as postmodernism and Buddhism. The perspectives developed are various and without closure, locating the sacred in modes as diverse as patristic traditions, feminist retranslations of biblical texts, and oral and written versions of documents from the world's religions. The essays cohere in their preoccupation with the crucial role...

The Mahāratnakūta Sūtra is one of the five major sutra groups in the Mahāyāna canon. Of the two great schools of Buddhism, Mahāyāna has the greatest number of adherents worldwide--it prevails among the Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Tibetans, and Vietnamese--and contains within it a number of movements, notably Zen, which have been of growing interest in the West in recent decades. Yet despite this increased attention and enormous following, translations of Mahāyāna scriptures have been scarce and fragmentary; clearly, a comprehensive translation...

First published in 1914, this is a fascinating investigation of the origins of Buddhism, drawing on a wealth of evidence relating to the life and teachings of the Buddha. First considering how the study of the Buddhist doctrine can be used to critique religious systems such as Christianity, Barthelemy Saint-Hilaire proceeds to discuss Buddhism at three different periods of its history: the life and legend of the Buddha as demonstrated within canonical works, Buddhism in India during the seventh century, and finally, Buddhism in Sri Lanka (formally 'Ceylon') at the start of the twentieth...