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    Seeds in the Heart Paid Member

    By Sam Hamill
    When Donald Keene first conceived of writing a history of Japanese literature, he expected to draw from his own lecture notes and complete the work in a couple of years. Twenty-five years later, he has published the fourth (following the earlier World Within Walls and the two-volume Dawn in the West) and final volume, Seeds in the Heart, a history of the first millennium of Japanese writing. This is scholarship of epic proportion. More »
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    Journey in Search of the Way Paid Member

    By Sallie Tisdale
    To be a Buddhist in the United States can sometimes mean struggling with a sense of cultural inadequacy. What would it be like to be a Buddhist in a Buddhist world, to have come to Buddhism as a child, surrounded by other practicing Buddhists? Journey in Search of the Way, the autobiography of a Japanese peasant woman named Satomi Myodo, dispels and fuels this feeling in turn. Satomi-san had the deep courage of the true spiritual seeker, and she grew up in a spiritually lively world, much of it Buddhist in flavor. Her story, written in 1956 when she was a sixty-year-old Zen Buddhist nun, is full of wonders and anguish, wonders that seem almost ordinary in her cultural context, and anguish that is in no way lessened by the multiplicity of spiritual seekers around her. More »
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    Outrageous Betrayal Paid Member

    By Dan Wakefield
    The general attitude of the media and most of the public to Werner Erhard, often described as "America's most famous pop guru," was crystallized in a review of this book in Erhard's former hometown paper, The San Francisco Chronicle. The review concluded that "Outrageous Betrayal certainly succeeds as an indictment of Werner Erhard, who is portrayed here as a monster of selfishness. But the mystery of why so many people believed in the man and his message still remains to be solved." More »
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    The Healing Path Paid Member

    By Jeffrey Zaleski
    Seven years ago, death sent a greeting card to Mark Ian Barasch—a card in the form of a 3.5-centimeter malignant tumor on his thyroid gland. Fortunately for Barasch, as well as for readers of this moving and revelatory book, the message was taken to heart: change your life, heal your life, or suffer death—not just death that marks the end of a life, but the slow living death of a life lived without attention, without full heart and soul. At the time, Barasch was the editor in chief of New Age Journal and a student of Buddhism to boot—a man whose work reflected his beliefs, a man presumably harmony with himself and the world: an apparently unlikely candidate for an illness whose roots—according to the thinking of many—seem to lie as much in mind as in matter. But, as with many of us, Barasch's spiritual search and idealism existed side by side with an inner turmoil: as his More »
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    Opening the Hand of Thought Paid Member

    By Tracy Cochran
    Between 1965 and 1975, while Kosho Uchiyama Roshi was abbot of Antaiji monastery in Kyoto, he kept an electric fan above the Buddha statue on the altar. One visitor expressed shock at this irreverence, but the iconoclastic Zen master insisted that the whirring appliance was just where it belonged. His reply became a teaching point in "The Wayseeker," his retirement lecture—the capstone to this wise, clear, deeply useful collection of his writings. More »
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    Wherever You Go There You Are Paid Member

    By Katherine S. Diehl
    As founder and director of the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, Jon Kabat-Zinn teaches mindfulness meditation to housewives, plumbers, prison inmates, laundry workers, lawyers—a wide assortment of people. They come for better physical health, and get more. Kabat-Zinn does what many Buddhist centers have been criticized for not doing. He offers mindfulness meditation to the people—to the masses—stripped of elitism. You don't need lofty philosophical goals, spiritual hankering, or psychic angst to sit in Kabat-Zinn's class. Most come in with plain old physical ailments or disease, among them chronic pain, cancer, AIDS. More »