The Teaching of Buddha


Society for the Promotion of Buddhism - 1966
    First published in 1925, the book was originally edited by Japanese scholars of Buddhism before WWII and distributed widely throughout Japan. The first English edition was published in 1934. The Reverend Dr. Yehan Numata brought out another English edition in 1962, and in 1966, after the establishment of the Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai (BDK) (Society for the Promotion of Buddhism), Dr. Numata assembled a committee of Buddhist scholars to substantially revise and edit a new English-Japanese edition. The Teaching of Buddha has undergone minor revisions and numerous reprintings since. It is now available in more than forty-two languages and over 8 million copies have been distributed and placed in hotel rooms in over fifty countries throughout the world.The Teaching of Buddha is a collection of writings on the essence of Buddhism, selected and edited from the vast Buddhist canon, presented in a concise, easy-to-read, and nonsectarian format. It also includes a brief history of Buddhism, a listing of the source texts, a glossary of Sanskrit terms, and an index.

The Three Pillars of Zen


Philip Kapleau - 1965
    Through explorations of the three pillars of Zen--teaching, practice, and enlightenment--Roshi Philip Kapleau presents a comprehensive overview of the history and discipline of Zen Buddhism.  An established classic, this 35th anniversary edition features new illustrations and photographs, as well as a new afterword by Sensei Bodhin Kjolhede, who has succeeded Philip Kapleau as spiritual director of the Rochester Zen Center, one of the oldest and most influential Zen centers in the United States.

Haiku: An Anthology of Japanese Poems


Stephen Addiss - 2009
    The translators have balanced faithfulness to the Japanese with an appreciation of the unique spirit of each poem to create English versions that evoke the joy and wonder of the originals with the same astonishing economy of language. An introduction by the translators and short biographies of the poets are included. Reproductions of woodblock prints and paintings accompany the poems.

excerpts from the book i'll never write


Nadia Nell Starbinski - 2017
    Divided into four sections: love, loss, acceptance, and growth- the content serves the purpose of making you feel and finding the light at the end of the tunnel.

Atlas: Poems


Katrina Vandenberg - 2004
    Like a literal road atlas, the poems carry lines and themes from one to the next. Like Atlas holding up the world, they hold patterns of all kinds aloft with an attention that transforms. The poems also are an atlas of the known world, capturing the way events repeat across time and place, as in one poem that links the image of her sister, pausing in her work as housekeeper, with the contours of a maid in a Vermeer painting and a woman just "made over" on that day's episode of Oprah. Vandenberg's poems use family artifacts, memory, and imagination to plot the intersections of love, death, history, art, and desire. In the first section, "Trade Routes," about connections, each poem moves back one generation to investigate the ways events reverberate across time. The second section, "The Red Fields of Lisse (A Love Story)," focuses on a former partner, a hemophiliac with AIDS, and tulips. The third section, "Catalog of Want," contains poems about desire in various guises. The last section, "A Place Ten Years Away," reexamines the themes of the first three sections.

Harp of Burma


Michio Takeyama - 1959
    The young soldiers discover that the trials of war involve more than just opposing the enemy. The alien climate and terrain, the strange behavior of foreigners, the constant struggle to overcome homesickness and nostalgia, and the emotions stirred by the senselessness of war—all of these forces, new and baffling to the soldiers, contribute to their distress and disorientation.In the midst of these overwhelming challenges, they discover the power of music to make even the most severe situations tolerable—through their commander's ability to lead them in song. Even though they face the inevitability of defeat, singing the songs of their homeland revives their will to live. Through the story of these men and of the music that saw them through the war, Takeyama presents thought-provoking questions about political hostilities and the men who unleash them. Harp of Burma is Japan's classic novel of pathos and compassion in the midst of senseless warfare.Harp of Burma was made into a critically acclaimed movie (The Burmese Harp) by the celebrated director Ichikawa Kon.

Branching Streams Flow in the Darkness: Zen Talks on the Sandokai


Shunryu Suzuki - 1999
    The book became the most successful treatise on Buddhism in English, selling more than one million copies to date. Branching Streams Flow in the Darkness is the first follow-up volume to Suzuki Roshi's important work. Like Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, it is a collection of lectures that reveal the insight, humor, and intimacy with Zen that made Suzuki Roshi so influential as a teacher.The Sandokai—a poem by the eighth-century Zen master Sekito Kisen (Ch. Shitou Xiqian)—is the subject of these lectures. Given in 1970 at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, the lectures are an example of a Zen teacher in his prime elucidating a venerated, ancient, and difficult work to his Western students. The poem addresses the question of how the oneness of things and the multiplicity of things coexist (or, as Suzuki Roshi expresses it, "things-as-it-is"). Included with the lectures are his students' questions and his direct answers to them, along with a meditation instruction. Suzuki Roshi's teachings are valuable not only for those with a general interest in Buddhism but also for students of Zen practice wanting an example of how a modern master in the Japanese Soto Zen tradition understands this core text today.

On Parole


Akira Yoshimura - 1988
    He must readjust to the bright and vigorous stimulus of Tokyo while fending off his own dark memories. In a spare yet powerful style, Akira Yoshimura paints the psychology of a quiet man navigating his way through the unsuspected traumas of freedom-finding a job, finding a home, even something as simple as buying an alarm clock. Kikutani takes comfort in the numbing repetition of his new daily life, only to be drawn inexorably back to the scene of his crime. A subtly powerful story, On Parole explores the fragile life of a murderer and the conditions of freedom in an unforgiving society. Yoshimura's startling novel raises provocative questions of guilt and redemption.

The Stone Boy and Other Stories


Thich Nhat Hanh - 1996
    Combining the traditional and the contemporary, Stone Boy and Other Stories contains ten works of short fiction that illuminate Buddhist themes and Vietnamese culture.

Zen and the Birds of Appetite


Thomas Merton - 1968
    "There is no body to be found. The birds may come and circle for a while... but they soon go elsewhere. When they are gone, the 'nothing,' the 'no-body' that was there, suddenly appears. That is Zen. It was there all the time but the scavengers missed it, because it was not their kind of prey." This gets at the humor, paradox, and joy that one feels in Merton's discoveries of Zen during the last years of his life, a joy very much present in this collection of essays. Exploring the relationship between Christianity and Zen, especially through his dialogue with the great Zen teacher D.T. Suzuki, the book makes an excellent introduction to a comparative study of these two traditions, as well as giving the reader a strong taste of the mature Merton. Never does one feel him losing his own faith in these pages; rather one feels that faith getting deeply clarified and affirmed. Just as the body of "Zen" cannot be found by the scavengers, so too, Merton suggests, with the eternal truth of Christ.

The Love Poems of John Keats: In Praise of Beauty


John Keats - 2007
    They appear as his epitaph in Rome's Protestant cemetery. Often called the greatest English poet after Shakespeare, Keats had a lifelong preoccupation with early death. This sense of mortality, along with the poet's famous, unrequited love for Fanny Brawne, sparked dozens of finely written sonnets and lyrics of love.This beautifully crafted collection contains some of the most heartfelt of Keats' personal poems. "La Belle Dame Sans Merci A Ballad" and "The Eve of St. Agnes" are paragons of the gothic lyric, wherein mysterious lovers, dream visions, and late-night fantasy come magically to life. Lighter verse, such as "Where be ye going, you Devon maid?" and such passionate, pensive poems as "When I have fears that I may cease to be" provide a personal glimpse of the young poet's dreams and dreads.This selection of twenty-six poems also presents an introduction to the life of John Keats, notes on the indivdual poems, and ten illustrations, half of which are of biographical interest and half underscore thematic elements contained in the poems.

Centuries of Meditations


Thomas Traherne - 1665
    Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Haruki Murakami Goes to Meet Hayao Kawai


Hayao Kawai - 2016
    While their extended talk took place at a particular location at a particular moment in history, much of the content is timeless and universal. After popular acclaim in Japan, the transcript now makes its first appearance in English.Topics from the Contents: The Meaning of Commitment Words or Images? Making Stories Answering Logically versus Answering Compassionately Self-Healing and Novels Marriage and 'Well-digging' Curing and Living Stories and the Body The Relationship between a Work and its Author Individuality and Universality Violence and Expression Where are We Headed?

Book of Longing


Leonard Cohen - 2006
    Book of Longing is Cohen’s eagerly awaited new collection of poems, following his highly acclaimed 1984 title, Book of Mercy, and his hugely successful 1993 publication, Stranger Music, a Globe and Mail national bestseller. Book of Longing contains erotic, playful, and provocative line drawings and artwork on every page, by the author, which interact in exciting and unexpected ways on the page with poetry that is timeless, meditative, and at times darkly humorous. The book brings together all the elements that have brought Leonard Cohen’s artistry with language worldwide recognition.From the Hardcover edition.

Complete Poems and Selected Letters


Hart Crane - 1968
    In his haunted, brief life, Crane fashioned a distinctively modern idiom that fused the ornate rhetoric of the Elizabethans, the ecstatic enigmas of Rimbaud, and the prophetic utterances and cosmic sympathy of Whitman, in a quest for wholeness and healing in what he called "the broken world." White Buildings, perhaps the greatest debut volume in American poetry since Leaves of Grass, is but an exquisite prelude to Crane's masterpiece The Bridge, his magnificent evocation of America from Columbus to the Jazz Age that countered the pessimism of Eliot's The Waste Land and became a crucial influence on poets whose impact continues to this day. This edition is the largest collection of Crane's writings ever published. Gathered here are the complete poems and published prose, along with a generous selection of Crane's letters, several of which have never before been published. In his letters Crane elucidates his aims as an artist and provides fascinating glosses on his poetry. His voluminous correspondence also offers an intriguing glimpse into his complicated personality, as well as his tempestuous relationships with family, lovers, and writers such as Allen Tate, Waldo Frank, Yvor Winters, Jean Toomer, Marianne Moore, E. E. Cummings, William Carlos Williams, and Katherine Anne Porter. Several letters included here are published for the first time. This landmark 850-page volume features a detailed and freshly-researched chronology of Crane's life by editor Langdon Hammer, chair of the English Department at Yale University and a biographer of Crane, as well as extensive explanatory notes, and over fifty biographical sketches of Crane's correspondents.