Nine-Headed Dragon River PDF Download

Author: Peter Matthiessen
Publisher: Shambhala Publications
ISBN: 0834828790
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
In August 1968, naturalist-explorer Peter Matthiessen returned from Africa to his home in Sagaponack, Long Island, to find three Zen masters in his driveway—guests of his wife, a new student of Zen. Thirteen years later, Matthiessen was ordained a Buddhist monk. Written in the same format as his best-selling The Snow Leopard, Nine-Headed Dragon River reveals Matthiessen's most daring adventure of all: the quest for his spiritual roots.

Author: Peter Matthiessen
Publisher: Shambhala Publications
ISBN: 1570623678
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
In August 1968, naturalist-explorer Peter Matthiessen returned from Africa to his home in Sagaponack, Long Island, to find three Zen masters in his driveway—guests of his wife, a new student of Zen. Thirteen years later, Matthiessen was ordained a Buddhist monk. Written in the same format as his best-selling The Snow Leopard, Nine-Headed Dragon River reveals Matthiessen's most daring adventure of all: the quest for his spiritual roots.

Author: Dale Stuart Wright
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190622598
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
What kind of person should I strive to be? What ideals should I pursue in my life? These basic human questions and others like them are components of the overall question that guides this book: What is enlightenment? As Dale Wright argues, any serious practitioner of human life, religious or not, confronts the challenge of living an authentic life, of overcoming common human disabilities like greed, hatred, and delusion that give rise to excessive suffering. Why then, Wright asks, is this essential question often avoided, even discouraged among Buddhists? One reason frequently cited by Buddhists is that pondering a distant goal might be a waste of energy that would be better applied to practice: Quiet the flow of obsessive thinking, put yourself in a mindful state of presence, and let enlightenment take care of itself. In this book, however, Wright contends that pondering this question is meditative practice--that attentive inquiry of this kind is essential as the starting point and guide for any mindful practice of life. Meditative reflection on the meaning of enlightenment focuses us on our aim and direction in life. It guides us in shaping our practices, our ideals, and the kinds of lives we will live. Asking what enlightenment is as a basic form of meditation helps to activate our lives and get transformative practice underway. From Wright's perspective, there is no more important question to ask than this one. What is Buddhist Enlightenment? offers a wide-ranging exploration of issues that have a bearing on the contemporary meaning of enlightenment, including a concluding section with 10 theses that answer the title's question. Written by a leading scholar of Buddhism, the book balances deep learning and an accessible style, offering valuable insights for students, scholars, and practitioners alike. While he takes an examination of what enlightenment has been in past Buddhist traditions as his point of departure, Wright's historical considerations yield to the question that our lives press upon us--what kinds of lives should we aspire to live here, now, and into the future?

Author: Peter Matthiessen
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 1582436304
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The journey of Buddhism over centuries, from India to China and then to Japan, is the stuff of mythology. But now, in our own time, we have witnessed and documented its historic crossing of the Pacific and its subsequent evolution in the Americas and Europe. In 1982, writer Peter Muryo Matthiessen, the first dharma successor of Roshi Bernie Glassman, traveled with Glassman to pay respects to the teachers in their lineage, some of the great living Zen masters of twentieth–century Japan. What took place was an important meeting of minds representing the past, present, and future of Zen practice, an intimate connection between ancestors and descendants marking a critical point in the Zen journey from the East to the West. This historic event was captured in the moment by the selective lens of Peter Cunningham. Matthiessen's exquisite poetic accounts of this pilgrimage, which formed a part of his book Nine–Headed Dragon River, accompany the photos.

Author: John D. Barbour
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009098837
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
Compelling exploration of how journeys to a Buddhist culture changed 30 Western writers as they explored the meaning of 'no-self'.

Author: John Gatta
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780195165050
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
This book argues that the religious import of American environmental literature has yet to be fully recognized or understood. Making Nature Sacred explores how the quest for 'natural revelation' has been pursued through successive phases of American literary and intellectual history.

Author: Peter Matthiessen
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307819701
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
An eloquent portrayal of a disappearing way of life of the Long Island fishermen whose voices--humorous, bitter and bewildered--are as clear as the threatened beauty of their once quiet shore.

Author: Harry Oldmeadow
Publisher: World Wisdom, Inc
ISBN: 0941532577
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 535

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Book Description
This is the first book to treat the impact of religious, philosophical and psychological traditions of the East on Western intellectuals, artists, travellers and spiritual seekers in the twentieth century. Addressed to both general readers and scholars of religion, it is especially valuable for its penetrating and inter-religious analysis of two of the most compelling themes now facing the world: the emergence of cross-cultural religious understanding of the natural order and ecological crisis and the metaphysical basis for both the formal diversity and essential unity of religious traditions of both East and West. The West has long romanticized the "mysterious" East, but it has, also, judged its traditions as "uncivilized." Our notions about Eastern spirituality have been formed by a succession of travellers, scientists, artists, intellectuals, poets, philosophers and missionaries, as well as by Eastern travellers who have spent time in the West. This book helps us to recognize the influence of Eastern ideas upon modern Western thought by tracing the history of engagements between East and West up until the present day. It concludes with a section that helps us to perceive the timeless value of the many Eastern contributions to the West's current intellectual and spiritual state.

Author: Intaek Oh
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9781433109911
Category : Ecology in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 150

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Book Description
Peter Matthiessen and Ecological Imagination offers an ecocritical reading of the Watson Trilogy - Killing Mister Watson (1990), Lost Man's River (1997), and Bone By Bone (1999) - which draws together themes Matthiessen has been exploring both in his fiction and nonfiction. While this study argues that his ecological imagination comes from his unique experience as a novelist, naturalist, environmentalist, social activist, and a student of Zen, it also illustrates that for Matthiessen, economic, political, social, racial, psychological, epistemological, and ecological issues are all inseparably interconnected. Set in the Everglades frontier in the formative era of American industrial capitalism, Matthiessen's novels are his grand attempt to reexamine the root causes of ecological disaster in the region and the costs to the people and the land that accompanied the conquering of the frontier.

Author: Steven Heine
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199710082
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Extending their successful series of collections on Zen Buddhism, Heine and Wright present a fifth volume, on what may be the most important topic of all - Zen Masters. Following two volumes on Zen literature (Zen Classics and The Zen Canon) and two volumes on Zen practice (The Koan and Zen Ritual) they now propose a volume on the most significant product of the Zen tradition - the Zen masters who have made this kind of Buddhism the most renowned in the world by emphasizing the role of eminent spiritual leaders and their function in establishing centers, forging lineages, and creating literature and art. Zen masters in China, and later in Korea and Japan, were among the cultural leaders of their times. Stories about their comportment and powers circulated widely throughout East Asia. In this volume ten leading Zen scholars focus on the image of the Zen master as it has been projected over the last millennium by the classic literature of this tradition. Each chapter looks at a single prominent master. Authors assess the master's personality and charisma, his reported behavior and comportment, his relationships with teachers, rivals and disciplines, lines of transmission, primary teachings, the practices he emphasized, sayings and catch-phrases associated with him, his historical and social context, representations and icons, and enduring influences.