Learn to be at peace and attain enlightenment while doing all the “little” things around the house in this guide to becoming one with your home and gaining an elevated sense of being. Wash the dishes, do the laundry, mop the floors, scrub the toilets, make the beds, vacuum the rugs…the list goes on and on, with little time to stop, breathe, and take in your beautiful surroundings. Now you can. Zen and the Art of Housekeeping challenges you to put more than elbow grease into your daily routine. You’ll learn how to spirit yourself away during mundane chores as you muse over thought-provoking Zen koans like: If the kitchen is the heart of the home, what is the heart of the kitchen? What is the color of clean? If the purpose of cleaning is to remove dirt, what is the purpose of dirt? What fills empty spaces? Whose footprints are on your floor? With Zen and the Art of Housekeeping, you’ll scrub your way to enlightenment—and a spotless sink.

In the years after World War II, Westerners and Japanese alike elevated Zen to the quintessence of spirituality in Japan. Pursuing the sources of Zen as a Japanese ideal, Shoji Yamada uncovers the surprising role of two cultural touchstones: Eugen Herrigel’s Zen in the Art of Archery and the Ryoanji dry-landscape rock garden. Yamada shows how both became facile conduits for exporting and importing Japanese culture. First published in German in 1948 and translated into Japanese in 1956, Herrigel’s book popularized ideas of Zen both in the West and in Japan. Yamada traces the prewar history of Japanese archery, reveals how Herrigel mistakenly came to understand it as a traditional practice, and explains why the Japanese themselves embraced his interpretation as spiritual discipline. Turning to Ryoanji, Yamada argues that this epitome of Zen in fact bears little relation to Buddhism and is best understood in relation to Chinese myth. For much of its modern history, Ryoanji was a weedy, neglected plot; only after its allegorical role in a 1949 Ozu film was it popularly linked to Zen. Westerners have had a part in redefining Ryoanji, but as in the case of archery, Yamada’s interest is primarily in how the Japanese themselves have invested this cultural site with new value through a spurious association with Zen.

Mindfulness, yoga, Tantra, Zen, martial arts, karma, feng shui, Ayurveda. Eastern ideas and practices associated with Asian religions and spirituality have been accommodated to a global setting as both a spiritual/religious and a broader cultural phenomenon. ‘Eastern spirituality’ is present in organized religions, the spiritual New Age market, arts, literature, media, therapy, and health care but also in public institutions such as schools and prisons. Eastspirit: Transnational Spirituality and Religious Circulation in East and West describes and analyses such concepts, practices and traditions in their new ‘Western’ and global contexts as well as in their transformed expressions and reappropriations in religious traditions and individualized spiritualities ‘back in the East’ within the framework of mutual interaction and circulation, regionally and globally.

A fifty year motorcycle racer shares insights into life and death from the seat of a racing motorcycle.

Explains how to apply Zen principles to create and maintain loving relationships, outlining thirteen essential practices that offer advice on how to overcome such challenges as miscommunication, insecurity, and jealousy.

The most innovative, unconventional, and profoundly practical career guide available--newly revised and updated With today's economic uncertainties, millions of Americans realize they must seize control over their own career paths. They want work that not only pays the bills but also allows them to pursue their real passions. In this revised edition, Laurence Boldt updates and revises his revolutionary guide to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century workplace. The first part of this book helps readers to identify the work that they really want to do, while the second provides practical, active steps to finding or creating that work. Zen and the Art of Making a Living goes beyond inspiration, providing a proven formula for bringing creativity, dignity, and meaning to every aspect of the work experience.

Few of us enjoy cleaning: it often feels like a thankless, repetitive task which we force ourselves to do. Linda Thomas is an expert, professional cleaner who ran her own ecological cleaning company for over twenty years. In this unique book, she explores her passion for cleaning, and argues that cleaning can have a profound effect not just on the spaces we care for, but on our own wellbeing and personal development. This lively and readable book is full of anecdotes, practical examples and ecological cleaning tips from Linda's decades of cleaning experience. Ultimately she argues that if we raise our understanding of cleaning, we might even begin to enjoy it!

With clarity of thought and realism, Rev. Ross Cribb sets out to provide an alternative vocabulary with which to describe significant events, human nature and spirituality, with the goal to empower individuals to have happier and more meaningful lives. His highly readable combination of Zen, philosophy, psychology and science makes a compelling case for his view of spirituality. Explaining that we often refer to different parts of ourselves as independent, he takes this a step further by invoking the New Age concept of Energy Bodies (specifically the Physical, Emotional, Mental and Spiritual Bodies). With these he explains Enlightenment, Being in the Moment and Energy Healing—an effective method for releasing blockages that take us out of the moment.

The Prajnaparamita ("perfection of wisdom") sutras are one of the great legacies of Mahayana Buddhism, giving eloquent expression to some of that school's central concerns: the perception of shunyata, the essential emptiness of all phenomena; and the ideal of the bodhisattva, one who postpones his or her own enlightenment in order to work for the salvation of all beings. The Prajnaparamita literature consists of a number of texts composed in Buddhist India between 100 BCE and 100 CE. Originally written in Sanskrit, but surviving today mostly in their Chinese versions, the texts are concerned with the experience of profound insight that cannot be conveyed by concepts or in intellectual terms. The material remains important today in Mahayana Buddhism and Zen. Key selections from the Prajnaparamita literature are presented here, along with Thomas Cleary's illuminating commentary, as a means of demonstrating the intrinsic limitations of discursive thought, and of pointing to the profound wisdom that lies beyond it. Included are selections from: • The Scripture on Perfect Insight Awakening to Essence • The Essentials of the Great Scripture on Perfect Insight • Treatise on the Great Scripture on Perfect Insight • The Scripture on Perfect Insight for Benevolent Rulers • Key Teachings on the Great Scripture of Perfect Insight • The Questions of Suvikrantavikramin