Ruth Fuller Sasaki, who died in 1967, was a pivotal figure in the emergence and development of Zen Buddhism in the United States. She is the only Westerner — and woman — to be made a priest of a Daitoku–ji temple and was mentor to Burton Watson, Philip Yampolsky, and Gary Snyder, and mother–in–law of Alan Watts. This is the first biography of her remarkable life. Few devoted their lives to Zen Buddhism as Ruth Fuller did. As a senior student of Sokei — an Sasaki in New York — Ruth helped him develop the infrastructure of what would eventually become The First Zen Institute in New York City. She married Sasaki in 1944, and it was her mission to maintain the Institute and later, to establish The First Zen Institute of America in Japan. Her legacy remains today in the Zen facilities she helped build in New York and abroad and in the many texts she saw through translation, published from the 1950s to the 1970s. For the first time in book form, three of her writings are included here — Zen: A Religion, Zen: A Method for Religious Awakening, and Rinzai Zen Study for Foreigners in Japan.

Explore two lives—and a relationship—that profoundly shaped American Zen. Ruth Fuller Sasaki and Sokei-an Shigetsu Sasaki: two pioneers of Zen in the West. Ruth was an American with a privileged life, even during the height of the Great Depression, before she went to Japan and met D. T. Suzuki. Sokei-an was one of the first Zen priests to come to America; he brought the gift of the Dharma to the United States but in 1942 was put in an internment camp. One made his way to the West and the other would find her way to the East, but together they created the First Zen Institute of America and helped birth a new generation of Zen practitioners: among them, Alan Watts, Gary Snyder, and Burton Watson. They were married less than a year before Sokei-an died, but Ruth would go on to helm trailblazing translations in his honor and to become the first foreigner to be the priest of a Rinzai Zen temple in Japan. With lyrical prose, authors Steven Schwartz and Janica Anderson bring Ruth and Sokei-an to life. Two dozen intimate photographs photos show us two people who aren’t mere historical figures, but flesh and blood people, walking their paths.

Drawn from the records of Chinese Zen masters of the Tang and Song dynasties, this collection may surprise some readers. In contrast to the popular image of Zen as an authoritarian, monastic tradition deeply rooted in Asian culture, these passages portray Zen as remarkably flexible, adaptive to contemporary and individual needs, and transcending cultural boundaries. The readings contained in Zen Essence emphasize that the practice of Zen requires consciousness alone and does not depend on a background in Zen Buddhism and Asian culture. The true essence of Zen resides in the relationship between mind and culture, whatever that culture might be. This unique collection of writings creates a picture of Zen not as a religion or philosophy, but as a practical science of freedom.

Presents a collection of essays, which argue that Zen Buddism actually has a rich and varied literary heritage. Among the significant texts are hagiographic accounts and recorded sayings of individual Zen masters, koan collections and commentaries and rules for monastic life.

Original Nature is the historic translation and commentary on the Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch of Chinese Zen by America's first Zen Master, Sokei-an Sasaki (1882-1945). Finally available, 75 years after its completion, Sokei-an considered the Sixth Patriach's message an essential foundation for the transmission of Zen to America "I think the Sixth Patriarch never dreamed that his record... would be explained to Westerners in New York... I feel that I am in a valley between huge mountains, and that the ancient simple minded woodcutters, fisherman, monks and nuns who are living in the mountains have come to the place where they always make their gatherings, and that I am one of them now..."

Join performer and teacher Jeff Peretz on a musical journey that will open your mind and improve your guitar playing in ways you've never dreamed of. Using the practice of skill cultivation, one of the principles at the heart of Zen philosophy, you'll discover ways to develop your powers of concentration, let go" as a player, and become a complete guitarist. Along the way, you'll learn about the history of Zen; the application of Zen to rhythm, melody, and harmony; and new ways of thinking about familiar musical elements. You'll find Zen and the Art of Guitar a musical learning experience unlike any you've ever encountered."

THE WHITE LOTUS IS A BEAUTIFUL SYMBOL. White represents multidimensionality, because white contains all the colors of the spectrum. That is the most strange, unbelievable quality about white: it contains all the colors yet it seems to be colorless. But it contains all those colors in such synthesis, in such harmony, that they all disappear. They dissolve into oneness and that oneness is white. White represents the ultimate synthesis and harmony… And the lotus also is a great symbol, particularly in the East… The lotus represents the essential meaning of sannyas. The lotus lives in the lake and yet the water cannot touch it. It lives in the water and yet remains untouched by the water. The lotus represents the witnessing quality of your being: You live in the world, but you remain a witness. You remain in the world and yet you are not part of it. You participate and yet you are not part of it. You are in the world, but the world is not in you. When you become a calm and cool observer of life you are going to laugh not ordinary laughter but a belly laughter like a lion’s roar. And white lotuses will start showering on you.

A modern classic unparalleled in scope, this sweeping history unfolds the story of Buddhism’s spread to the West. How the Swans Came to the Lake opens with the story of Asian Buddhism, including the life of the Buddha and the spread of his teachings from India to Southeast Asia, China, Korea, Japan, Tibet, and elsewhere. Coming to the modern era, the book tracks how Western colonialism in Asia served as the catalyst for the first large-scale interactions between Buddhists and Westerners. Author Rick Fields discusses the development of Buddhism in the West through key moments such as Transcendentalist fascination with Eastern religions; immigration of Chinese and Japanese people to the United States; the writings of D. T. Suzuki, Alan Watts, and members of the Beat movement; the publication of Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki; the arrival of Tibetan lamas in America and Europe; and the influence of Western feminist and social justice movements on Buddhist practice. This fortieth anniversary edition features both new and enhanced photographs as well as a new introduction by Fields’s nephew, Buddhist Studies scholar Benjamin Bogin, who reflects on the impact of this book since its initial publication and addresses the significant changes in Western Buddhist practice in recent decades.

Sokei-an translated the Record of Lin-chi (Lin-chi lu) from 1931 to 1933, in his first series of lectures. He felt that Americans needed original Chinese Zen source materials, translated and commented upon by a Zen master, and there were no such materials in those early days. Sokei-an was the first Zen master to translate the Record of Lin-chi and to give a commentary in English to Western students. The real historic value of Sokei-an's Lin-chi is in his commentary with its manifestation of Lin-chi's Zen.

Long Strange Journey presents the first critical analysis of visual objects and discourses that animate Zen art modernism and its legacies, with particular emphasis on the postwar “Zen boom.” Since the late nineteenth century, Zen and Zen art have emerged as globally familiar terms associated with a spectrum of practices, beliefs, works of visual art, aesthetic concepts, commercial products, and modes of self-fashioning. They have also been at the center of fiery public disputes that have erupted along national, denominational, racial-ethnic, class, and intellectual lines. Neither stable nor strictly a matter of euphoric religious or intercultural exchange, Zen and Zen art are best approached as productive predicaments in the study of religion, spirituality, art, and consumer culture, especially within the frame of Buddhist modernism. Long Strange Journey’s modern-contemporary emphasis sets it off from most writing on Zen art, which focuses on masterworks by premodern Chinese and Japanese artists, gushes over “timeless” visual qualities as indicative of metaphysical states, or promotes with ahistorical, trend-spotting flair Zen art’s design appeal and therapeutic values. In contrast, the present work plots a methodological through line distinguished by “discourse analysis,” moving from the first contacts between Europe and Japanese Zen in the sixteenth century to late nineteenth–early twentieth-century transnational exchanges driven by Japanese Buddhists and intellectuals and the formation of a Zen art canon; to postwar Zen transformations of practice and avant-garde expressions; to popular embodiments of our “Zenny zeitgeist,” such as Zen cartoons. The book presents an alternative history of modern-contemporary Zen and Zen art that emphasizes their unruly and polythetic-prototypical natures, taking into consideration serious religious practice and spiritual and creative discovery as well as conflicts over Zen’s value amid the convolutions of global modernity, squabbles over authenticity, resistance against the notion of “Zen influence,” and competing claims to speak for Zen art made by monastics, lay advocates, artists, and others.