Re: OT: zen for beginners

[Raul Bonell <raul.bonell@gmail.com>]

tao te king... i was thinking of this too. 
it's an interesting subject for lots of you, as i see. 

it's hard to describe this with my limited english, but anyway... 

the book is for a student which is asking himself "what comes next". it's a very good student, but with the actual state of things and the new european laws coming on 2012, Bologna, it looks they are feeling the pressure the political system is exerting on them. the idea behind is that of the even more strict specialization. which, i hope you're agree here, is pure shit.

it pisses me off that even the more skilled ones face the matter by reducing the problem to what's going to be "really important", and thus, what's going to be economically rewarding. what a loss of talented minds.

since this is the last year they'll stay before jumping to the university, and knowing my limitations, i had the idea of passing the flame with some "long run" book. at least, for those who seem inhabited by old souls, so to say.

thanks friends!

2009/11/25 Qua Veda <qua@oregon.com>

How about the Tao Te Ching?     I believe those are essentially Zen principles, in a very consumable , short book.
-Qua

On 11/24/09 3:23 PM, "Raul Bonell" <raul.bonell@gmail.com> wrote:

thanks for your quick responses. i have to take a look at these and then try to find which of them is translated into spanish. sorry i did forget to mention this before.

is there something loopers-delight is not good for?
you rock!


2009/11/25 Jeff Shirkey <jcshirke@verizon.net>

How much does he know about Zen already?

When I was 15, the book I kept going back to again and again was "The Zen Experience" by Thomas Hoover.  It's more a history book -- charting Zen from its beginnings with the original sutras, Kumarijiva's concept of Void, and Bodhidharma's journey out of India to China.  It explains the philosophical theories while describing the lives and beliefs of each of Zen's Patriarchs as the religion morphed from Indian Mahayana Buddhism, into the North and South schools of Chinese Ch'an, and finally the Rinzai and Soto Zen sects of Japan.

If it's history your friend is interested in, you're going to want to buy something much more recent than Hoover, for one thing. More importantly, you'll want to buy a book with some scholarly merit. Look at books by John McRae ("Seeing Through Zen") or Bernard Faure, for instance--both Chan/Zen scholars at the top of their field.

My .02

Jeff

-Qua

-- 
Raul Bonell at Blogger: http://raulbonell.blogspot.com
Chain Tape Collective: http://www.ct-collective.com