Hwadu is the most authoritative edition of Zen questions and answers by JeonBeop Zen Master DaeWon Moon JaeHyeon. Through Hwadu one may encounter the living Zen of the Korean tradition.

A fifth-century Indian Buddhist monk, Bodhidharma is credited with bringing Zen to China. Although the tradition that traces its ancestry back to him did not flourish until nearly two hundred years after his death, today millions of Zen Buddhists and students of kung fu claim him as their spiritual father. While others viewed Zen practice as a purification of the mind or a stage on the way to perfect enlightenment, Bodhidharma equated Zen with buddhahood and believed that it had a place in everyday life. Instead of telling his disciples to purify their minds, he pointed them to rock walls, to the movements of tigers and cranes, to a hollow reed floating across the Yangtze. This bilingual edition, the only volume of the great teacher's work currently available in English, presents four teachings in their entirety. "Outline of Practice" describes the four all-inclusive habits that lead to enlightenment, the "Bloodstream Sermon" exhorts students to seek the Buddha by seeing their own nature, the "Wake-up Sermon" defends his premise that the most essential method for reaching enlightenment is beholding the mind. The original Chinese text, presented on facing pages, is taken from a Ch'ing dynasty woodblock edition.

Here is the inimitable Zen Master Seung Sahn up close and personal—in selections from the correspondence that was one of his primary modes of teaching. Seung Sahn received hundreds of letters per month, each of which he answered personally, and some of the best of which are included here. His frank and funny style, familiar to readers of Dropping Ashes on the Buddha, is seen here in a most intimate form. The beloved Zen master not only answers questions on Zen teaching and practice, but applies an enlightened approach to problems with work, relationships, suffering, and the teacher-student relationship.

"This book is a complete translation with my interpretative comments of the eloquent yet enigmatic verses commenting on one hundred cases composed in 1038 by the master Xuedou Chongxian (980-1052). A representative of the Yunmen branch of Chan that he helped revive and bring to prominence during the Northern Song dynasty (960-1127), before its impact declined with the fall of the capital in Kaifeng, Xuedou demonstrates a unique literary flair for explicating gong'an that is evident in numerous writings included in his recorded sayings. In particular, Xuedou's 100 Odes to Old Cases (,C. Xuedou baize songgu, J. Setchō hyakusoku juko) is recognized as the seminal discourse that has greatly influenced the way stories of former teachers (guze) have been appreciated and appropriated for the past thousand years. This text, which became the basis for the Blue Cliff Record that is also cited in my translations, continues to exert a profound impact on the overall legacy of East Asian Buddhist intellectual history and religious literature. Xuedou's verses reflect the author's unique capacity for taming through elegance the undisciplined and deluded minds of followers struggling with self-imposed obstacles to discern reality and thereby discover inner peace. He cites extensively multiple Chan sources, uses extensively irregular meter to disrupt the reader's expectations, and evokes unusual allusions to Chinese lore while often interjecting personal comments or lyrical imagery that goes beyond a reliance on doctrine"--

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.

Although the lines of the palm of the hand are barely visible in the early light, the monks of the Tofukuji monastery have been about their familiar rounds of daily tasks for several hours. Their routine is simple but faithfully practiced. Within its repetition lies the key to the self and the Buddha who resides within. The daily life of the monastery is portrayed here in ninety-seven watercolor sketches. Drawn during his last years by the Zen monk Giei Sato, these sketches recollect his days as an unsui, an apprentice monk. With humor and steadfast warmth Sato depicts the day of leaving home and the day of returning; the rainy season and the snowy season; the chores, the celebrations, the days of cleaning, and the days of begging. Each of the charming drawings is enhanced by a brief description of the event portrayed, a touch of Zen teaching, or a note on monastic life.

Hu Shih (1891-1962),. In the 1910s, Hu studied at Cornell University and later Columbia University, both in the United States. At Columbia, he was greatly influenced by his professor, John Dewey, and became a lifelong advocate of pragmatic evolutionary change. He received his Ph.D. in Philosophy in 1917 and returned to lecture at Peking University. Hu soon became one of the leading and most influential intellectuals during the May Fourth Movement and later the New Culture Movement. His most widely recognized achievement during this period was as a key contributor to Chinese liberalism and language reform in his advocacy for the use of written vernacular Chinese. Hu Shih was the Republic of China’s Ambassador to the United States of America (1938-1942) and later Chancellor of Peking University (1946-1948). In 1939 Hu Shih was nominated for a Nobel Prize in literature and in 1958 became president of the “Academia Sinica” in Taiwan, where he remained until his death in Nangang at the age of 71. This diverse collection brings together his English essays, speeches and academic papers, as well as book reviews, all written between 1919 and 1962. English Writings of Hu Shih represents his thinking and insights on such topics as scientific methodology, liberalism and democracy, and social problems. It can also serve as a helpful resource for those who study Hu Shih and his views on ancient and modern China. The first volume “Chinese Philosophy and Intellectual History” allows readers to trace the development of Chinese thought and see the historical methodology applied therein. The second volume “Literature and Society” mainly includes Hu Shih’s works on language reform, which owing to his advocacy for the use of written vernacular Chinese were a success in both the educational and literary fields. The third volume “National Crisis and Public Diplomacy” mainly collects Hu’s articles and speeches from his term as Ambassador of China to the U.S.A. between 1938 and 1942.

The life of Bodhidharma, the founder of Zen Buddhism, has, with the passing of time, been magnified to the scale of myth, turning history into the stuff of legend. Known as the First Patriarch, Bodhidharma brought Zen from South India into China in 500 CE, changing the country forever. In Tracking Bodhidharma, Andrew Ferguson recreates the path of Bodhidharma, traveling through China to the places where the First Patriarch lived and taught. This sacred trail takes Ferguson deep into ancient China, and allows him to explore the origins of Chan [Zen] Buddhism, the cultural aftermath that Bodhidharma left in his wake, and the stories of a man who shaped a civilization. Tracking Bodhidharma offers a previously unheard perspective on the life of Zen's most important religious leader, while simultaneously showing how that history is relevant to the rapidly developing super–power that is present–day China. By placing Zen Buddhism within the country's political landscape, Ferguson presents the religion as a counterpoint to other Buddhist sects, a catalyst for some of the most revolutionary moments in China's history, and as the ancient spiritual core of a country that is every day becoming more an emblem of the modern era.

I call Zen the only living religion because it is not a religion, but only a religiousness. It has no dogma, it does not depend on any founder. It has no past; in fact it has nothing to teach you. It is the strangest thing that has happened in the whole history of mankind – strangest because it enjoys in emptiness, it blossoms in nothingness. It is fulfilled in innocence, in not knowing. It does not discriminate between the mundane and the sacred. For it, all that is, is sacred.