Rest the mind (of discrimination) and walk the path, so that the ancient style does not collapse, and then your own matter (of original endowment) will be clear and bright. The flowering mountains and spring begins invariably. I laughed once.

This book provides historical background on Kanhua Chan (hwadu practice) in Korea, explains key terms, and contains an annotated translation of the “Seon Dialogues” text, which outlines the practices of various Seon masters.

One who regards the 南泉 (Nánquán) gōng’àn as antinomianism is doctrinally confused, yet one who assigns feasibility to it is practically mistaken.

The study first unveils the pivotal role of the tathāgatagarbha and the central objective of “enlightening the mind and seeing the nature” (míngxīn-jiànxìng 明心見性). It then elaborates on the “two-tier scheme”—a metaethical structure suitable for explicating Chan philosophy. Following this, the study carefully analyzes three critical aspects of Chan morality: (1) The Chan attitude towards rules and precepts, which forms the practical basis for Chan ethics; (2) The characteristics and rationale of the spontaneous morality of enlightened beings; (3) Violence in Chan public cases (gōng’àn 公案), which transcends mundane ethics and epitomizes the great compassion of the Chan masters in transmitting the highest truth.

Bashō was a sensitive poet whose values were firmly founded in Buddhist, Confucian, and Daoist thought. Bashō, although having seriously studied Zen, was never a monk belonging to a monastery, but he often dressed as a priest and often stayed at temples and shrines.

Matsuo Bashō was a 17th-century, Edo poet and a true master of the Haiku form. His Oku no Hosomichi (The Narrow Road to the Interior) is one of the most celebrated, religious travelogues ever written.

Although Ru and Dao are disparate gateways,
Clouds and grove are rather a shared mode.

The preeminent example of Classical Chinese Buddhist poets, Meng Haoran shows how deeply Buddhist and Chinese culture mixed during the Tang Dynasty to produce the quintessentially East Asian Buddhism we now call “Chan.”

If you want to find a resting place,
Cold Mountain will keep you long.
A gentle breeze blows the hidden pines:
The closer you come, the better it sounds.

A corpus of over three hundred poems attributed to a legendary Tang (618–907) era recluse who took the name Hánshān (Cold Mountain) from the isolated hill on which he lived in the Tiantai 天台 range. In pre-modern times, editions of the collection usually included fifty-some poems attributed to Hanshan’s monastic companion, Shídé 拾得­ (“Foundling”) and two poems attributed to another monk, Fēnggān 豐­干. This translation contains the complete text of the earliest surviving edition.

I, Li Bo, love wine completely, right now. How to attain the immortality within wine? This Dao always gets muddled. Don’t look for it in a ladle! The deity of drunkenness will give transmission to whoever is chosen.

An anthology of writing by and about the legendary swashbuckler-poet of Tang China.

… the time for discovering Buddha directly, you must remain alone

A short poem on overcoming our barriers and sticking to the practice.

A monkey went up to the little hut

A canonical basis for the ubiquitous “monkey mind” metaphor.

Note: The above PDF link is missing Chapter 40. You can read the missing chapter online here.