the zen of zenlike fiction
Discover the best zenlike fiction books with 'The Zen of Zenlike Fiction.' Explore calming, introspective reads that inspire mindfulness and inner peace.
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The Woman at Otowi Crossing
by Frank Waters
This is the story of Helen Chalmer, a person in tune with her adopted environment and her neighbors in the nearby Indian pueblo and also a friend of the first atomic scientists. The secret evolution of atomic research is a counterpoint to her psychic development.
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The Man who Killed the Deer
by Frank Waters
The story of Martiniano, a Pueblo Indian story of sin and redemption and of the conflict between Indian and white laws.
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Jake Fades
by David Guy
Jake is a Zen master and expert bicycle repairman who fixes flats and teaches meditation out of a shop in Bar Harbor, Maine. Hank is his long-time student. The aging Jake hopes that Hank will take over teaching for him. But the commitment-phobic Hank doesn’t feel up to the job, and Jake is beginning to exhibit behavior that looks suspiciously like Alzheimer’s disease. Is a guy with as many “issues” as Hank even capable of being a Zen teacher? And are those paradoxical things Jake keeps doing some kind of koan-like wisdom . . . or just dementia? These and other hard questions confront Hank, Jake, and the colorful cast of characters they meet during a week-long trip to the funky neighborhood of Central Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts. As they trek back and forth from bar to restaurant to YMCA to Zen Center to doughnut shop, answers arise—in the usual unexpected ways. Click here to listen to the author, David Guy, discuss Jake Fades on North Carolina Public Radio.
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Kill the Shogun
by Dale Furutani
Matsuyama Kaze, a samurai on a quest to rescue his murdered lord's kidnapped daughter, is caught in a plot to kill the shogun.
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Spiritual Enlightenment
by Jed McKenna
From a Spiritual Master Unlike Any, A Spiritual Masterpiece Like No Other AUTHOR, TEACHER AND SPIRITUAL MASTER Jed McKenna tells it like it's never been told before. A true American original, Jed succeeds where countless others have failed by reducing this highest of attainments - Spiritual Enlightenment - to the simplest of terms. Effectively demystifying the mystical, Jed astonishes the reader not by adding to the world's collected spiritual wisdom, but by taking the spirituality out of spiritual enlightenment. Never before has this elusive topic been treated in so engaging and accessible a manner. A masterpiece of illuminative writing, Spiritual Enlightenment is mandatory reading for anyone following a spiritual path. Part exposé and part how-to manual, this is the first book to explain why failure seems to be the rule in the search for enlightenment - and how the rule can be broken. Says Jed: The truth is that enlightenment is neither remote nor unattainable. It is closer than your skin and more immediate than your next breath. If we wonder why so few seem able to find that which can never be lost, we might recall the child who was looking in the light for a coin he dropped in the dark because "the light is better over here." Mankind has spent ages looking in the light for a coin that awaits us not in light and not in dark, but beyond all opposites. That is the message of this book: Spiritual enlightenment, pure and simple.
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Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment
by Jed McKenna
Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment Isn't One Kind of Enlightenment - It's the Only Kind THE MARK OF A TRUE MASTER is that he can express a subject of the utmost complexity with uncanny simplicity. Jed McKenna is such a master, and spiritual enlightenment is his subject. His first book, Spiritual Enlightenment: The Damnedest Thing, was an instant classic and established him as a spiritual teacher of startling depth and clarity. Now, his second book, Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment, takes us on a fascinating tour of the enlightened state - what it is and what it's not, who's there and who's not, how to get there and how to get somewhere better. Delightful surprises abound, including the dramatic unveiling of perhaps the greatest spiritual masterpiece of all time - long hidden in plain view and well known to all. Whitman, Melville, Thoreau, Mark Twain and U.G. Krishnamurti all appear, and a student from the first book returns to share her Spiritual Autolysis journals. Also surprising are the author's gentle efforts to guide the reader away from enlightenment toward a more desirable and accessible state. Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged, Missing me one place, search another, I stop somewhere, waiting for you. - Walt Whitman Jed McKenna's books aren't for everyone. They're for people who are tired of the spiritual merry-go-round and ready to confront the unadorned reality of the awakening process. If you like your teachers with all the spiritual trimmings and trappings, Jed may not be right for you, but when you're ready to jump off the merry-go-round and begin your journey, Jed McKenna is the guy you want to see standing there, waiting for you.
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Spiritual Warfare
by Jed McKenna
Guns and bombs are children's toys. A true war wages, and you're invited. IT'S AN INVITATION you may not be able to accept if you want to, or decline if you don't. It's an invitation to fight in a war like no other; a war where loss is counted as gain, surrender as victory, and where the enemy you must face, an enemy of unimaginable superiority, is yourself. In Spiritual Warfare, the metaphor of warfare rarely appears. Instead, we are presented with the living reality of a very normal woman - a wife and mother with a demanding career and high-stress lifestyle - and we see what happens when she receives an invitation that, try as she might, she can't refuse. And we meet another woman, a woman who accepted the invitation and fought and won. In the closing chapters of this book, we attend her memorial service as Jed delivers her eulogy. Spiritual Warfare issues a damning and irrefutable indictment of its own audience and genre, putting spirituality and religion themselves on trial. A terrible crime is being committed against humanity, a crime of oppression and subjugation far beyond Orwell's 1984. We are the victims of this crime, but we are also its perpetrators. Our motive is fear, our sin is ignorance, and the chain in which we enslave ourselves is belief. "Belief means not wanting to know what is true." -Friedrich Nietzsche Spiritual Warfare is a book for those who do want to know; people who want to escape from their dark asylum and experience a direct and authentic spirituality; people for whom it's time to look, to think, to know, and, at long last, to put away childish things.
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Siddhartha
by Hermann Hesse
Blends elements of psychoanalysis and Asian religions to probe an Indian aristocrat's efforts to renounce sensual and material pleasures and discover spiritual truths.
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The Ronin
by William Dale Jennings
"A thunderbolt, full of lightning and excitement, one you won't put down until its last extraordinary page." —The Japan Times The violence of twelfth-century Japan explodes in this half-legendary, half-true story of a violent man who becomes a folk hero. A heartless savage, the Ronin, or "wandering samurai," slashes his way up from the gutter to wealth, honor and status. In spite of his crime sand bloodthirsty cruelty, he bears the strange mark of destiny that the wise see and respect, even as he destroys them. The tale which is told with humor and irony, ranges from the pleasantly colloquial to the brutally satiric, yet never relents in the Ronin's ruthless search for the truth. The storyteller hides nothing and speaks bluntly, yet this jewel-like tale shimmers with tantalizing riddles that will haunt the reader just as they haunted the Ronin. Sure to shock, confound and ultimately inspire readers, The Ronin is loosely based on an ancient legend told to the author by the Zen Master Nyogen Senzaki.
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The Crocodile and the Crane
by Arthur Rosenfeld
Sanfeng and Zetain, a brother and sister from China who have become immortal as a result of an ancient healing art, join with an American guru in a struggle to combat a deadly plague from their past which threatens their relationship and the existence ofthe modern world.
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Way of the Peaceful Warrior
by Dan Millman
"Includes a new interview with the author about the making of the film"--P. [4] of cover.
