This Zen guide offers a readable, helpful interpretation of a classic pillar of Zen training. The Venerable Myokyo-ni is one of today's most distinguished teachers in the Rinzai Zen tradition. In Gentling the Bull she offers an insightful explanation of the Ten Ox-Herding Pictures, showing how they are a metaphor of both one's Zen training and spiritual journey. The Ten Ox-Herding Pictures, also known as the Ten Bull Pictures, are believed to have been drawn by Kakuan, a twelfth century Chinese Zen master, but became widely used as a means of Zen study in fifteenth-century Japan. They are used in formal Zen training to this day to show the stages of one's realization of enlightenment. Each of the ten pictures is presented here with a preface and general foreword to the series by Chi-Yuan, a monk in the direct line of Kakuan. Myokyo-ni provides a lucid introduction that sets the pictures in their historical context and shows their relevance to modern Zen training. In her own comments on each picture, she discusses how they are representative of our own search for "oneness" -- spiritual fulfillment.

The Venerable Myokyo-ni is one of today's most distinguished teachers in the Rinzai Zen tradition. In Gentling the Bull she offers an insightful explanation of the Ten Ox-Herding Pictures, showing how they are a metaphor of both one's Zen training and spiritual journey. The Ten Ox-Herding Pictures, also known as the Ten Bull Pictures, are believed to have been drawn by Kakuan, a twelfth-century Chinese Zen master, but became widely used as a means of Zen study in fifteenth-century Japan. They are used in formal Zen training to this day to show the stages of one's realization of enlightenment. Each of the ten pictures is presented here with a preface and general foreword to the series by Chi-Yuan, a monk in the direct line of Kakuan. Myokyo-ni provides a lucid introduction that sets the pictures in their historical context and shows their relevance to modern Zen training. In her own comments on each picture, she discusses how they are representative of our own search for "oneness"spiritual fulfillment.

Bull Vaulter is an absorbing novel set in 2100 B.C.E. that interweaves adventure, passion, love, and wisdom. Join Alena, Bull Vaulter from Keft, as she journeys to the Peloponnesus, meets the Kurgan-warrior, Jahal, and develops the special talents bestowed upon her by the Goddess as she embarks on an exhilarating journey to fulfi ll her fated destiny.

The donkey, the onager, the koulan-the burro. All are names for one of the world’s most used and abused beasts of burden. If the horse was the animal of conquest, it was the lowly burro who made it possible for civilization to spread to the far reaches of the earth. Burros brought wood to the fires, raised water from the wells, toiled in the fields, carried the great and the poor, followed the conquistadors to the New World, and packed for the prospector and miner. Recommended by Cleveland Amory, renowned animal welfare advocate and founder of the Black Beauty Ranch, this book is an eloquent and appealing account of the burro’s past and present. It includes a chapter on the selection, feeding, and care of pet burros.

Written by one of today's most distinguished teachers, this Zen book provides an authoritative introduction to Zen training from the perspective of someone who has gone through it. The author begins by setting out the basic Buddhist teaching based on the example of Buddha and then traces the fundamentals of the Zen way through a detail account of workings of a contemporary Zen monastery. She draws on her own experience of twelve year's study in a Rinzai monastery to present the pattern of its life: the harsh introduction that the novice endures, the daily routine of chanting, work and meditation, the seasonal festivals, retreats and rituals. Through all this, Myokyo-ni shows that the Zen way leads to a genuine insight into the Buddhist teachings and provides what is necessary for the development of such insight to occur. Lastly, she demonstrates that this insight is not merely a mental exercise but a genuine restructuring and making whole.

The carefully crafted, meditative essays in On the Shoreline of Knowledge sometimes start from unlikely objects or thoughts, a pencil or some fragments of commonplace conversation, but they soon lead the reader to consider fundamental themes in human experience. The unexpected circumnavigation of the ordinary unerringly gets to the heart of the matter. Bringing a diverse range of material into play, from fifteenth-century Japanese Zen Buddhism to how we look at paintings, and from the nature of a briefcase to the ancient nest-sites of gyrfalcons, Chris Arthur reveals the extraordinary dimensions woven invisibly into the ordinary things around us. Compared to Loren Eiseley, George Eliot, Seamus Heaney, Aldo Leopold, V. S. Naipaul, W. G. Sebald, W. B. Yeats, and other literary luminaries, he is a master essayist whose work has quietly been gathering an impressive cargo of critical acclaim. Arthur speaks with an Irish accent, rooting the book in his own unique vision of the world, but he addresses elemental issues of life and death, love and loss, that circle the world and entwine us all.