Delivery & Return:Free shipping on all orders over $50
Estimated Delivery:7-15 days international
People:18 people viewing this product right now!
Easy Returns:Enjoy hassle-free returns within 30 days!
Payment:Secure checkout
SKU:70506526
How Zen experience can enrich Christians' emotional orientation. Robert Kennedy is one of three Jesuits in the world who answer to both the titles "Father" and "Roshi," or venerable Zen teacher. In 1991, after ten years of practicing Zen meditation, he was installed as a Zen teacher at the recommendation of his teacher, Glassman Roshi, and of Glassman Roshi's teacher, Maezumi Roshi. Today, he directs a dozen groups of people from many religious persuasions - even atheists and agnostics - who sit weekly in Zen meditation throughout the greater New York metropolitan area. This book is specifically addressed to the Christian practitioners of Zen meditation or those who are curious about it. It is structured around the ten well-known ox-herding pictures that have been a consistent source of inspiration to Zen students for centuries. Each picture represents a specific Zen insight into life, and these insights, says Kennedy, are not only fully compatible with Christianity but can help Christians achieve the spiritual goals enshrined in a Christian classic. For example, The Cloud of Unknowing: to be silent and attentive, to be wholly present to life, to be able to separate one's true self from one's false self, the self-seeking part of the personality that so often brings on pain.
Certainly the book is challenging and needs to be taken in chapter bites, but the rewards in terms of deep insights to both Christianity and Zen Buddhism are priceless. Kennedy as priest of both Catholic and Zen faiths carries home the shared visions and weaves them with wonder words and stories from poets and priests. He uses the famed Ox-Herding images to open each chapter and brings fresh water to us all. This book is clearly a gift...of compassion and caring as a way of life.