Paper 1-930337-03-5
128 pages with 12 illustrations
Price: $15.95View koans from the book:
Case 27: Limbs Exposed to the Autumn Wind
Case 29: Just Go Along with It
Case 83: The Ancients and the Pillar
Case 97: The Scorn of the Timeor order securely online at:
www.steinerbooks.com
Blue Cliff Record: Zen Echoes
By
David Rothenberg
Foreword by Sam Hamill
It is astonishing how thousand-year-old riddles are brought here to evocative poetic life. David Rothenberg converts them into contemporary verbal music, an arcanum, a profound secret, a mystery without intellectual solution.
--Frederick Franck, author of The Zen of Seeing, The Buddha Eye, and other books
Much as Coleman Barks breathed new life into the work of the great Sufi poet Rumi and reached the hearts and minds of contemporary readers, David Rothenberg now brings us vividly poetic new versions of the enigmatic koans and riddles from the classic Zen Buddhist text, the Blue Cliff Record. Blue Cliff Record: Zen Echoes is an accessible contemporary distillation of this twelfth-century treasure of Zen Buddhism, a lively feast of words and images designed to stretch and open the mind.
David Rothenberg's adaptation of Blue Cliff Record is that rare thing, a work of art that is also useful. It is as bracing as a dive into a cold spring--a wake up call from reality--the splendor of what is.
--Mark Rudman, winner of the National Book Critics' Circle Award for Poetry and author of Rider
What is unique and wondrous about these poetic responses to the Blue Cliff Record is that here philosophy, spiritual practice and creativity are fused and whole. Each poem remarkably celebrates the Zen past and at the same time builds the foundation for a new interpretation that helps imagine how we, here and now, can live the Dharma on these shores.
--Charles Johnson, winner of the National Book Award in fiction for Middle Passage
David Rothenberg is a contributing editor to Parabola magazine and author of Sudden Music and Hand's End. His writings on spirituality, philosophy, ecology and music have been published in magazines ranging from Sierra and Whole Earth to Wired and The Nation, and are featured in The Best Spiritual Writing 1999 (Harper SanFrancisco) and The Soul of Nature (Penguin).
Sam Hamill is a poet, author, and translator of The Essential Chuang Tzu, The Sound of Water: Haiku by Basho, Buson and Issa and Other Poets (both from Shambhala Publications), and other books.