Dharma Library

A large collection of articles, from past issues of New Chan Forum and more besides.

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Book Review: Illumination by Rebecca Li

Cover of Illumination by Rebecca Li

A Guide to the Buddhist Method of No-Method

This book feels familiar, like a homecoming, with its frequent references to Masters Sheng Yen, John Crook and Simon Child – Rebecca Li’s three teachers to whom she dedicates it. It is also simultaneously very challenging.

Rebecca’s background, born in Hong Kong and then studying in America while being the regular translator for Master Sheng Yen over…

Western Chan Fellowship CIO

Categories: 2024 , Book Reviews , Others

Book review: The Angel's Wound – Collected Haibun

Cover image of The Angel's Wound

In this book George Marsh, one-time editor of this journal, presents a collection of haibun. Those familiar with the muse and process of haiku and haibun will know, however, that you do not collect them, they collect you. So here we have the assembled work of someone that has been collected through the experiences and activities of his life including those of a Buddhist practitioner.

For readers…

Western Chan Fellowship CIO

Categories: Book Reviews

Book Review: The World Could Be Otherwise by Norman Fischer

Cover of the World could be Otherwise

This book had been winking at me since the beginning of the year. For several years, Norman Fischer’s writing in Tricycle and elsewhere has been a source of pleasure to me. He writes lucidly and with a poet’s eye and phrase. Eventually, a couple of months after it was published, I gave in, bought this book, devoured it and then just reread it straight away. That’s rare for me. 

Its subtitle,…

Western Chan Fellowship CIO

Categories: 2019 , Book Reviews , Others

Ten Zen Questions

dr-susan-blackmore

This short extract introduces you to Sue Blackmore's new book in which she puzzles her way into certain serious Zen questions. You must read it to decide whether she has solved them or not but her discussion is characteristically lively and interesting; further more it is based in retreats at Maenllwyd. We place it here for your interest and information. Eds.

The idea for "Ten Zen Questions" 1…

Western Chan Fellowship CIO

Categories: 2009 , Susan Blackmore , Book Reviews

Money, Sex, War, Karma: Notes for a Buddhist Revolution: David R Loy

David Loy

This book comprises fourteen essays which originally appeared as articles or talks by one of the leading theoreticians and popularisers of socially engaged Buddhism. 'Liberated Buddhism' is the focus of the first half. By this Loy means that "Buddhism needs to take advantage of its encounter with modern / postmodern civilisation - offering a greater challenge than Buddhism has ever faced before --…

Western Chan Fellowship CIO

Categories: 2009 , Book Reviews , Ken Jones

Crooked Cucumber: The Life and Teaching of Shunryu Suzuki

Eddy Street

I am not normally a consumer of biographies but this is one I wanted to read. One of the first things I did when I began the Buddhist path was to buy a copy of Suzuki’s ‘Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind’. I can still recall standing in a bookshop in London, wondering which book for beginners to buy. I choose the thinnest, what seemed to be the simplest and the one with a picture of the nice man on the…

Western Chan Fellowship CIO

Categories: 1999 , Book Reviews , Eddy Street

Language and Freedom: Meaning in Zen. Review by John Crook

John Crook sitting in front of the altar at Maenllwyd

What is the place of Zen in contemporary thought, the relation of Buddhist metaphysics to philosophy and the value of ancient texts to thinking people today? These and related questions form the subject matter of this intelligent, subtle and provoking book. Dale S. Wright, Professor of Religious Studies, Occidental College, Los Angeles, provides a thought provoking read especially for those of us…

Western Chan Fellowship CIO

Categories: 1999 , John Crook , Book Reviews

Awakening the Buddha Within: Tibetan Wisdom for the Western World by Lama Surya Das

Pamela Hopkinson (now Butler)

Book review by Pamela Hopkinson

Not living very close to a local group, I place great store by the books I read on Buddhism. I picked this one up because Surya Das has constructed the book following the Eight-Fold Path, and I'd been meditating on parts of this for a long time.

Inside I found one of the liveliest and most enjoyable books on Buddhism that I have read for a long time. With the aim…

Western Chan Fellowship CIO

Categories: 1998 , Book Reviews , Others

Sacred Hoops by Phil Jackson

Eddy Street

I've been throwing basketballs for almost as long as I have been sitting. At about the same time that I began to sit regularly I started attending a Keep Fit evening class where basketball is the staple diet. So most Thursday evenings will see me along with a group of similarly middle aged and slightly overweight (?) men running up and down a gym trying to throw a ball into a suspended basket.

So…

Western Chan Fellowship CIO

Categories: 1998 , Book Reviews , Eddy Street

The Goose is Out

Calligraphy for the character Chan

"a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his life as if he were telling a story" Jean-Paul Sartre

I have always been fascinated by the art of story telling and this short book was my first "taste of Zen" through the medium of the story. It is a compilation of a series…

Western Chan Fellowship CIO

Categories: 1997 , Book Reviews , Others

Space In Mind: East-West Psychology and Contemporary Buddhism

Calligraphy for the character Chan

The editors of this book Dr John Crook, Reader in Ethology at Bristol University and Buddhist Scholar and teacher, and Dr David Fontana, Reader in Educational Psychology at Cardiff University, author and therapist, have brought together seventeen essays, most of which are based upon papers presented at a conference on 'Eastern Approaches to Self and Mind' sponsored by the British Psychological…

Western Chan Fellowship CIO

Categories: 1993 , Book Reviews , Others

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