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Words can be both sacred and potent vehicles of inner peace. The Path of Direct Awakening comprises passages chosen and tested especially for memorization and meditation. Taught in all the major world religions, passage meditation engages the highest human faculties and links our inner being with the serene beauty of a calm lake or the highest mountain top. This book is unique in that it references the seed of the divine not in any personalized God, but in the mind, or nature. It includes new and original translations of seventy poems and thirty-three prose pieces from the oldest and most respected Eastern Traditions.  Part I is devoted to meditation passages that purport to assist us in reclaiming “our original nature before our mother and father were born.” Lao Tsu and Confucius, from whom most of these pieces derive, call this path to self-discovery the Tao.The passages in Part II, drawn mostly form the Buddha and his Zen followers, focus on gaining enlightenment by suspending the inertial stream of conscious thought—thereby gaining entry to the Buddha nature that lurks behind it. Part III consists mainly of poems by the Chinese Buddhist mystic Han Shan, written during the Chinese T’ang dynasty (AD 689-906). An attempt to wed Buddhism with the love of the environment, they use the image of the ascent up Cold Mountain to represent the path of spiritual illumination by means of communion with unspoiled nature or simple village life. Stephen Ruppenthal, author, editor, and translator, gives the historical context to the selections in his introduction, as well as providing easy-to-practice guidelines on how to use them to meditate. Essays on the Tao and the Zen concept of Emptiness facilitate understanding of Eastern mysteries difficult for Westerners to grasp. This one-of-a-kind collection enables the reader to practice a type of time-honored spirituality based on the natural world around us, or the divine spark within us, without recourse to a sectarian divinity such as God, Krishna, or Yahweh. |
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© 2007 Stephen Ruppenthal & DirectAwakenings.com
© 2007 Stephen Ruppenthal & DirectAwakenings.com