The Open Door To Emptiness

Although the word 'emptiness' can seem a bit intimidating, in the Buddhist traditions it is the key to freedom. Our mind is intrinsically empty of self and any fixed or defining content. We are not defined by anything which has occurred, that is occurring now, or will even occur in the future. Being empty of fixed content allows us to open to all that occurs without being trapped in reactivity. By resting in the intrinsic openness of our mind it becomes clear that we are not a thing amongst things.

During Lent and Holy Week, 1999, Phyllis Cole-Dai and James Murray lived voluntarily on the streets of Columbus, Ohio, the nation’s fifteenth largest city. They didn’t go out on the streets to satisfy idle curiosity, or to experience a strange new world. They didn’t go out to find answers to questions, solutions to problems. They didn’t go out to save anyone, or to hand out donations of food and blankets. They went out with one primary aim: to be as present as possible to everyone they met—to love their neighbor as themselves. Doing so, they were reminded just how difficult the practice of compassion can be, especially because of personal judgments, assumptions, fears and desires, all habits of mind that harden one’s regard for and behavior toward other people. The Emptiness of Our Hands: A Lent Lived on the Streets is a meditative narrative accompanied by nearly thirty black and white photographs, most of them shot by James using crude pinhole cameras that he constructed from trash. This book will thrust you out the door of your comfortable life, straight into the unknown. What can happen to a person without a home? Indeed, what might happen to you?

If you let it—if you listen—a book could change your life.

From King Lear to the Tragedy of Carmen, from Marat/Sade to the epic Mahabharata, Peter Brook has reinvented modern theatre, not once but again and again. In The Open Door the visionary director and theorist offers a lucid, comprehensive exposition of the philosophy that underlies his work. It is a philosophy of paradoxes: We come to the theatre to find life, but that life must be different from the life we find outside. Actors have to prepare painstakingly yet be willing to sacrifice the results of their preparation. The director’s most reliable tool may be his capacity to be bored. Brook illustrates these principles with anecdotes that span his entire career and that demonstrate his familiarity with Shakespeare, Chekhov, and the indigenous theatres of India and Iran. The result is an unparalleled look at what happens both onstage and behind the scenes, fresh in its insights and elegant in its prose.

Women played major roles in the history of Buddhist China, but given the paucity of the remaining records, their voices have all but faded. In Daughters of Emptiness, Beata Grant renders a great service by recovering and translating the enchanting verse - by turns assertive, observant, devout - of forty-eight nuns from sixteen centuries of imperial China. This selection of poems, along with the brief biographical accounts that accompany them, affords readers a glimpse into the extraordinary diversity and sometimes startling richness of these women's lives. A sample poem for this stunning collection: The sequence of seasons naturally pushes forward, Suddenly I am startled by the ending of the year. Lifting my eyes I catch sight of the winter crows, Calling mournfully as if wanting to complain. The sunlight is cold rather than gentle, Spreading over the four corners like a cloud. A cold wind blows fitfully in from the north, Its sad whistling filling courtyards and houses. Head raised, I gaze in the direction of Spring, But Spring pays no attention to me at all. Time a galloping colt glimpsed through a crack, The tap [of Death] at the door has its predestined time. How should I not know, one who has left the world, And for whom floating clouds are already familiar? In the garden there grows a rosary-plum tree: Whose sworn friendship makes it possible to endure. - Chan Master Jingnuo

When documentary maker Jane Takagi-Little finally lands a job producing a Japanese television show that just happens to be sponsored by an American meat-exporting business, she uncovers some unsavoury truths about love, fertility, and a dangerous hormone called DES. Soon she will also cross paths with Akiko Ueno, a beleaguered Japanese housewife struggling to escape her overbearing husband. And the battle with 'big beef' will be on in earnest. Ruth Ozeki's much-loved debut novel, winner of the Kirayama Prize for Literature of the Pacific Rim, represents the entertaining face of ecological activism. It will delight fans of Michael Pollan, Margaret Atwood and Barbara Kingsolver. Ruth Ozeki was born and raised in Connecticut by an American father and a Japanese mother. She has lived in Japan, where among other things she worked as a bar hostess and studied flower arrangement, Noh drama and mask carving. Ruth practises Zen Buddhism and was ordained as a priest in 2010. She is the bestselling author of A Tale for the Time Being and All Over Creation. textpublishing.com.au 'Ruth Ozeki masks a deeper purpose a light tone...A comical-satirical-farcical-epical-tragical-romantical novel.' Jane Smiley, Chicago Tribune 'A joy to read.' Elle 'Wonderfully wild and bracing...A feast that leaves you hungry for whatever Ozeki cooks up next.' Newsweek 'Romance, agri-business, self-discovery, cross-cultural misunderstanding - it takes a talent like Ruth Ozeki's to blend all these ingredients beautifully together. My Year of Meats is a sensitive and compelling portrait of two modern women.' Arthur Golden, author of Memoirs of a Geisha