Writing as Enlightenment
Buddhist American Literature into the Twenty-first Century
Publication Year: 2011
Published by: State University of New York Press
Writing as Enlightenment: Buddhist American Literature into the Twenty-first Century
Writing as Enlightenment: Buddhist American Literature into the Twenty-first Century
Contents
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pp. vii-viii
Acknowledgments
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pp. ix-
Reprinted with permission from the University of Massachusetts Press: pp. 107–26 from the introduction to Chapter 3, “The Emergence of Black Dharma and Oxherding Tale, in Charles Johnson in Context by Linda Fergerson Selzer. Copyright 2009 by University of Massachusetts Press and published by the University of Massachusetts Press. ...
Foreword
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pp. xi-xiii
In the eighth century AD, an Indian Buddhist poet and philosopher named Shantideva penned, in verse, a treatise on compassion that immediately became—and has remained—a classic work of Buddhist literature. Entitled The Way of the Bodhisattva, the poem eloquently describes how the thought of enlightenment ...
Introduction
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pp. 1-16
In his recently published North American Buddhists in Social Context (2008), Paul David Numrich wonders if scholarly research on American Buddhism really constitutes a “field of study.” Although the interest in Buddhism in North America is, as Thomas A. Tweed asserts, much greater currently than in the past (2000, xv),1 ...
Part I: Widening the Stream: Literature as Transmission
Chapter 1: The Transmission of Zen as Dual Discourse: Shaku Soen and Okakura Kakuzo
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pp. 19-36
The seemingly widespread awareness of Zen Buddhism in American culture today is evident from the use of Zen as a catchword in everything from beauty advertisements to self-help manuals. A recent edition of Books in Print lists approximately 450 titles under the subject of Zen, although many of these books deal ...
Chapter 2: Black American Buddhism: History and Representation
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pp. 37-68
In one compelling scene in the racially controversial film Crash (2004), a successful black television producer and his beautiful wife—Cameron and Christine Thayer (played by Terrence Howard and Thandie Newton)—are pulled over by a racist cop and his reluctant young partner. ...
Part II: The New Lamp: Buddhism and Contemporary Writers
Chapter 3: Some of the Dharma: The Human, the Heavenly, and the “Real Work” in the Writings of Gary Snyder
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pp. 71-88
Since the 1950s, Gary Snyder has offered one of the clearest expressions of Buddhist sensibility in American literature. A seminal figure in the “broad movement” toward Buddhism that “took off in the 1960s” (Seager 9), Snyder helped achieve a transfer of Buddhist values to the West by linking Buddhism to what he calls ...
Chapter 4: “Listen and Relate”: Buddhism, Daoism, and Chance in the Poetry and Poetics of Jackson Mac Low
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pp. 89-108
“Poetry expresses the emotional truth of the self. A craft honed by especially sensitive individuals, it puts metaphor and image in the service of song. Or at least that’s the story we’ve inherited from Romanticism, handed down for over 200 years in a caricatured and mummified ethos ...
Chapter 5: A Deeper Kind of Truth: Buddhist Themes in Don DeLillo’s Libra
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pp. 109-130
Raised as a Catholic by Italian immigrant parents, Don DeLillo acknowledges that he is a “spiritual person,” one whose writing “brings [him] closer to spiritual feelings than anything else. Writing is the final enlightenment” (Moss 158). DeLillo’s use of the word “enlightenment” is suggestive of an Asian philosophical lens, ...
Part III: Speaking as Enlightenment: Interviews with Buddhist Writers
Chapter 6: “The Present Moment Happening”: A Conversation with Gary Snyder about Danger on Peaks
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pp. 133-140
Julia Martin (JM): In Danger on Peaks there is so much awareness of suffering and destruction at many levels, yet the collection also is deeply concerned with healing. So reading the poems brings to mind for me the great question of how to work with integrity as a writer in the late modern world. ...
Chapter 7: Embodied Mindfulness: Charles Johnson and Maxine Hong Kingston on Buddhism, Race, and Beauty
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pp. 141-156
This interview was conducted on May 29, 2004 at the American Literature Association (ALA) Conference in San Francisco. Charles Johnson and Maxine Hong Kingston each gave readings at the ALA that year and generously agreed to meet with me for the interview. Also in attendance were fellow members of the Charles Johnson Society: ...
Chapter 8: Poetry and Practice at Naropa University
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pp. 157-184
Poetry, fiction, and literary nonfiction have been essential vehicles in the transmission of Buddhism from Asia to the United States, rivaling even canonical texts in influence. From the mid-1970s onward, the institutional center for American literary Buddhism has been Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. ...
Contributors
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pp. 185-188
Index
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pp. 189-193
E-ISBN-13: 9781438439211
E-ISBN-10: 1438439210
Print-ISBN-13: 9781438439198
Print-ISBN-10: 1438439199
Page Count: 207
Publication Year: 2011
Series Title: SUNY series in Buddhism and American Culture
Series Editor Byline: John Whalen-Bridge
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