Buddhist Heroes of the Ancient World

If you love Zen stories, meet their ancestors. Centuries before Zen was born, monks in the meditation caves of an ancient island told stories just like these — short, startling, and true.

They are among the oldest meditation stories in the world. They have been waiting fifteen hundred years for you.from the book description

The word Zen itself descends, through Chinese Chan, from the old Indian word for meditation — the same word these monks knew in Pali as jhāna. What Zen would one day make famous, they were already living: the guarded eye, the unmoved foot, the mouthful of water held against one’s own politeness.

For seven hundred years the elders of ancient Sri Lanka — hunters and wrestlers, librarians and kings’ examiners, dying men and quiet nuns — were remembered in the margins of the great Pali commentaries, each story a dozen lines long, each one kept because a teacher once said: be like this elder. Buddhism’s oldest tradition preserved them. Almost no one has ever read them.

This book brings forty-eight of those lost stories into English for the first time, spare as they were told, with gentle introductions that assume nothing and teach everything: who the Buddha was, what an emperor’s remorse set in motion, how an island kept a library alive through famine and empire, and what these men and women actually did with their minds. Illustrated throughout with photographic plates and hand-drawn maps, and closing with the complete Pali sources, scholarly endnotes, and a full glossary.

No prior knowledge of Buddhism required. Begin anywhere. Stay as long as you like. The company is good.