Elemental Mind: A Little Guide to Awakening

The essential primer for understanding awakening in the Ch’an Buddhist tradition.

Long acclaimed as a translator and interpreter of ancient Chinese philosophy, David Hinton turns his attention to the practice of meditation. Distilling 2,600 years of Taoist and Ch’an (Zen) wisdom into a narration of a single meditation session, Hinton traces the insights that can arise in the mind of the meditator—insights that reveal the deep interrelation of self and other, humanity and earth, consciousness and cosmos.

Hinton strips away complex Chinese terminology to reveal the simple, empirical truths at the heart of meditative awakening. In plainspoken prose, he shows how our minds are empty in nature, how thought is the cosmos contemplating itself, how our primordial kinship with nature entails an environmental ethics of responsibility, and how beauty can teach us just as effectively as a retreat in a monastery. Interwoven with translations of poems by Yang Wan-li, one of China’s great Ch’an poets, Elemental Mind will deepen your understanding of the power of meditation.