New Mahāyāna : Buddhism for a post-modern world /

A well-grounded and audacious proposal to restore Japanese Buddhism to its authentic place, prior to sectarian differences. Akizuki is a man of 70 years, author of 50 books, independent Rinzai master, and advocate of Zen studies as the "total engagement of the thinking person." This, his first book to be translated into English, is deeply personal, global in intent, and pervaded by the spirit of D.T. Suzuki. It complements the philosophical works of Nishida Kitaro and Nishitani Keji, but is more accessible. It would augment one's reading of phenomenological studies such as Drew Leder's The Absent Body (1990) and would be an appropriate measure of many of the more or less radically non-Japanese expressions of Zen in the West--e.g., D.E. Harding's On Having No Head: Zen and the Re-Discovery of the Obvious (1986) and C.J. Beck's Everyday Zen: Love and Work (1989). Recommended for courses on Eastern religions, interreligious relations, and religion and personality. -G. R. Thursby, University of Florida

Any organized religion incapable of reforming and adapting will discover either its followers drifting away or the proliferation of many sects under its name. Christianity's fortunes exemplify this condition, but so do Buddhism's. Keenly aware of this, Akizuki Ryomin, a Japanese Zen monk, was--even back in 1959--calling for the radical reform of Buddhism. He descried the path to that reform in the awakening of the individual self. Hoping to shake the tradition to its very foundation, he threatened to publish the secret answers to many hundreds of the classical Zen "riddles" known as koan. He didn't, instead spending the next 30 years constructing a new Mahayana, or liberal Buddhism. Akizuki's writings are not only voluminous and well known in his own country, but also, like a medicine, difficult to take, for he does not spare any one or any group in his search for the "real spirit of Zen." Even the Westerner fairly well versed in Zen will find much in this book that surprises. The excellent translation is the first in English of Akizuki's writings. Hopefully, it will not be the last. Footnotes; index. ~--Jerry Alber