Zen Fiction

Ryokan (1758–1831) is, along with Dogen and Hakuin, one of the three giants of Zen in Japan. But unlike his two renowned colleagues, Ryokan was a societal dropout, living mostly as a hermit and a beggar. He was never head of a monastery or temple. He liked playing with children. He had no dharma heir. Even so, people recognized the depth of his realization, and he was sought out by people of all walks of life for the teaching to be experienced in just being around him.

Jessamyn Teoh is closeted, broke, and moving back to Malaysia, a country she left when she was a toddler. So when Jess starts hearing voices, she chalks it up to stress. But there's only one voice in her head, and it claims to be the ghost of her estranged grandmother, Ah Ma. In life Ah Ma was a spirit medium, the avatar of a mysterious deity called the Black Water Sister. Now she's determined to settle a score against a gang boss who has offended the god - and she's decided Jess is going to help her do it.

When, one dark night in November, Prince Ludovico Ruspanti fell 150 feet to his death in the chapel at St. Peter's, Rome, there were a number of questions to be answered. Inspector Aurelio Zen finds that getting the answers isn't easy, as witness after witness is mysteriously silenced - by violent death. To crack the secret of the Vatican, Zen must penetrate the most secret place of all: the Cabal.

A powerful industrialist, Ruggiero Miletti, is kidnapped. Inspector Zen is transferred to Perugia to take over the case - but finds that there are many obstacles in his way. The local authorities see him as an interloper, and the victim’s family, one of the most powerful in Italy, seem content to let Miletti languish in the hands of his abductors. Zen has crossed swords with the establishment before - and lost. Can he succeed this time?

Aurelio Zen of Rome's elite Criminalpol is back, but nobody's supposed to know it. After months in hospital recovering from a bomb attack on his car, he is lying low under a false name at a beach resort on the Tuscan coast, waiting to testify in an imminent anti-Mafia trial. Zen has clear instructions: to sit back and enjoy the classic Italian beach holiday - relaxing in the sun, eating seafood and engaging in a little mild flirtation with the attractive woman sitting under the next umbrella.

The Royal Society of Unnatural Philosophers has long been tasked with maintaining magic within His Majesty's lands. But lately, the once proper institute has fallen into disgrace. Zacharias Wythe ventures to the border of Fairyland to discover why England's magical stocks are drying up. When his adventure brings him in contact with a woman with immense power, he sets on a path which will alter the nature of sorcery.

Inspector Zen has a problem: an impossible murder, recorded on the closed-circuit video of Oscar Burolo's top-security Sardinian fortress. As Zen gets to work, he is once again plunged into a menacing and violent world where his own life is soon at risk.

When the corpse of the shady industrialist who owns the local football team is found both shot and stabbed with a Parmesan knife, Italian police inspector Aurelio Zen is called to Bologna to oversee the investigation. Recovering slowly from surgery and fleeing an equally painful crisis in his personal life, Zen is only too happy to take on what at first appears to be a routine and relatively undemanding assignment.

When a group of Austrian cavers exploring a network of abandoned military tunnels in the Italian Alps come across human remains at the bottom of a deep shaft, everyone assumes the death was accidental - until the still unidentified body is stolen from the morgue and the Defence Ministry puts a news blackout on the case. And is the recent car bombing in Campione d'Italia, a tiny tax haven surrounded on all sides by Switzerland, somehow related?

The Hidden Lamp is a collection of 100 koans and stories of Buddhist women from the time of the Buddha to the present day. This revolutionary book brings together many teaching stories that were hidden for centuries, unknown until this volume. These stories are extraordinary expressions of freedom and fearlessness, relevant for men and women of any time or place. In this audio, we meet nuns, laywomen practicing with their families, famous teachers honored by emperors, and old women selling tea on the side of the road.

The Eastern front has become a living hell. The enemy army is approaching and the Empire’s allies are being wiped out. There isn’t enough to eat or drink, and no time to sleep—yet the war rages on. Hoping for nothing more than to delay the end, Tanya races to the battlefield with her mages in tow, while Zettour lives up to his reputation as an enemy of the world.

This is the tale of a cat wise in the ways of zen, journeying to discover a fabled ancient pine, under which infinite wisdom may be found. Along the way he meets a vivid cast of animals: from an anxious monkey and a tortoise tired of life to a tiger struggling with anger, a confused wolf cub and a covetous crow. But it's a surprise encounter with a playful kitten, that forces the cat to question everything ...

More than a decade before the release of the book that would make him famous, Robert M. Pirsig had already caught hold of the central theme that would animate Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Though he was revered by fans who considered him a guru, the famously private Pirsig published only two books and consented to few interviews and almost no public appearances. Now, for the first time, listeners will be granted access to five decades of Pirsig’s personal writings in this posthumous collection that illuminates the evolution of his thinking to an unprecedented degree.

Tanya has won victory after victory on the battlefield, and still the Empire hurtles toward its destruction. Zettour stands at the helm, a warped sense of patriotism guiding his actions as he prepares the stage. His only goal now is to secure the best possible defeat the Empire can afford, even if it means going down in history as the greatest villain of all time. And to make that happen, he’ll do whatever it takes to shock and awe the world, starting with Ildoa. The time for diplomacy or reason has passed. There is only war.

This book offers a complete translation of the Majjhima Nikāya, or Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha, one of the major collections of texts in the Pāli Canon, the authorised scriptures of Theravada Buddhism. This collection - among the oldest records of the historical Buddha's original teachings - consists of 152 suttas or discourses of middle length, distinguished as such from the longer and shorter suttas of the other collections.

Aurelio Zen returns to his native Venice to investigate the disappearance of a rich American resident but he soon learns that, amid the hazy light and shifting waters of the lagoon, nothing is what it seems. As Zen is drawn deeper into the complex and ambiguous mysteries surrounding the discovery of a skeletal corpse on an ossuary island in the north lagoon, he is also forced to confront a series of disturbing revelations about his own life.

High above the blood- and mud-soaked trenches, a young girl pits herself against army mages in high stakes aerial duels with bullets, spells, and bayonets. Her name is Tanya Degurechaff and she is the Devil of the Rhine, one of the greatest soldiers the Empire has ever seen!

After his adventures in Cosi Fan Tutti, Aurelio Zen finds himself back in Rome, sneezing in a damp wine cellar and being given another unorthodox assignment - to release the jailed scion of an important wine-growing family.

Neopolitan businessmen, politicians, and eminent mafiosi are assassinated as someone takes literally the job of cleaning up the city's tarnished image. In this mystery, Aurelio Zen discovers that in '90s 'New Italy', things are still the same.

Writen in the 13th century by Japanese Zen master Muju. Well-known koans in the collection include A Cup of Tea, The Sound of One Hand, No Water, No Moon, and Everything is Best. Includes the soundtrack The Mysterious Sound of Wind in the Bamboo