Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Red Thread Zen: Humanly Entangled in Emptiness

Red Thread Zen: Humanly Entangled in Emptiness

Murphy, Susan

Paperback

BuddhismGeneral Eastern Religions

ISBN10: 1619027836
ISBN13: 9781619027831
Publisher: Catapult
Published: Oct 11 2016
Pages: 272
Weight: 0.45
Height: 0.90 Width: 4.90 Depth: 6.90
Language: English
Love, attachment, the passions, gender, carnality, birth, bodily being, mortality, belonging, suffering, hope, despair, personhood, imagination, vitality, the struggle to be fully human - how do these things dwell wholly in emptiness, how do we reconcile their vivid life with 'no-thingness'?

The red (or 'vermilion') thread originally connoted the color of the silk undergarments courtesans were obliged to wear. Most spiritual traditions do their best to distance themselves as thoroughly as possible from such direct and intimate contact with the fact of impassioned human bodily being, if not to declare open war upon the flesh, and the female body that most plainly bears flesh into the world. Spirituality has trouble dealing with the fact that we arrive here covered in blood.

But the red thread can never be cut. Why not? Why would no perfectly accomplished saint ever even dream of cutting it?

Red Thread Zen will set out to explore every corner of the magnificent koan of being 'still attached to the red thread, or 'line of tears'. This is an argument against the bloodless and socially disengaged form of 'Buddhism' that is generally being gestated in the West, one that shades too readily into the blandest of bland self-help.

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