Tibetan Zen: Discovering a Lost Tradition Paperback – August 25, 2015

Sam van Schaik has delivered a short masterpiece on the practices of now-extinct Tibetan Zen. Documents retrieved from a cave near Dunhuang - a mix of sutras, teaching guides and student primers - provide a fascinating look at Zen during the period 700-1000 CE.The book chapters each focus on a limited area of Zen practice, but together they paint a clear picture. Each chapter has an introduction describing historical context and illustrating subtleties in the translation, followed by the translated document.It is interesting that many of the teaching documents contain brief FAQs intended to focus teaching correctly. I learned the answers to a few questions I should have asked my teacher long ago.This translation is wonderfully rendered in modern English. It is a pleasure to read.Highly recommended.

This is a very well written book! The teachings contained herein were holed up until 1900 in remote caves in China. Reading through this smartly translated work, I marveled at the connecting threads of these teachings now appearing in English for the first time. I feel very fortunate and blessed to be able to study them in the language of my mother tongue.The breadth and scope of details from this historiography is wonderfully presented, as well as, pith instructions for all levels of practitioners on the path. It is a gem.

Too dry, too academical to me. I didn't finish it.Yet, I liked much the first part of excerpts from Chan teachings that point directly to the highest view.

So beautifully researched and presented without hyperbole or fatuous opinionation! For Zen lovers and meditators a most instructive, inspiring, and authentic text. Check it out again and again!

This book offers valuable insight into the breadth of historical Buddhist practices in Tibet. It provides translations of an assortment of texts from around 1000c.e. with author's narrative to provide context. It helped me better appreciate the doctrinal choices at the heart of the famous debate (in whatever form it may have taken) in that era. I would have enjoyed a larger translation to commentary ratio, but that said, the text was well worth reading.

This book is excellent!I haven't finished it yet, but it's really fun, it helps me a lot to understand the overall history of Zen Buddhism and it is full of wonderful Dharma, profound teachings that apply now just as much as a thousand years ago. I highly recommend it for people with some Buddhist background and curiosity about it's origins in East Asia.

This excellent book illustrates how "original" Zen was introduced and practiced in Tibet from the eighth to the 11th centuries, based on manuscripts from the Danhuang Library Cave. It has been the cause of much discussion and thought in my Sangha's book club & is recommended by all who have read it.

It was very good