A lively collection of folk tales and Buddhist teaching stories from four noted premodern Japanese Zen masters: Taigu Sôchiku (1584–1669), Sengai Gibon (1750-1831), Hakuin Ekaku (1686-1769), and Taigu Ryôkan (1758-1831).Zen Master Tales collects never before translated stories of four prominent Zen masters from the Edo period of Japanese history (1603-1868). Drawn from an era that saw the “democratization” of Japanese Zen, these stories paint a picture of ...

The teachings of the groundbreaking Buddhist Zen Master: "Should remain for years to come the standard source book for the Western student of Zen" (Douglas Harding, The Middle Way).The eccentric Bankei (1622–1693) has long been an underground hero in the world of Zen. At a time when Zen was becoming overly formalized in Japan, he stressed its relevance to everyday life, insisting on the importance of naturalness and spontaneity. This volume presents his te...

Miro Basinas is an experimental botanist who sells his rarefied product to a discerning clientele. Only Miro's not growing heirloom tomatoes or making organic wine-he's growing weed. And when Miro hits the big time by winning Amsterdam's famed Cannabis Cup, cannasseurs and ganjaficionados aren't the only people who want a piece of him and his mind-blowing pot that tastes like mangoes. A wickedly funny novel, Baked opens with a bang as Miro is cut down by a bullet. A mild-mannered hipster w...

When the greedy owner of a Las Vegas movie catering company tries to muscle in on a local, family-owned business in Honolulu, it leaves a very bad taste in the mouths of the natives, and the battle for paradise begins for Joseph, a young Hawaiian chef. As far as Joseph's father Sid is concerned, this is an invasion on par with Captain Cook and the mainlanders have to be stopped at all costs. As Joseph defends his family he encounters a TV producer rebounding from a bad breakup and sufferin...

Sepp Gregory, a reality-TV hunk and one of People magazine's "sexiest men alive," is on tour to promote his debut novel. Not that Sepp's actually read the book-he doesn't have to, he lived it! And everyone just wants him to take his shirt off. The book has hit the bestseller list and is even getting rave reviews from serious critics. Aside from Harriet Post, that is. One of the blogosphere's most respected literary minds, Harriet fears that the novel's reception means the end of civilizati...

Original Nature is the historic translation and commentary on the Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch of Chinese Zen by America's first Zen Master, Sokei-an Sasaki (1882-1945). Finally available, 75 years after its completion, Sokei-an considered the Sixth Patriach's message an essential foundation for the transmission of Zen to America"I think the Sixth Patriarch never dreamed that his record... would be explained to Westerners in New York... I feel that I am in a valle...

What could cause Bob to give up his job at the Los Angeles pathology lab that demands so little of him, where he can play Tetris and Web surf whenever he wants? What could lead him to walk out on his beautiful girlfriend, who makes her living as a masturbation coach? What could make him risk everything and ultimately transform him into Roberto, a kingpin in the Los Angeles Mexican mafia? An erotic tattoo. But not just any naughty skin ink, the Mona Lisa of erotic tattoos, painted on a seve...

Sokei-an translated the Record of Lin-chi (Lin-chi lu) from 1931 to 1933, in his first series of lectures. He felt that Americans needed original Chinese Zen source materials, translated and commented upon by a Zen master, and there were no such materials in those early days. Sokei-an was the first Zen master to translate the Record of Lin-chi and to give a commentary in English to Western students. The real historic value of Sokei-ans Lin-chi is in his commentary with its manifestation of...

From the author of Moist and Delicious comes a raucous comic novel where anything goes. Turk Henry, an overweight, unemployed rock star married to a supermodel, has discovered that Thailand is probably the last place a recovering sex addict should go on vacation, yet here he is, surrounded by topless groupies and haunted by the stares of hundreds of luscious bar girls. Turk's struggles with monogamy, however, pale beside a greater challenge when his wife is abducted by a group of renegade,...

Bryan LeBlanc worked his way up into a plum position on Wall Street as the boy genius of the foreign exchange desk. Surrounded by acolytes of the free market, the true believers, the U.S. Marines of capitalism?"the few, the proud, the completely full of themselves"?Bryan soon realizes that being honest at a dishonest job is not the path to success. He decides to give Wall Street a taste of its own medicine and hatches an intricate plan to disappear permanently with just enough misappropria...