Features
- Cover Type: Paperback with 156 pages
- Published by: Trafford Publishing October 16, 2007
- Written in: English
- ISBN 10 Number: 1425133770
- ISBN 13 Number: 978-1425133771
-
Book Dimensions:
9 x 6.1 x 0.5 inches
- Weighs: 8.8 ounces
Product Review
…if you're the least bit interested in some of the more profound mysteries of the life of the mind, you'll find a great deal of guidance and inspiration in these pages. Like a good poem, it chooses not to explicate but rather to evoke, arouse, suggest, inspire. It's a book to be savored…as one might read a volume of poetry. It will surely delight those readers who allow themselves to be led into its dance of language, image, and idea--and it will surely shed more light on the Heart Sutra than many a more academic text.
Peter Clothier --The Huffington Post, December 4 2007
Product Description
An Arrow to the Heart is an exciting, trail-blazing, non-traditional translation and commentary of the Heart Sutra, an ancient and highly revered text in Mahayana Buddhism. This sutra is a concise presentation of the emptiness of all experience. Almost cryptic in its brevity, it confounds and inspires all who read it.
Free of the cultural clothing in which Buddhism came to the West, An Arrow to the Heart goes straight to the heart of the Heart Sutra. In the tradition of Hakuin and others, McLeod's provocative tone and unpredictable turns consistently derail any conceptual understanding of this classic Buddhist scripture. Instead, he throws the reader into the very emptiness the Heart Sutra describes. The result is a sense of previously unsuspected possibilities that illuminate every nook and cranny of your life.
It's also a delightfully irreverent combination of wit, irony, prose, and poetry. If you are looking for a traditional commentary on the Heart Sutra, this is probably not the right book. This book is for people who aren't afraid of having the ground pulled out from under them.
Only in the last few years have senior Western teachers such as Ken McLeod started to write commentaries that truly mix the culture and style of Western thought with a deep respect and understanding of such traditional texts as the Heart Sutra.
Reader ReviewsFor those interested in a bold, unconventional exploration of Buddhism's "Heart Sutra", Ken McLeod's new book, which in my opinion falls closer to poetry than prose, is a great place to find what the author calls, "an experiential, rather than academic" interpretation of the classical text. This unusual blend of pithy incisiveness, on the mark commentary, Koan-like poetics and ever present wit stands apart from McLeod's other writings as well as from most of the ever growing canon of contemporary Buddhist writing. It is relentlessly challenging while remaining surprisingly accessible.
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