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| Zen Antics: 100 Stories of Enlightenment. by Cleary, Thomas, trad. Boston, MA: Shambhala. 1993. | Throughout Zen history, stories and anecdotes of Zen masters and their students have been used as teaching devices to exemplify the enlightened spirit. Unlike many of the baffling dialogues between Zen masters preserved in the koan literature, the stories retold here are penetratingly simple but with a richness and subtlety that make them worth reading again and again. This collection includes over a hundred such stories-many appearing here in English for the first time-drawn from a wide variety of sources and involving some of the best-known Zen masters, such as Hakuin, Bankei, and Shosan. Also presented are stories and anecdotes involving famous Zen artists and poets, such as Sengai and Basho. |
| Zorba The Greek. by Kazantzakis, Nikos. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster. 1952. | The unnamed narrator is a scholarly, introspective writer who opens a coal mine on the fertile island of Crete. He is gradually drawn out of his ascetic shell by an elderly employee named Zorba, an ebullient man who revels in the social pleasures of eating, drinking, and dancing. The narrator's reentry into a life of experience is completed when his newfound lover, the village widow, is ritually murdered by a jealous mob. |
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