The Story
A guide to the famous Heart Sutra that reveals the tenderness and compassion underlying the striking rhetoric of this popular Buddhist textThe radical message of the Heart Sutra, one of Buddhisms most famous texts, is a sweeping attack on everything we hold most dear: our troubles, the world as we know it, even the teachings of the Buddha himself. Several of the Buddhas followers are said to have suffered heart attacks and died when they first heard its assertion of the basic groundlessness of our existencehence the title of this book.Overcoming fear, the Buddha teaches, is not to be accomplished by shutting down or building walls around oneself, but instead by opening up to understand the illusory nature of everything we fearincluding ourselves. In this book of teachings, Karl Brunnhlzl guides practitioners through this crazy sutra to the wisdom and compassion that lie at its core.
Description
A guide to the famous Heart Sutra that reveals the tenderness and compassion underlying the striking rhetoric of this popular Buddhist textThe radical message of the Heart Sutra, one of Buddhisms most famous texts, is a sweeping attack on everything we hold most dear: our troubles, the world as we know it, even the teachings of the Buddha himself. Several of the Buddhas followers are said to have suffered heart attacks and died when they first heard its assertion of the basic groundlessness of our existencehence the title of this book.Overcoming fear, the Buddha teaches, is not to be accomplished by shutting down or building walls around oneself, but instead by opening up to understand the illusory nature of everything we fearincluding ourselves. In this book of teachings, Karl Brunnhlzl guides practitioners through this crazy sutra to the wisdom and compassion that lie at its core.
