Why Buddha Touched the Earth is (or will be) a collection of essays on the philosophy I've come to call "Zen Paganism". It combines several years of research into the history of Buddhism and the Neo-Pagan movement with my own experiences in the Pagan community and informal Buddhist studies.
What appears here is a preview. I'm placing some sample draft chapters here for review by friends and other curious parties. Please feel free to leave intelligent feedback. Proselytizing will, of course, be deleted.
Please note that these are drafts: Typos are present. Ideas are not yet fully formed.
I expect to have the first complete draft of the book by summer or fall of 2009. I have a few potential publishers in mind, but would certainly appreciate any leads or contacts. All else failing, I will self-publish it.
(I have not included references and sources in the posts here, but they will be included in the book -- there will be many footnotes in the sections dealing with Pagan history. This is meant to be a popular rather than academic work, so I haven't always gone back to primary sources. But on the other hand, the web has made a surprising and delightful number of old books easily available -- many thanks to Google Books, to the Internet Sacred Text Archive, and to Project Gutenberg!)
Here's a list of the planned chapters, with links to sample drafts for some:
- "I Love Being Religious!"
- Zen Paganism
- Industrial Strength Shamanism
- The Mystic Sense
- A Guy Who Woke Up
- A Red-Bearded Barbarian and An Illiterate Peasant
- The Tapestry of Zen Pagan History (or, Poets, Buddhists, and Magicians, Oh My!)
- The Way of the Kami (concerning Shinto, the native Pagan religion of Japan)
- It's All In Your Mind
- Why Buddha Touched the Earth
- How Shall We Live? (ethics: the Buddhist precepts, the Wiccan Rede, the ethical portions of the Eightfold Path)
- How To Sit Down and Shut Up (meditation, Zen-style)
Zen and the Art of Magic (the elements of ritual) - What Would Buddha Eat?
- Sex (or the lack thereof) and the Single Gaijin
- Life and Death in the Stream
- Law, Sausage, and Religion (why would should see them being made)
- Appendix: Sacred Texts (Zen stories, Pagan poems, and other good stuff, plus commentaries)
- Appendix: Glossary (talking about Buddhism brings in Japanese, Sanskrit, Chinese...help!)
- Appendix: Big Raft, Little Raft (a few words about Therevada and Mahayana Buddhism)
- Appendix: Woodcraft and Wicca?
- Appendix: Masons and Rosicrucians
- Appendix: Curious Characters (brief bios on Anna Kingsford, Ernest Seton, Allan Bennett, Soyen Shaku, Kerry Thornley)
- Appendix: A Partial Time-line of the Pagan and Buddhist Revivals
If this looks interesting to you and you'd like updates about the book and related work, you might want to get on my "Zen Pagan" mailing list. Thanks.
-Tom Swiss / tms@infamous.net