I gather in you go to a hotel in Japan you will probably come across a copy of a small book titled The Teaching of Buddha. It’s a pretty good anthology of Buddhist teachings, with a bit of a slant in the general direction of the Pure Land schools. If you haunt used bookstores, you may well have found a copy. I’ve even stayed at a West Coast hotel and found a copy in my bedside drawer right next to a Gideon Bible.
Well, the people who brought us the Teaching are now into a major project to bring the complete Mahayana Buddhist canon online. That will take awhile…
However they already they have some important Zen texts up and available in digitized form.
Take a visit and wander around a bit.
You will find John McRae’s translation of the Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, the central organizing story of the Zen tradition, Shohei Ichimura’s Baizhang’s Monastic Rule, a seminal document of Zen and the first of three volumes of the Gudo Nishimjima & Chodo Cross translation of Eihei Dogen’s Shobogenzo, one of the most important of Japanese Zen documents.
A great gift…
(thank you Hogen, for the pointer!)
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