Zen

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Zen. It’s often thought of as a form of Buddhism that emphasises the practice of meditation over any particular set of beliefs. In fact Zen belongs to a particular intellectual tradition within Buddhism that took root in China in the 6th century AD. It spread to Japan in the early Middle Ages, where Zen practitioners set up religious institutions like temples, monasteries and universities that remain important today.

→ Listen on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Tim Barrett 8 episodes
  Emeritus Professor in the Department of the Study of Religions at SOAS, University of London
• Lucia Dolce 2 episodes
  Numata Reader in Japanese Buddhism at SOAS, University of London
• Eric Greene No other episodes
  Lecturer in East Asian Religions at the University of Bristol

Reading list

• Soto Zen in Medieval Japan
  William Bodiford (University of Hawaii Press, 1993) Google Books →
• The Zen Monastic Experience: Buddhist Practice in Contemporary Korea
  Robert E. Buswell (Princeton University Press, 1992)
• Visions of Power: Imagining Medieval Japanese Buddhism
  Bernard Faure (Princeton University Press, 1993) Google Books →
• The Rhetoric of Immediacy: A Cultural Critique of Chan/Zen Buddhism
  Bernard Faure (Princeton University Press, 1991) Google Books →
• Opening a Mountain: Koans of the Zen Masters
  Steven Heine (Oxford University Press, 2002) Google Books →
• Zen Ritual: Studies of Zen Buddhist Theory in Practice
  Steven Heine and Dale S. Wright (Oxford University Press, 2008) Google Books →
• Seeing Through Zen: Encounter, Transformation, and Genealogy in Chinese Chan Buddhism
  John McRae (University of California Press, 2004) Google Books →
• How Zen Became Zen: The Dispute over Enlightenment and the Formation of Chan Buddhism in Song-Dynasty China
  Morten Schlutter (University of Hawaii Press, 2008) Google Books →
• Zen at War
  Brian Victoria (Weatherhill, 1997) Google Books →
• The Linji Lu and the Creation of Chan Orthodoxy: The Development of Chan's Records of Sayings Literature
  Albert Welter (Oxford University Press, 2008) Google Books →

Related episodes

• Daoism
  
  16 Dec, 2010 290 Other religions
• The Buddha
  
  14 Mar, 2002 290 Other religions
• Confucius
  
  1 Nov, 2001 180 Ancient, medieval, and Eastern philosophy
• Shinto
  
  22 Sep, 2011 200 Religion
• Zeno’s Paradoxes
  
  28 May, 2020 190 Modern Western Philosophy
• Stoicism
  
  3 Mar, 2005 100 Philosophy
• Queen Zenobia
  
  30 May, 2013 930 History of the Ancient World
• Zoroastrianism
  
  11 Nov, 2004 290 Other religions
• The Samurai
  
  24 Dec, 2009 950 History of Asia
• The Philosophy of Solitude
  
  19 Jun, 2014 120 Epistemology

Experimental. For more related episodes, visit the visual explorer.

---

Programme ID: b04sxv29

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04sxv29

Auto-category: 294.392 (Zen Buddhism)

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello. Quote, if you meet the Buddha on the road to enlightenment, kill him.