Buddhist Heroes of the Ancient World

If you love Zen stories, meet their ancestors.

Centuries before Zen was born, monks in the meditation caves of an ancient island told stories just like these — short, startling, and true. The word Zen itself descends, through Chinese Chan, from the old Indian word for meditation — the same word these monks knew in Pali as jhāna. What Zen would one day make famous, they were already living: the guarded eye, the unmoved foot, the mouthful of water held against one's own politeness.

For seven hundred years the elders of ancient Sri Lanka — hunters and wrestlers, librarians and kings' examiners, dying men and quiet nuns — were remembered in the margins of the great Pali commentaries, each story a dozen lines long, each one kept because a teacher once said: be like this elder. Buddhism's oldest tradition preserved them; almost no one has ever read them.

Hidden in the margins of the oldest Buddhist library on earth, the lost stories of the enlightened elders are translated here for the first time — with gentle introductions that assume nothing, photographic plates and maps of their vanished world, and the complete Pali sources.

No prior knowledge of Buddhism required. Begin anywhere. Stay as long as you like. The company is good.

Inside this edition

• A monk who holds water in his mouth for years to keep a vow of silence
• A wrestler at the height of his fame, undone by a single overheard sentence
• A dying elder who takes his own disease as the object of his meditation
• A farmer in the coils of a python, choosing his given word over his life
• A deity who weeps because one monk's kindness had kept an invisible village at peace