Storehouse of Treasures: Recovering the Riches of Chan and Zen

Storehouse of Treasures unearths wise and beautiful elements of Chan and Zen still little known in the West, revealing unexpected aspects of the tradition and new implications for practice.
Since the dawn of Chan and Zen in medieval China and Japan, members of these schools have enlivened their teaching by creatively adopting and adapting terms, images, principles, poetry, and lore native to their societies. Unfortunately, so much of that cultural wealth has been ”lost in translation” that Western practitioners have barely begun to discover and appreciate this extraordinarily rich legacy. In Storehouse of Treasures, second-generation American Zen teacher Nelson Foster makes a series of adventuresome forays into the trove of material laid up by the Dharma ancestors, bringing to light:

Masters’ delight in playing with words, stories, and inherited Buddhist concepts, bending them to express the Dharma in inspired...