Written 400 years ago by a scholar in the Ming Dynasty, one hundred years after Columbus and around the time Shakespeare completed Henry VI, accomplished scholar and philosopher Hong Zicheng retired from public life and settled down to write an informal compilation of his thoughts on the essence of life, human nature, and heaven and earth. Though he wrote other books as well, only this one has survived—thanks largely to its continuous popularity, first in China and later in Japan and Korea. Entitled Caigentan (Vegetable Roots Discourse), this book has been studied and cherished for four hundred years.

Terse, humorous, witty, and. above all, timely, this book offers a provocative and personal mix of Daoist, Buddhist, and Confucian understanding. It contains 360 observations that lead us through paths as complex, absurd, and grotesque as life itself. While it has been translated into many languages, this comprehensive version will immediately become the standard edition for generations of English readers to come.

About the Author

Hong Zicheng was a Chinese philosopher who lived during the end of the Ming Dynasty.

Robert Aitken is the author of more than a dozen books about Buddhism, including A Zen Wave, Encouraging Words, and Taking the Path of Zen. A dedicated Buddhist for most of his life, he is a former abbot and roshi of the Honolulu Diamond Sangha in Hawaii, which he co-founded with his late wife Anne Hopkins Aitken in 1959. He now lives in retirement at the Palolo Zen Center in Honolulu.

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Pulpfiction Books is one of Western Canada's largest independent bookstores. We maintain a basic stock of approximately 100,000 titles in three different Vancouver neighborhood locations and most days see several hundred new books added to the shelves. In addition to full runs of reading copies by most major science fiction, fantasy, and mystery authors, we carry a wide assortment of contemporary fiction, literature, books on art, architecture, cultural studies, philosophy, science, music, travel writing, cookbooks, poetry, drama, and most other major subject fields. We travel regularly throughout North America, sourcing rare and hard-to-find titles. We buy books every day. No appointment is ever required to sell books to us. While the bulk of our purchases consists of recent trade and mass market fiction and nonfiction, we are always interested in purchasing antiquarian stock, particularly in the visual arts, architecture, and Northwest Coast art and literature. Our shop website, www.pfbvan.ca, gives more details about how we make our buying decisions.

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