Description
This book opens a window onto the daily life of Gold Mountain Monastery in San Francisco during the early years of the Venerable Master Hsuan Hua's ministry in America. In the summer of 1968, the Venerable Master began a series of lectures on the great scriptures of the Mahayana, completing first the Sรผrangama Sutra, then the Lotus Sutra, and finally the Avatamsaka (Flower Adornment) Sutra in 1979, and he continued lecturing regularly until his gradual retirement in the late 1980's. These incomparable lectures were the first of their kind to be heard in any Western country
In the early years his audience consisted largely of young Americans like myself, each of us drawn to him by some lucky and inexplicable circumstance, and his lectures were one of his many means of molding Buddhist practitioners out of our unpromising American clay. We were the fortunate ones who had the opportunity, and the desire born of a deep intuition, to return again and again into the presence of this extraordinary being.
Once there, he instructed us, cajoled us, entertained us, scolded us, comforted us, fed and housed us, always leading us in our commitment to a pure life, always urging us forward in our spiritual practice-in short, teaching us, as he would put it, how to be human beings.
ISBN:9780881399387
