David Hinton

Elemental Mind:

A Little Guide to Awakening

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After four decades translating and contemplating and writing about the classic texts in ancient China’s Taoist and Ch’an (Zen) Buddhist tradition, David Hinton here explains clearly and directly the essentials: meditation and awakening. He follows a single period of meditation, tracing the insights that it reveals one after another, step by step, slowly gathering them together until we find ourselves in the midst of awakening.

    Little is said about Ch’an awakening: it is normally left as some ineffable state one can know only after long practice, something beyond words and explanations. But Hinton here describes awakening itself in all its dimensions as elemental mind: consciousness free of the self-enclosed center of identity, wide-open and integral to the vast processes of earth and Cosmos. Hinton reveals this to be surprisingly simple. Simple, and yet breathtaking in the transformative wonders it opens.

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                  — from the book jacket

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Shambhala (Spring 2027)

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Praise for David Hinton

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“Enchanting. . . . This mesmerizes.”

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                        –Publishers Weekly 

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Hinton is after . . . depth and boundlessness.

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                        —The New York Review of Books

 

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A national treasure . . . Hinton cracks open the cosmos and takes you into the depths of the mind.

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                        —Lion’s Roar Magazine

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