Zen And American Thought Van Meter Ames by Van Meter Ames 9780824885106, 0824885104 instant download after payment.

“Wise men of the East are stimulating the Western mind, says Van Meter Ames, speaking of Zen Buddhism, but are they infusing the West with something foreign, or are they awakening it to resources of its own? Dr. Ames inclines to the latter view.
“The striking thing about Zen to an American,” Dr. Ames writes, “is that it is a religion, or a way of life in place of a religion, which denies the dualism associated with religion in the West, and is entirely naturalistic.”
Dr. Ames feels that Americans have lived much by Zen—as they have found it in the Bible. “They saw themselves, like the Hebrews of old, coping with the wilderness, seeking the Promised Land. When they read the Bible for themselves and did not rely on interpretations which take the Zen out of it, they saw that Jesus was not so much a man of sorrow as of hope and joy...who bade them be of good cheer, and know the prophets by their fruits. By their fruits--that was the secret of the Zen masters; not anything said, not anything done, so much as saying and doing things in a way to make all the difference, if only in asking to pass the tea, or in doing the dishes.”
Ames finds Zen, without that name, in the thinking of Paine and Jefferson. As for today’s dilemma: “It is hard for Americans not to feel that Jefferson’s ideal of government to foster freedom and the pursuit of happiness can somehow be kept even in an industrial age. The saving thing may be the discovery and adaptation of Zen at this late date, with the lesson of yielding to a dangerous force and seizing a chance to trip it in our favor.”
In this unique book, exhibiting a lifetime of work in the field of American philosophy, plus a wide and sympathetic understanding of Chinese and Japanese philosophy in general and Zen in particular, Ames finds Zen ways throughout American life and Zen philosophy in the thinking of Americans from the beginning through Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, the elder Henry James, William James, Peirce, Royce, Santayana, Dewey, and Mead.