LIVING ZEN! The Story of Zen With 26 Principles & Practices for Helping You Succeed in Life!

Product Description In the early 1600s some of Japan’s samurai who were not vassals of fief clan lords traveled about the country challenging other samurai to fight duels to the death as their way of training—a shogunate approved custom known as shugyosha [shuu-g’yoh-shah] or “samurai-in-training,” The shugyosha who was to become the most famous samurai in Japan’s history was a young man named Musashi Miyamoto, who fought his first duel when he was 13 years old. By the time Miyamoto was 28 he had killed over 60 other samurai in death duels, a dueling record that has never been equaled in any country where duels were a common practice. Somehow, at a very young age, Miyamoto had developed a fighting technique based on 13 principles and 13 practices that made him invincible—simply unbeatable by a single or multiple opponents. Miyamoto then retired from killing, but continued roaming the country, teaching his way of sword-fighting at the dojo of fief lords and staging demonstrations. The principles and practices Miyamoto created were based on the fundamentals of Zen: recognizing the difference between illusion and reality; between the irrational and rational; between the impractical and practical; between weakness and strength, etc. In addition to the story of Zen in India, China, Korea and Japan, I have identified and described the 26 principles and practices Miyamoto created and reformulated them as guidelines for the most desirable mindset and behavior of all categories of people, from athletes, businesspeople, educators, parents and politicians to students. About the Author Boyé Lafayette De Mente has been involved with Japan, China, Korea and Mexico since the late 1940s as a member of a U.S. intelligence agency, student, journalist, editor and author working out of Tokyo, Seoul, Hong Kong, Singapore and Mexico City. He is a graduate of Jochi University in Tokyo, and The American Institute for Foreign Trade (in 1953), now Thunderbird School of Global Management, in Glendale, Arizona, USA. De Mente wrote the first ever books on the Japanese way of doing business (Japanese Etiquette and Ethics in Business in 1959 and How to Do Business in Japan in 1962), and was the first to introduce the now commonly used Japanese terms wa, nemawashi, kaizen, tatemae-honne, shibui, sabi and wabi to the outside business world! His 70-plus other books run the gamut from language learning to the night-time "pink" trades in Japan, the sensual nature of Oriental cultures, male-female relations, and understanding and coping with the Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Mexican mindset in business and social situations. He has also written extensively about his home state of Arizona and the failures of American culture.