Red Thread Zen: Humanly Entangled in Emptiness

by Susan Murphy

Love, attachment, the passions, gender, carnality, birth, bodily being, mortality, belonging, suffering, hope, despair, personhood, imagination, vitality, the struggle to be fully human – how do these things dwell wholly in emptiness, how do we reconcile their vivid life with ‘no-thingness’?

The red (or ‘vermilion’) thread originally connoted the color of the silk undergarments courtesans were obliged to wear. Most spiritual traditions do their best to distance themselves as thoroughly as possible from such direct and intimate contact with the fact of impassioned human bodily being, if not to declare open war upon the flesh, and the female body that most plainly bears flesh into the world. Spirituality has trouble dealing with the fact that we arrive here covered in blood.

But the red thread can never be cut. Why not? Why would no perfectly accomplished saint ever even dream of cutting it?

Red Thread Zen will set out to explore every corner of the magnificent koan of being ‘still attached to the red thread, or ‘line of tears’. This is an argument against the bloodless and socially disengaged form of ‘Buddhism’ that is generally being gestated in the West, one that shades too readily into the blandest of bland self-help.

Genres: Philosophy, Buddhism, Zen

240 pages, Paperback

Published October 11, 2016

Reviews

[Raven · Rating 4 out of 5]

Possibly taking this year's award for longest time taken for me to read a short book, "Red Thread Zen" addresses what is to me the central difference between Buddhism and my approach to philosophy. Its descriptive back cover immediately commanded my attention, since the major reason that I'm not a Buddhist is my disagreement with their conception of embodied suffering. The chance to read a whole book which dances with the tensions in having bodies and emotions in all their messiness without advocating that we work to overcome that was not to be missed. Murphy draws from the wisdom traditions of many cultures and their stories in making her points about Zen -- you might see the Blue Cliff Record, the Bible, a quote from aboriginal Australian elders, or the poetry of an East Timorese resistance poet. I learned something about early Orthodox Christianity while reading. Her discussion includes the world, with far-flung arms, without letting go of her discussion of how Zen addresses moments of mortality, feeling, and the accompaniments of being embodied. Worth reflecting on; I suspect if I read this book again in five years I'd have different takeaways from it than I did this time.

[Eduardo A. Camargo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential for any Zen student. Aitken Roshi's students will love it.