The Little Book of Zen Healing

PAULA ARAI was raised in Detroit by a Japanese mother and did Zen training in Japan. She obtained her Ph.D. in Buddhist Studies from Harvard University in 1993 and is now the Eshinni & Kakushinni Professor of Women and Buddhist Studies at the Institute of Buddhist Studies in Berkeley, California. She is the author of Bringing Zen Home: The Healing Heart of Japanese Women s Rituals, Women Living Zen: Japanese Soto Buddhist Nuns, and Painting Enlightenment: Healing Visions of the Heart Sutra.

This exquisite book is medicine for our time. It is a book that you will return to, again and again, for the profundity of its wisdom and practicality of its path.
Joan Halifax, author of Being with Dying and Standing at the Edge

Intimate, honest, revealing, caring listening and learning to heal. This is a book of revolutionary wisdom.
Kazuaki Tanahashi, author of Zen Chants

The Little Book of Zen Healing is a gift. In it, Paula Arai distills the wisdom, kindness, and care of our women ancestors into small yet empowering rituals we can practice in our lives to heal ourselves and those we love.
Ruth Ozeki, author of The Book of Form and Emptiness

Paula Arai has spent years, actually lifetimes, learning attentively from a generation of elderly Japanese women whose daily, hourly Zen practices infuse their lives and the lives of their families with quiet, invisible beauty, prayer, and awareness, imbuing small gestures with peace, equilibrium, and subtle, penetrating healing power. This book is alive with deep understanding, light, transformation, and secret joy.
Peter Sellars, opera, theater, film and festival director

After decades of important ethnographic study and spiritual practice in Japan, Paula Arai here presents us with a beautiful expression of the path of healing that has been the through-line of her life. To many, Zen means austere meditation and paradoxical sayings, but in this lovely book, full of brilliant stories and simple practices, Arai shows us that, more than this, Zen is a way of profound healing, and of beauty and harmony. I have long valued the ritual side of Zen practice, which Arai beautifully extends and develops. The Little Book of Zen Healing is an important book for Zen students . . . and everyone else.
Norman Fischer, author of When You Greet Me I Bow: Notes and Reflections from a Life in Zen

Arai s words inform us that healing occurs in the small silences and