Paula Arai

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 activities of our personal daily lives. She reminds us that it is not always necessary to enact rituals of religion in an effort to change. If we see life as a cosmic ceremony, then mindful attention to the everyday rituals of life has the potential to transform our personal and collective experiences of suffering. This book is a gift!" —Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, author of The Shamanic Bones of Zen and The Deepest Peace

"Paula Arai offers a tenfold Zen path to healing. A map to appreciating life and death just as it is. Enduring and timely rituals to alleviate our suffering." —Duncan Ryūken Williams, author of American Sutra: A Story of Faith and Freedom in the Second World War

"This book is warming rays and quenching rain, fragrant tea and wholesome meal, shimmering brocade and hardworking tenugui cloth. Crafted with utmost care, it perfects the art of giving all that is beautiful, practical, and protective. ‘Daily life is brimming with possibilities to enact healing rituals,’ Dr. Arai writes. The dancing words in these pages show us how, inviting us into a lineage of time-hewn wisdom and limitless love." —Chenxing Han, author of Be the Refuge and one long listening

"Buddhist scholar and author Paula Arai’s The Little Book of Zen Healing gently reorients the reader from the potential chaos of a difficult life, season, or task, to making meaning with the whole body-heart-mind. Whether our circumstances are mundane or tumultuous, Arai writes, ritual can be driven by thoughtful intent and engaging deepest love." —Lion's Roar