The Fire He Carried Home
A complete 20,000-word book about Eihei Dōgen Zenji, free and yours to keep. Not a sample chapter.
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Told with full reverence from within the tradition. Enter your email and it is waiting in your own library here: read it, and your place is always kept across every device.
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The hour has no name you would find on a temple bell schedule, but every one of us who has sat a sesshin knows it by feel: the deep watch past midnight when the incense stick has burned down and been replaced once already, when the legs have gone past aching into a kind of far country, when the mind stops bargaining for the end of the period because it has forgotten there ever was an end. At Tiantong Mountain, in the monks' hall of Jingde Monastery, that hour arrived the same way it always does — quietly, without ceremony, the oil lamps guttering low along the platforms, a hundred backs unmoving in their rows, the whole hall breathing as one slow animal in the dark. It was the summer of 1225. Dōgen was twenty-five years old, a monk from Japan who had crossed a sea to find a teacher worth dying for, and for two years he had found teacher after teacher who could not answer the question burning a hole through the center of his chest. Then he came up this mountain to a new abbot named Rujing, and something in him had gone quiet the way a compass needle goes quiet when it finally finds north.
9 movements, carrying the whole life of Eihei Dōgen Zenji from beginning to enduring memory.
- The Night Body and Mind Fell Away
- A Child Watches Smoke Rise
- The Question That Would Not Close
- Crossing the Cold Sea
- What He Carried Home Across the Water
- The Sword and the Cushion
- The Whole World Is the Dharma Hall
- He Left the Robe on the Cushion
- The Doorway
Bought here, this life does not land in a downloads folder. It lives in your own library, in rooms built for unhurried reading and listening.
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This life is being voiced now. Own it in ebook today and the narration joins your library the day it is finished, at no extra cost. The early believer is never left behind.
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One membership opens all 3 volumes of this life, and every other life in the Sanctuary besides, to read here and to listen to here, with each new life joining the day it is finished.
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What is the free book, and is there a catch?
No catch. The Invitation is a real book, free, and yours to keep: a complete portrait of this life in about 20,000 words, not a sample or a teaser. It is the doorway. The three volumes tell the life in its fullness, and they are here whenever you wish to go deeper.
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Is there an audiobook?
The three volumes are available as ebooks today; the audiobook narration joins your library when each life is voiced, at no extra cost to owners.
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The free Invitation costs nothing, and always will. Own any title for $8 — ebook and audiobook together — or a Complete Life for $20. The Library Card — $369, once, yours for life — opens every life in the house, every volume and every audiobook, and each new life joins the day it is finished. Every life, every volume, every voice - and every one still to come. One payment, yours for life.
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Every life is sold in print and ebook through the ordinary bookshops: Ingram, Google Play, Apple Books, Kobo. The membership is how to read the whole house; the shops are how to keep one life on your shelf forever.
Lives that walk beside Eihei Dōgen Zenji — chosen for their likeness, not their fame.
