Pointing at the Autumn Sky
A complete 21,000-word book about Hui-neng, 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 flag on its bamboo pole outside Faxing Temple was nothing remarkable — a strip of yellow temple silk, sun-bleached at the hem, that had hung there through a hundred ordinary afternoons. On this one, in the eighth month of the year 676, a wind came off the Pearl River and took hold of it, and the whole courtyard fell into an argument that would not end for thirteen centuries. Master Yinzong had just finished the day's lecture on the Mahaparinirvana Sutra. He had been speaking, as he often did that autumn, on the nature that does not die — the bright, uncreated ground the sutra calls Buddha-nature, present whether a being knows it or not, whether a life is long or cut short, whether the words used to point at it are eloquent or clumsy. The monks filed out of the hall into the last gold light of the day, minds still full of what they had heard, and it was then, in the ordinary business of walking back to their quarters, that two of them stopped beneath the flagpole and began to quarrel. "The flag moves," said one. "No," said the other. "Look again. It is the wind that moves.
9 movements, carrying the whole life of Hui-neng from beginning to enduring memory.
- Not the Wind, Not the Flag
- The Boy Who Sold Firewood
- Eight Months at the Mortar
- The Verse, the Robe, the Night
- Sixteen Years Among the Hunters
- Caoxi: A Mountain Becomes a World
- Five Flames, One Fire
- No-Thought, No-Form, No Dust to Wipe
- The Doorway at Caoxi
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.
The Reading Room
Pages that truly turn. Type sized to your eyes, line by line; Night, Paper, or Sepia; your place kept to the paragraph, on every device you own.
The Listening Room
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.
Your Library
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Then the whole life, and every other
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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Questions, answered
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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Enter your email and we send a single sign-in link, and no password to invent. Your library opens in your browser, holding the book, and your reading place is always kept across your devices.
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.
What does it cost?
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.
Can I cancel?
Any time, in one click, from your library. You keep everything to the end of the period you have paid for, and we never ask why.
What if I would rather own a copy?
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 Hui-neng — chosen for their likeness, not their fame.
