David Hinton

The Carefree-Ease Record

​

​

The Carefree-Ease Record (formerly translated as The Book of Serenity) is one of the three classic koan collections from ancient China, and David Hinton’s radically new translation returns us to the original understanding of its zany storytelling and profound wisdom.

 

The insights embedded in Ch’an (Zen) Buddhist koans are thought to be impenetrable without the guidance of a master teacher. But The Carefree-Ease Record is a carefully constructed literary/philosophical texts designed to create, in and of itself and without further explanation, a direct and immediate literary experience in the reader: the experience of awakening’s wordless depths. This collection presents carefree-ease as perhaps the essence of enlightened liberation. Here we encounter the earthy dimensions of Ch’an that have been largely lost in contemporary Zen. For that carefree-ease refers to a way of moving through life with the profound tranquility of earth and Cosmos as they unfurl their perennial transformations. As such, the carefree-ease offered here is the essential nature of enlightened liberation: liberation not from this world, as in conventional Buddhism, but all the way into it.

 

This is the last volume in David Hinton’s project to translate the three classic koan collections. The other two volumes are: The Blue-Cliff Record and No-Gate Gateway.

​

​

​

Praise for David Hinton's Ch'an Books:

​

David Hinton adds something rare: a deeply informed and radically different take on Ch’an. As developed here and in earlier books, Hinton sees Ch’an not so much a school of Buddhism as a uniquely indigenous Taoist mysticism in which awakening is radical embeddedness in the natural world rather than transcendence of it—an important perspective in our time of planetary crisis.

 

                   —Roshi Norman Fischer, author of The World                                                   Could Be Otherwise

​​

​

Hinton’s deep understanding of the Taoist roots of Ch’an shine a light on the Zen practice of today, taking us back in a thrilling way beyond the Japanese rigor and aesthetics, beyond the mythical T’ang Dynasty flourishing of Ch’an’s great ancestors, back to its Taoist roots in the first millennium BCE—and even beyond them, into the mists of its Paleolithic origins.

​

                    —Roshi Henry Shukman

 

​

         — from the book jacket

​

​

Shambhala (Fall 2025)