The Zen of Tantra. Tibetan Great Perfection in Fahai Lama's Chinese Zen Monastery

After the Zen boom of the 1960s and 1970s Tibetan Buddhism increasingly captured the Wests imagination. Today entire stadiums fill when the Dalai Lama speaks training centers mushroom and books proliferate. Even the most esoteric form of Tibetan Buddhism rDzogs chen or Great Perfection has found numerous followers in the West. But the West stands not alone: in communist China too this form of Buddhism experienced a kind of camouflaged boom from the 1980s. Monica Esposito (1962-2011) one of Europes foremost scholars of Chinese religions observed this process up close. After her discovery in 1988 of a Buddhist nunnery on Mt. Tianmu in Chinas Zhejiang province she lived and practiced under the monasterys founder a Chinese Zen (Chan) and Tibetan rDzogs chen (Great Perfection) master called Fahai Lama (1920-1991). Dr Espositos book offers a fascinating glimpse into the daily life and practices of a Chinese Buddhist monastery and into the teachings of a man who not only survived the Cultural revolution as an acupuncturist Qigong master and recluse in a Daoist cave but managed to found and build a Chan monastery to promote Tibetan Tantra in a still thoroughly communist environment.