Press & Media
The Mystery of Buddhist Mysteries
When solving a mystery…
How do we know the clues we encounter are real?
How do we know which clues to chase and which to ignore?
How can the clues ever be real once we realize we are not?
Is a mystery a mystery once we’ve assigned it meaning?
Or is meaning just the next question we ask as we stumble through the clues?
Jim Ringel
I first thought of writing the Lama Rinzen mysteries after a session of Analytical Meditation. Analytical Meditation asks the meditator to focus on an object—a sound, a thing, or a mantra. Focus long enough and eventually you experience its emptiness. A can of soda pop dissolves into an oddly shaped blur. Silence erupts into a cacophony of tiny sounds. The mantra tranforms into wordless rhythm.
All things are empty of self. Maybe that sounds contradictory. A Buddhist detective novel – maybe that sounds contradictory too. But Buddhists and detectives – and everyone really – struggles to experience the world as it is. Outside the shadow of preconception. That is the contradiction I write the Lama Rinzen Mysteries so my readers and I might better understand what it means simultaneously exist while being empty of self.
Read more about the Author…
Jim Ringel
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