Book excerpt: "Journeys into Emptiness traces the lives of three famous religious seekers and their quests for personal transcendence. Dogen, a thirteenth-century Japanese Zen master, experienced emptiness in wordless meditation - the practice of zazen that spread in time from the Eastern world to the West. Thomas Merton was a twentieth-century Catholic monk whose experience of personal homelessness brought him to explore the tension that lies between solitude and community. Carl Jung, raised by a pious father and a psychologically unbalanced mother, was driven to understand the structure of the psyche, including the male and female elements that exist in every human person." "Robert Jingen Guinn provides wise and compassionate portraits of these emblematic figures. Each of them, in his own way, had to experience emptiness, going beyond consciousness to discover his own personal truth, whether that was rooted in Buddha-nature, God or the unconscious. This "going beyond" became a path to encountering their own unique selves and a deeper sense of life."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved