Lucien Miller

Jesus in the Hands of Buddha is an enthralling memoir of Father Shigeto Oshida, a man who was at once a Japanese Zen Buddhist master and a Catholic Dominican priest. Guided by the hand of God and the Buddha dharma, he became the founder and director of the Takamori Hermitage in the Japanese Alps, a place where pilgrims have been drawn for decades. He was a unique pioneer in the encounter between religions East and West who felt he was led to the Catholic faith and the priesthood by a trick of God. Overwhelmed by the weight of European-styled Catholic culture inundating the Catholic Church in Japan, Oshida received permission from his superiors to strike out on his own and listen to the voice of God while remaining a Dominican priest and Zen master, thus becoming both hermit and healer in a community of pilgrims—the sick, the poor, and the disenchanted from around the world. Through this encounter with Shigeto Oshida’s life and works, and awakening to his oneness of being a Catholic priest and Buddhist monk, readers are invited to enter their own journey to Jesus in the hands of Buddha. The unifying thread of this new horizon is grace—the unmitigated gift of divine love that permeates individuals, events, and locations and makes them holy.

When Exiles at Home first appeared in 1986, Ch’en Ying-chen was already hailed as a central figure in the Native Literature movement in Taiwan. Ch’en, who spent seven years in prison on political “subversion” charges, is known for his often brutal honesty about rural poverty and the bland hypocrisies of the middle class. Deeply moral, Ch’en’s nine stories here capture his personal alienation, touching on issues of racism, business ethics, and social nonconformity that continue to worry Chinese society on both sides of the straits. Lucien Miller’s translation deftly conveys the force and the spirit of Ch’en’s prose; his colloquial American English suits Ch’en’s jabs at Taiwan's Americanization. This was the first collection of Ch’en’s stories to appear in English and its stories still challenge readers with Ch'en's keen social consciousness and commitment to the Chinese literary tradition.