Talk:The Zen Manifesto: Freedom from Oneself

This book was called The Zen Manifesto: Freedom From Oneself up to Dec 16, 2013, then changed to The Zen Manifesto. Probably because Freedom From Oneself was seen as a subtitle.

I would plead for using the full title again:

• On the title-page Freedom From Oneself does not look like a subtitle.
• Books like Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega, Vol 1 and The New Alchemy: To Turn You On have a comparable situation, there the complete title was choosen.
• One can argue that, in the book's Introduction and on the flap, the title is quoted as The Zen Manifesto. I regard that as abbreviations in speech.
• And the most important argument: I see Freedom From Oneself as an essential part of the title, of what is being conveyed.

Any objections against me changing the title ? --Sugit (talk) 09:00, 15 March 2017 (UTC)

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I agree that "Freedom from Oneself" conveys something essential but it's not necessary that the title conveys all. One can argue fairly persuasively imo that a solid arbiter of this would be the books list at the back of the hard copy editions. From the VBT of the early 90s we have many books with full coloned titles, not least of which is "Hsin Hsin Ming: The Book of Nothing" but this book is just plain The Zen Manifesto.

It seems that is presenting a fairly high level of coloned titles and "TZM not being explicitly included in that company suggests fairly strongly to me that's how it should be. To go against that might need some extraordinary finding. -- doofus-9 16:25, 15 March 2017 (UTC)

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i wouldn't agree with Sugit's first point - it very much looks like a subtitle.

but i still agree with him to rename it, not because it is clearly correct, but because the overwhelming majority of websites refer to it as such.

we have 4,050 hits for "The Zen Manifesto" and of that we have 3,890 using "Freedom From Oneself" as part of its title.

--Rudra (talk) 14:36, 16 March 2017 (UTC)-------

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• doofus is right: all books published just after this one quote The Zen Manifesto as title.
• The Dutch and Russian translations to not have a ref to Freedom From Oneself.
• The German translation does have "Freedom From Oneself".

Now I am getting doubtful myself, but I still tend to the whole long thing, maybe also a matter of aesthetics. --Sugit (talk) 19:51, 17 March 2017 (UTC)

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