Category: buddhism

Stands with the Best
Mind Sky: Zen Teaching on Living and Dying by Jakusho Kwong. Wisdom Publications. 178 pp. $18.95. ***** I have a bias that a dharma teacher’s first book is usually the best one. With most teachers, they finally get it together to put out a book (or somebody does it for them), and it’s not anything they ...
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More Than Posture
The Posture of Meditation: A Practical Manual for Meditators of All Traditions. Second Edition By Will Johnson. Shambhala. 161 pp. $15.95. ***** It’s hard to believe that any activity as fundamentally simple as zazen—all you do is sit there and breathe—could become complicated, but the human mind (my human mind, anyway) can complicate anything. Though I’ve ...
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Where Zen Began
China Root: Taoism, Ch’an, and Original Zen by David Hinton. Shambhala. 176 pp. $17.95. ***** This is a fascinating and important book. David Hinton is a long time—thirty-five years—translator of Chinese poetry and other texts. He has translated most of the great Chinese classics, including the Tao Te Ching, I Ching, Chuang Tzu, The Analects, Mencius, ...
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Ratliff Was a Zen Master
Vladimir Kyrilytch, That Is Though pedantry denies It’s plain the Bible means That Solomon grew wise While talking with his queens I don’t know who was Faulkner’s favorite among his narrators, in the Snopes novels and elsewhere. Sometimes I think it’s (for me the rather tiresome) Gavin Stevens, a lawyer who likes to elaborate endlessly, or maybe Charles Mallison, Stevens’ ...
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It’s an Art (Says the Old Fart)
The Science of Enlightenment: How Meditation Works by Shinzen Young. Sounds True. 265 pp. $13.89. ***** As Shinzen Young himself says in one of the later chapters, Zen teachers are known for under-explaining meditation, vipassana teachers for over-explaining. It’s as if vipassana teachers want to tell you everything that might possibly happen, so you never have ...
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The Wild Man and the Schoolmarm
Appreciate Your Life: The Essence of Zen Practice by Taizan Maezumi Roshi. Shambhala. 160pp. $19.59. ***** Ordinary Wonder: Zen Life and Practice by Charlotte Joko Beck. Shambhala. 240 pp. $17.95. ***** Dharma books wander into my life at exactly the right moment. Years ago, I picked up Taizan Maezumi’s Appreciate Your Life and, except for the title ...
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I Bow Back
When You Greet Me I Bow: Notes and Reflections from a Life in Zen by Norman Fischer. Shambhala. 336 pp. $16.97. ***** I haven’t read all his books, but for my money this is Norman Fischer’s best, reflections on a wide range of topics from a man who has spent fifty years living and teaching the ...
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Give Us a Grin
The Guide by R. K. Narayan. Penguin Classics 196pp. $16.00. **** If you have some time on your hands these days—maybe you’re recently retired, or lost your job during the pandemic—have you thought of becoming a teacher of Advaita Vedanta, or Kashmir Shavism? I realize you’re supposed to be enlightened to do that, but is that ...
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Portrait of a Lunatic (You Wrote About the Wrong Cousin, Iris Murdoch)
The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch. Penguin Classics. 495 pp. $20.00 ***** The Sea, the Sea has everything going for it. It’s large and expansive, beautifully written; it contains a wealth of fascinating characters; it traces a wild plot, where things keep happening that you can’t believe, and it comes to an emotionally satisfying confusion. ...
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Not a Matter of Belief
Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist by Stephen Bachelor. Random House. 320 pp. $14.99 Some years ago, when I was trying to get my head around Christianity, I read various works by C.S. Lewis, including Mere Christianity. Lewis is widely regarded as an effective proselytizer for the religion, offering not a passionate but a reasonable approach to ...
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Things Will Never Be That Way Again
Sound of Metal a film by Darius Marder. With Riz Ahmed, Olivia Cook, Paul Raci, Lauren Ridloff. ***** I almost stopped watching Sound of Metal during the first five minutes. I’m not a fan of heavy metal and didn’t want to spend two hours listening to what I heard in those early minutes. I didn’t need ...
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That’s Not the Choice
Reflections on The Friend In Sigrid Nunez’ superb novel The Friend, the narrator is thinking back on a friend who has just died, and mentions that he was a committed atheist. “Between religion and knowledge, he said, a person must choose knowledge.” I almost jumped out of my chair as I read that. That’s not the ...
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What Finally Matters
What Are You Going Through: A Novel by Sigrid Nunez. Riverhead Books. 224 pp. $19.59. ***** The idea sounds grim beyond belief. Our narrator—living in New York—has a friend in a nearby town who is dying of cancer. At first the woman seems to be in remission, but then the cancer comes back with a vengeance, ...
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Damned Is Right
Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett by James Knowlson. Grove Press. 800 pp. $22.00. **** Four Men Shaking: Searching for Sanity with Samuel Beckett, Norman Mailer, and My Perfect Zen Teacher by Lawrence Shainberg. Shambhala. 134 pp. $16.95 ***** The story told in the first half of James Knowlson’s excellent biography is thrilling and fascinating. ...
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What Is Liberation?
Great Demon Kings: A Memoir of Poetry, Sex, Art, Death, and Enlightenment by John Giono. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. 368 pp. $25.49. **** For the two years I lived in Cambridge—1991-93, while my wife was in Divinity School—I was in bookstore heaven. It seems strange to say nowadays, when bookstores barely exist. There was the Harvard ...
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What Healing Is
For My 72nd Birthday The morning my father died we had barely gotten back from the hospital when there was a knock at the door and my mother opened it to Mrs. Shriver, a neighbor from across the street. She was an older woman, with a ruddy, deeply lined face, kept herself busy with outdoor sports, ...
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He Published Himself
Lorenzo Milam 1933-2020 Forty years ago, The Sun magazine was not the polished publication it is today. It was printed on what I believe is called stock, rather than the slick paper the magazine currently uses. It didn’t have a vast staff—often the Editor was it—and didn’t pay its writers much, if at all. Each issue ...
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Sitting with Louis II
The Other Side One of the problems with my earlier piece about talking and sitting zazen with my autistic brother in law is that I sound so kind, compassionate, magnanimous, and patient. A true Bodhisattva. Actually, I’m no better than anyone else, but it isn’t too surprising that I sound that way. I wrote the piece, ...
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The Itch to Write
Notes During a Pandemic One of the great pleasures of talking to my brother frequently—which I’ve been doing lately–is hearing of writers I wouldn’t have encountered otherwise. Bill mentioned to me, for instance, that he had just bought two volumes of the reviews of Marjorie Perloff, a name I’d never heard. She writes regularly for the ...
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Sitting with Louis
Notes During a Pandemic We came to stay at our Asheville cabin during the pandemic in order to take care of my wife’s brother Louis, who has a house on the same property. He’s 68 years old and autistic, diagnosed just a few years ago. His job was bringing in shopping carts at the local supermarket, ...
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