Category: buddhism

Get Me Outta Here: Panic as a Spiritual Practice
Going Buddhist: Panic and Emptiness, the Buddha and Me by Peter J Conradi. Short Books. 183 pp. I had high hopes for this book, which I found when I was farting around on the Internet after reading a review of Iris Murdoch’s letters. The author was a friend of Murdoch’s and became her official biographer. The ...
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True Zen Man
Not Always So: Practicing the True Spirit of Zen by Shunryu Suzuki. Edited by Edward Espe Brown. Harper Collins. 162pp. $22.95. I think of Shunryu Suzuki as the quintessential Soto Zen Priest: modest, quiet, never drawing attention to himself, refusing to make great claims for practice or the results of practice, utterly devoted to zazen. Back ...
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The Secret of Life That We Are All Looking For
Being Bodies: Buddhist Women on the Paradox of Embodiment edited by Lenore Friedman &Susan Moon. Shambhala. 240 pp. $15.00. As I’ve said before, I think that the women teachers in my tradition—the Soto Zen lineage that goes back to the San Francisco Zen Center—are often the most interesting. There’s something about the extreme rigors of Zen, ...
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The True Art Is Your Life
Dharma Art by Chogyam Trungpa. The Collected Works of Chogyam Trungpa Volume Seven. pp. 3-162. Shamblala. 2004. Zen and Creativity: Cultivating Your Artistic Life by John Daido Loori. Ballantine Books. 248 pp. $25.95. I look back with great fondness on the days when I wrote my first novel. It was 1973, and I had just turned 25. ...
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Portrait of a Turd
Steve Jobs A Film by Danny Boyle I’m a little slow on the uptake, often don’t read reviews of movies before I see them, so I was into the final third of Steve Jobs before I realized that this was a drama in three acts, that it focused on three specific moments, that the same characters ...
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When the Teacher Screws Up
Buddha Is the Center of Gravity: Teisho of Joshu Sasaki Roshi at Lama Foundation. Lama Foundation. 95 pp. 1974 (out of print) This is the book that gave Brad Warner the title for his most recent book. He has spoken highly of this volume at various times through the years, and when I’ve checked in the ...
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Practice Enlightenment
(Ongoing Project) Treasury of the True Dharma Eye: Zen Master Dogen’s Shobogenzo. Edited and Translated by Kaz Tanahashi and others. Shambhala. 2010. 1171pp. One of the periodic alternations in my meditation practice is between wanting to get something out of it, especially some kind of exalted perfected state, and understanding that such wanting is a hindrance, ...
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Clark in the Dark
Waking up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age by Clark Strand. Spiegel & Grau. 140 pp. $26.00. I seem to be reading a lot of Clark Strand. One book has led to another. And though I’ve made light of his tendency to try every spiritual practice known to man, I’ve genuinely enjoyed his ...
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Seeker on Steroids
Waking the Buddha: How the Most Dynamic and Empowering Buddhist Movement in History Is Changing Our Concept of Religion by Clark Strand. Middleway Press. 184 pp. $14.95 As long as I have known Clark Strand, he has been searching for—and repeatedly finding—the ideal spiritual practice, and writing a book about it that he thought would be ...
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Get Back, Jo Jo
How to Believe in God Whether You Believe in Religion or Not by Clark Strand. Doubleday. 237 pp. $24.95 Clark Strand—to say the very least—can’t make up his mind. You probably know the kind of spiritual seeker who keeps trying different things; Strand is that person on steroids. For a while he wanted to be a ...
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Not Much of a Father Either
Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem. Vintage. 311pp. $13.95 I’m asking myself the question critics always ask when a mainstream writer publishes a thriller: does Motherless Brooklyn succeed as a mystery? It has one of the mystery features that I think of as amateurish, a substantial chapter at the end to tie up all the loose ends, ...
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And Back In Again
Inside Out a film by Pete Docter and Ronaldo Del Carmen Some years ago, my wife and I would emerge from a movie and say, “That was very Buddhist.” We nearly always agreed. It seemed that movies were starting to reflect Buddhist values, or perhaps that, since we had both started studying Buddhism, we picked up ...
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The Beer-Sodden Mystery of Chogyam Trungpa
Mindfulness in Action by Chogyam Trungpa. Shambhala. 196 pp. $21.95. Twenty-seven years ago, on my first trip to Mexico, I was sitting in the back seat of a bus on the outskirts of Oaxaca. My wife and I weren’t on a tour; we had joined a group that was studying Spanish at a school in Cuernavaca, ...
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Heaven All the Way
In Paradise by Peter Matthiessen Riverhead Books 250 pp $16.00 Peter Matthiessen’s final novel—it was published right around the time of his death in 2014—concerns a group of people who come together to do a meditation retreat at Auschwitz. Matthiessen’s Zen teacher, Bernie Glassman, conducted such a retreat, perhaps more than one, and I don’t know ...
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Apology to Peter Matthiessen
Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen. Modern Library. 912 pp. $18.00. For some years—having read a few things avidly—I avoided the work of Peter Matthiessen. I devoured his book of Zen Journals, Nine-Headed Dragon River, which featured some of the most important figures of American Zen, read it two or three times. I also loved my first ...
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