Category: meditation

Zazen is For Everybody
Don’t Be a Jerk: And Other Practical Advice from Dogen, Japan’s Greatest Zen Master By Brad Warner. New World Library. 306 pp. $16.95. A couple of weeks ago I wrote a review of Brad Warner’s latest book, which I regard as his richest and most helpful to date. I had hoped to go into various themes ...
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Renegade Zen Man
Don’t Be a Jerk: And Other Practical Advice from Dogen, Japan’s Greatest Zen Master By Brad Warner. New World Library. 306 pp. $16.95. Brad Warner is that rare thing, a Buddhist teacher who primarily teaches by writing. In fact—though he leads retreats and gives lectures, does podcasts and has even appeared in a movie or two—I ...
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The Texture of Every Day
Jim Harrison 1937-2016 I’ve been haunted this week by the death of Jim Harrison, whom I’ve described for years as my favorite living writer and whose books I bought as soon as they came out, without reading a review or glancing through them. Only once did he let me down. I’ve wondered specifically if The Ancient ...
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True Zen Man II
No Beginning, No End: The Intimate Heart of Zen by Jakusho Kwong. Edited by Peter Levitt. Shambhala. 256 pp. $19.95. I like what I think of as the original teachers, the people who were prominent where I first began practicing Buddhism in 1991. My all-time favorite is Shunryu Suzuki, whose Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind was the ...
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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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Dispatches from the Abyss III
Infinite Jest: The Blessing at the Heart of Addiction Various threads of the novel come together when Hal Incandenza—whom I’ve been thinking of as the protagonist, despite the massive cast, and the many scenes where he isn’t present—tries to go to a Narcotics Anonymous meeting, and winds up instead at a Men’s group, where men are holding ...
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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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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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In That Stillness is the Great Dynamic Activity
Trying Not to Try: The Art and Science of Spontaneity by Edward Slingerland. Crown. 296 pp. $26.00. When he was a teenager, we all noticed that my nephew Charlie was surrounded by beautiful young women, though he seemed less accomplished than his older brothers (he wasn’t; he was just younger). You’d go over in the morning ...
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A Wrong Turn
Lost Christianity: A Journey of Rediscovery By Jacob Needleman. Tarcher/Penguin. 228 pp. $15.95 I had thought I would only reread the opening section of this book—Three Christians—because I love the portrait the author draws there of three unusual Christians and their transformative practices, but as I finished that section I continued and reread the whole book. ...
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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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