Category: religion

Fearful Symmetry
Blake by Peter Ackroyd. Knopf. 399 pp. My re-kindled interest in Blake began, weirdly enough, when I ordered some copies of Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior for some inmates and noticed that the most perceptive Amazon review was written by a woman named Laurie from New Zealand. I clicked to see the rest of ...
Read more
Whattya Know?
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. [This is the seventh and final piece in a series on Dogen’s Zen, inspired by Brad Warner’s new book paraphrasing fascicles of the Shobogenzo. Earlier articles are here, here, here, here, here, and ...
Read more
Beyond Belief
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. [This is the sixth in a series on Dogen’s Zen, inspired by Brad Warner’s new book paraphrasing fascicles of the Shobogenzo. This series has got to end sometime but hasn’t ended yet. Earlier ...
Read more
The Precepts Are the Mind of the Buddha
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. [This is the fifth in a series on Dogen’s Zen, inspired by Brad Warner’s new book paraphrasing fascicles of the Shobogenzo. Earlier articles are here, here, here, and here. My review of the ...
Read more
Deep Wisdom
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. [This is the fourth in a series on Dogen’s Zen, inspired by Brad Warner’s new book paraphrasing fascicles of the Shobogenzo. Earlier articles are here and here and here. My review of the book ...
Read more
The Process of Zazen
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. [This is the third in a series on Dogen’s Zen, inspired by Brad Warner’s new book paraphrasing fascicles of the Shobogenzo. Earlier articles are here and here. My review of the book is ...
Read more
Zazen is a Physical Practice
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. Still pondering Brad Warner’s book. Dogen goes on and on. Brad does a paraphrase of the Fukanzazengi, the meditation instructions Dogen wrote (and largely cribbed from a Chinese document) when he returned to Japan ...
Read more
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 ...
Read more
Stop Me Before I See More Movies!
Full Frame Documentary Film Festival 2016 Thursday The Jazz Loft According to W. Eugene Smith *** Forever, Chinatown **1/2 The 100 Years Show **** The Many Sad Faces of Mr. Toledano **** By Sydney Lumet ***1/2 Weiner **1/2 Friday The Black Belt *** Trapped **** Dancing for You ***** Dixieland ** Tarikat ***** Horizons **** Two Trains Runnin’ **** Saturday Following Seas ***** Life, Animated **** Raising Bertie ** Hours spent standing in line, sometimes ...
Read more
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 ...
Read more
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 ...
Read more
She Wasn’t Just a Dotty Old Lady II
The Lady in the Van. A film by Nicholas Hytner. With Maggie Smith, Jim Broadbent, Alex Jennings. I’m as much a fan of oldster movies as anyone—they’re about me, after all—and, like everyone else in the world, I love Maggie Smith. I especially like her as the outraged Dowager Countess on Downton Abbey, though the series ...
Read more
She Wasn’t Just a Dotty Old Lady
Iris Murdoch As I Knew Her by A.N. Wilson. Arrow Books. 276 pp. Those Brits do keep writing, don’t they? I look at the titles by A. N. Wilson, who is my rough contemporary (two years younger than I, actually) and I’m astonished, and somewhat ashamed, to see thirty books. (Compared to six for me. Eight ...
Read more
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 ...
Read more
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 ...
Read more
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, ...
Read more
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. ...
Read more
Everybody Knew but Nobody Was Talkin’
Spotlight A film by Tom McCarthy Spotlight is an absolutely thrilling movie, one of those newspaper movies where reporters shout at each other, slam their fists on the desk, burst into the records office a few minutes before closing time, run down the sidewalk shouting for a taxi, stay up too late, write at incredible speeds, ...
Read more
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 ...
Read more
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, ...
Read more

...