Essential Zen. - book reviews

Whole Earth Review, Spring, 1995 by Rick Fields

Kazuaki Tanahashi & Tensho David Schneider. HarperSanFrancisco, 1994; 174 pp. ISBN 0-06-251046-0 $9 ($11.75 postpaid) from HarperCollins Publishers, Direct Mail, PO Box 588, Dunmore, PA 18512;800/331-3761

A little Zen goes a long way. This collection leapfrogs from early Chinese patriarchs (and a few matriarchs), to pioneers like Nyogen Senzaki and Soen Nakagawa, to homegrown teachers, Zen center monks, and wandering poets --Robert Aitken, Charlotte Joko Beck, Zen cook Ed Brown, Philip Whalen. Taken together, these ancient and modern poems, stories and encounters prove Zen's tough, resilient, weedy continuity through cultures and epochs: China, Korea, Vietnam, Japan, North America. Editors Kazuaki Tanahashi and Tensho David Schneider include a fair sampling of classics (many freshly retranslated) but for the most part, as they say, "we put in what we like." The result, happily, is not so much an essential Zen (rather a redundancy of a title anyway) but a living, breathing, questioning, laughing Zen -- that may inspire you to hit the safu, once again, or take up the brush and try a little haiku yourself. For instance:

Spring rains Out of the vacant lot Weeds pop up!

* Seung Sahn would say, "When you eat, just eat. When you read the newspaper, just read the newspaper. Don't do anything other than what you are doing."

One day a student saw him reading the newspaper while he was eating. The student asked if this did not contradict his teaching. Seung Sahn said, "When you eat and read the newspaper, just eat and read the newspaper."

* Thich Nhat Hanh said at Plum Village in France, "There are enough Zen centers. We need more Zen corners."

* Birth, old age, Sickness, and death: From the beginning, This is the way Things have always been. Any thought Of release from this life Will wrap you only more tightly In its snares. The sleeping person Looks for a Buddha, The troubled person Turns toward meditation. But the one who knows That there's nothing to seek Knows too that there's nothing to say. She keeps her mouth closed.