Review: Little or nothing to do with Zen
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 10 29, 2012
This book has little or nothing to do with Zen.  Zazen is a daily, moment to moment practice usually realized through long term application. Yet the author, by his own admission, doesn't want to spend the years needed to come to Zen through meditation practice.So he chooses to loosely define Zen and roughly handle the principle of non-attachment among  his personal recall of his cancer experiences and admonitions to various types of positive thinking. Which is a pity, because his starting premise - that cancer can be a teacher rather than an opponent - is a worthwhile one.Zen is Buddhism and a central question of Buddhism is how to end suffering, so it should be a fertile ground for an uncluttered exposition by a Zen adept.  The two-and-a-half pages on attachment, non-attachment in Shunryu Suzuki's book "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind" give a clearer notion of this principle than the whole of "The Zen of Cancer."Beyond Zen Buddhism, one could do worse than Pema Chodron's "When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times (Shambhala Library)" to get a grasp of how Buddhist methods could be applied to the emotional turmoil that cancer can provoke.  And for an insight into how a realized Buddhist  teacher can handle the intense  suffering of cancer  with effortless joy,  the chapter on the Tibetan master the  16th Karmapa in Reginald Ray's  book "Secret of the Vajra World: The Tantric Buddhism of Tibet (World of Tibetan Buddhism, Vol. 2)" is unparalleled.