Nothing holy about it
Subtitle: the Zen of being just who you are
By: Tim Burkett ; edited by Wanda Isle
Published: 2015
Language: eng
Number of pages: 292
ISBN-13: 9781611801941
Subjects: Zen Buddhism
Description: "Zen teachings--infused with elements of memoir--by a popular modern teacher who "grew up" at the feet of two of the great figures who brought Zen to America, Shunryu Suzuki and Dainin Katagiri. He employs his reminiscences of those two great masters as teaching anecdotes. Tim Burkett was twenty when he met Suzuki Roshi, and it was love at first sight. He immediately quit pursuing the career in law to which his illustrious family of jurists inclined him, and became a serious Zen student. He went on to become a licensed psychotherapist and then followed Katagiri Roshi to Minneapolis to become a founder of the Zen scene there. He never left. Now that he's himself a revered Zen teacher, he's decided to articulate his own view of Zen. He structures the teaching according to five not-necessarily sequential levels on the road to enlightenment: (1) commitment to the path, (2) studying the self, (3) cultivating compassion and equanimity, (4) perseverance, and (5) emptiness. This is an introduction to Zen teaching that reads like an intriguing memoir, as the author discovers the teaching in the people, places, and experiences he encounters in the course of his practice"--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Foreword / by Norman Fischer; title: Commitment to the unknown. Awakening to the longing ; From longing to aspiration ; Becoming who we already are; title: Calling in the shards: we starts with the self. To study Buddhism is to study the self ; Making peace with the fear body ; Eating the globefish ; Healing the splits ; Bringing it all back home; title: When snow falls, it falls on everything: cultivating equanimity and compassion. Accommodating ourselves to the environment ; Touching the heart that suffers ; Forgetting the self is our only refuge; title: Staying on the track: even when the sun rises in the west. Five hindrances that point the way ; Training with the hindrances ; Continuous practice: the circle of the way ; Skin, flesh, bones, and marrow; title: Time dissolving into timelessness. Turtle Mountain has finally awakened ; Delusion and enlightenment have no fixed nature ; Buddha's world: what a wondrous counterculture!; title: Epilogue: To forget the self is to become intimate with all life.