The awareness of the firefighter, the mindfulness of the monk, the principles of fire and the spirit of Zen come together in...
A former Yoga Journal senior editor’s account of five Zen practitioners turned firefighters who saved a beloved California monastery.
Most readers, if they know it at all, will connect Tassajara to the bread-baking and vegetarian cookbooks inspired by its kitchen. For practitioners of American Zen, however, the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center in the Ventana Wilderness near Big Sur is an almost sacred place for meditation and work, famous for its monastic training and host to thousands of guests since its founding in the mid-1960s. In June 2008, lightning set the California chaparral ablaze. At the end of an unpaved road, in a canyon surrounded by mountains, Tassajara lay in the middle of what would eventually become the third-largest conflagration in state history, destroying more than 240,000 acres. For almost three weeks, the community watched the fire approach, reduced their numbers to essential personnel and took various steps—including an ingenious sprinkler system rigged to rooftops, dubbed “Dharma Rain”—to protect the monastery. Finally, down to a band of 14 and under orders from state and federal authorities who deemed the place indefensible, they evacuated. On the way out, five monks turned back, determined to protect the abbey. Their histories, the stories of other Tassajara disciples, an introduction to the tenets of Buddhism and a meticulous tracking of the devastating fire’s progress are all part of Busch’s story. Her main purpose, though, is to explore how the discipline of Zen uniquely prepared otherwise untrained monks to face the crisis. Herself a Zen student, the author explains how Zen practice teaches followers to live in flux, to recognize impermanence and to deal with uncertainty. Novice firefighters, the monks were veterans at practicing calm and taking care, of honoring simultaneously interdependence and individual authority. They smoothly turned toward the fire, not to confront or fight it, but rather to meet it, to “make friends with it” as the blaze lapped at their perimeter.
The awareness of the firefighter, the mindfulness of the monk, the principles of fire and the spirit of Zen come together in a well-told story about the effort required and the lessons learned from paying close attention.Pub Date: July 11, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-59420-291-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2011
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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