ED, >TCIGTZL does include a lot of material that is perplexing. I expected that. I >also expect to find my future exploration of Zen >frustrating.
Maybe this could be rectified by buying 'The Complete Idiot's Guide to Reading The Complete Idiot's Guide to Living Zen'? Where does it stop? Mike ________________________________ From: ED <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Sun, 6 March, 2011 18:41:53 Subject: [Zen] Zen for Dummies 122 of 126 people found the following review helpful: 5.0 out of 5 stars Buy it, read it, burn it, live it, July 14, 2002 By Timothy Campbell(Toronto, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME) This review is from: The Complete Idiot's Guide to Zen Living (Paperback) I have been studying Zen off and on for years but was continually frustrated by the relentless obscurantism. On several occasions I asked questions on Zen newsgroups and was disappointed when people would answer my questions with riddles. Also, when I asked a Zen Roshi to answer some questions (even offering to pay him for his time) I found myself railroaded into taking his beginner's course a second time! I began to suspect that there are a lot of people out there who are so attached to some FORM of Zen that they have lost the ability to communicate the essentials in a compelling manner. They asked me, in effect, to "just have faith", perhaps inspired by their reports of bliss. Sorry, but I've been there, done that! If you can't explain your valuable insight without a modicum of understanding of who I am and what I can grasp, then I'm not interested. That's why I found "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Zen Living" (hereinafter TCIGTZL), so very refreshing. While I'm sure that some Zen purists will scoff, I was happy to have some perplexing questions answered. For example, I once asked on a Zen newsgroup, "What is the benefit of Zen? Why should I entrust the next 20 years of my life to some teacher whose qualifications I'm not able to assess?" In response, I got a lot of Zentastic blathering. It was as if they were trying to teach somebody calculus before arithmetic. TCIGTZL, on the other hand, lays out the benefits quite clearly. I fail to see the harm in that; the authors carefully explain the "goaless goal" aspect of Zen, so there should be little danger of readers striving to attain and cling to those benefits. (If I may draw an analogy: you can explain the advantages of learning to read without getting people fixated on the actual process once they acquire the skill.) So, at last, a bit of clarity! While Zen has long appealed to me at a gut level, I was getting to the point where I was asking, "After hundreds of years, why hasn't Zen improved its method of introducing itself to neophytes?" Maybe that's not fair -- maybe I wasn't looking in the right places -- but until I found TCIGTZL I was starting to think that I'd been wrong about Zen all along. TCIGTZL does include a lot of material that is perplexing. I expected that. I also expect to find my future exploration of Zen frustrating. Now, though, I've read an accessible overview. I won't keep the book -- that would be too "clingy" -- but at least I now have some validation of my initial (favourable) gut reaction to Zen.
