Product Description

This work shows how to make living itself a spiritual practice and how to discover that the extraordinary is really "nothing special".

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #113439 in Books
• Published on: 1995-01-23
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 177 pages

Customer Reviews

Can change your life
Following on from "Everyday Zen", this book is another collection of Charlotte Joko Beck's dharma talks to her students in San Diego. Joko - as she's known - is a little granny look-alike, in her sixties I guess, and once an ordinary white American housewife and mother - now an extremely powerful Zen teacher. Having read lots of Zen and Buddhist literature, I keep on coming back to Joko's common sense wisdom. She has little time for doctrine, lazy religious belief, and her teaching has more to do with critical pyschology than classical Buddhism. But in this sense it is perhaps closer to the Buddha's original, revolutionary sceptical teaching. In essence, Joko exhorts us to sit meditatively with the reality of our life. Don't live in fantasy - fear or desire - she says, live in the hard, beautiful realness of life with all it's pain and confusion. She speaks really eloquently about the way in which our egos - habitual patterns of thought, learnt ad hoc throughout our lives and elevated to the status of concrete reality - how this illusionary sense of ego is the very thing that is keeping us unhappy and half dead. This book is just as confrontational as Everyday Zen, but perhaps a little more accessible. There are some very simple but powerful images that can really unlock a lot of clogged up life. Read it and meditate. It will change your life. It has mine.

Only what is real
What amazes me about Zen teachings in general is their uncompromising hold on what is real and what is not. This is not to say that they reject the unnexplainable and mysterious, but their stance that things such as apparitions or prophecies are both as unreal and unnecessary as science and materialism in considering a spiritual life, simply because they do not exist in the unbending reality of the present moment.

I have read both of Joko's books now and conclude that for someone who has read quite widely about Buddhist meditation, she is the source of the most painfully honest, blunt and beautiful teachings I have yet to come accross. You will learn alot about yourself simply by reading this book, and putting her words into consistent practice will undoubtedly change the way you live your life. Her metaphors for human life are so simple and direct that you find yourself wondering how such things had not occured to you before. If you are a practicioner of Zen, I can only say that this book, along with Everyday Zen, have been the greatest aid to my practice thus far. Enjoy this book, and take it very, very seriously, because people like Joko are the greatest treasure this world has given us.

The Best Book I Have Ever Read
Living Zen was brilliant... This is Better. Her use of Analogies make this book, the reader, able to see. Life changing. theres no going back once you have read this. Who would want to. I feel I can read it again and again and learn something new if I read it for the rest of my life.