When Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind was published in 1972, it was enthusiastically embraced by Westerners eager for spiritual insight and knowledge of Zen. The book became the most successful treatise on Buddhism in English, selling more than one million copies to date. This book is the first follow-up volume to the author's important work. Like Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, it is a collection of lectures that reveal the insight, humor, and intimacy with Zen that made the author such an influential teacher. The Sandokai — a poem by the eighth-century Zen master Sekito Kisen (Ch. Shitou Xiqian) — is th ... More

When Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind was published in 1972, it was enthusiastically embraced by Westerners eager for spiritual insight and knowledge of Zen. The book became the most successful treatise on Buddhism in English, selling more than one million copies to date. This book is the first follow-up volume to the author's important work. Like Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, it is a collection of lectures that reveal the insight, humor, and intimacy with Zen that made the author such an influential teacher. The Sandokai — a poem by the eighth-century Zen master Sekito Kisen (Ch. Shitou Xiqian) — is the subject of these lectures. Given in 1970 at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, the lectures are an example of a Zen teacher in his prime elucidating a venerated, ancient, and difficult work to his Western students. The poem addresses the question of how the oneness of things and the multiplicity of things coexist (or, as expressed in this book, “things-as-it-is”). Included with the lectures are the students' questions and the author's direct answers to them, along with a meditation instruction. The book provides an example of how a modern master in the Japanese Soto Zen tradition understands this core text of Buddhism today.