Eihei Dōgen (image from Wikimedia Commons)
Teachings
Zen lore speaks of a “secret transmission beyond words and scriptures.” The “secret” is open, hidden in plain sight, and everything transmits it, including the reams of words and scriptures the Zen tradition has produced. While Zen ultimately is not about ideas, there are many ideas about Zen. Zen practice puts our wonderful capacity for discursive thought into perspective alongside our other wonderful capacities and potential, but Zen is not anti-intellectual. Zen is a whole-person practice. Discursive thought is de-emphasized during meditation, but a Zen life naturally also includes thinking.
Key texts in our Zen stream include the various Mahayana Sutras (especially the Heart Sutra, Diamond Sutra, and Platform Sutra), wisdom poems composed by early teachers, the various koan collections (especially The Gateless Gate, The Blue Cliff Record, The Book of Serenity, and The Transmission of Light), and the writings of Eihei Dōgen, the 13th century founder of Sōtō Zen in Japan. Contemporary introductions to Zen practice we recommend can be found on our reading list below.
The Sixteen Bodhisattva Precepts, Zen’s ethical teachings, are the heart of our lived practice. There are several good books on the precepts, yet we especially recommend Nancy Mujo Baker’s Opening to Oneness: A Practical and Philosophical Guide to the Zen Precepts. Baker emphasizes that our greatest, and most spontaneous, capacity for ethical conduct arises from the experience of non-separation. She offers a practical method for working with the precepts that helps us compassionately recognize how we subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) deviate from their literal meaning. She then helps us learn how to reintegrate concealed or unseen parts of ourselves that might lead us to break the precepts unconsciously, or to inappropriately rationalize that we have done so.
Recommended Books on Zen
Bernie Glassman, Infinite Circle: Teachings in Zen
Charlotte Joko Beck, Everyday Zen: Love and Work
Kosho Uchiyama, Opening the Hand of Thought: Foundations of Zen Buddhist Practice
Soko Morinaga, Novice to Master: An Ongoing Lesson in the Extent of My Own Stupidity
Koun Yamada, Zen: The Authentic Gate
John Daido Loori, The Art of Just Sitting: Essential Writings on the Zen Practice of Shikantaza
Nelson Foster and Jack Shoemaker, The Roaring Stream: A New Zen Reader (an anthology containing a broad selection of key Zen sources with short biographies of their authors or, for some ancient texts, their presumed authors)
Barbara O’Brien, The Circle of the Way: A Concise History of Zen from the Buddha to the Modern World
Hee-Jin Kim, Eihei Dogen: Mystical Realist
Nancy Mujo Baker, Opening to Oneness: A Practical and Philosophical Guide to the Zen Precepts
We also humbly offer sutra book and our Commonplace Book, a collection of poems of diverse origin read and discussed at our Sunrise Sit. Many bows to Libby Fay for curation and typesetting of the latter.