Spirituality & Practice “Best Books of 2021” Award Winner In this new collection of quotes from Shunryu Suzuki Roshi and stories from his students, the presence, wisdom, and humor of a great Zen teacher come alive once more. The teachings of Shunryu Suzuki have served for innumerable people as the gateway to Zen practice and meditation. In Zen Is Right Now, devoted student and biographer David Chadwick sheds new light on Suzuki’s presence and teachings through selected quotes from his lectures and a variety of stories told by his students. Complementary to another collection about Suzuki, Zen Is Right Here, this book offers a joyful bounty of anecdotes and insights, revealing a playful and deeply wise teacher who delighted in paradox and laughed often. Each of the stories and quotes presented here is an example of the versatile and timeless quality evident in Suzuki’s teaching, showing that the potential for attaining enlightenment exists right now, in this very moment.

A new book by the author of "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind" offers a posthumous sequel to Shunryu Suzuki's seminal work on Buddhism, collecting his insights on the famous eighth-century Zen poem Sandokai. Illustrations.

Shunryu Suzuki is known to countless readers as the author of the modern spiritual classic Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. This most influential teacher comes vividly to life in Crooked Cucumber, the first full biography of any Zen master to be published in the West. To make up his intimate and engrossing narrative, David Chadwick draws on Suzuki's own words and the memories of his students, friends, and family. Interspersed with previously unpublished passages from Suzuki's talks, Crooked Cucumber evokes a down-to-earth life of the spirit. Along with Suzuki we can find a way to "practice with mountains, trees, and stones and to find ourselves in this big world."

One of the simplest, easiest-to-understand guides to Zen meditation--with audio exercises to serve as meditation companions. Through Zen meditation it is possible to find stillness of mind even amidst our everyday activities--and this book reveals how. With easy-to-understand instructions, practical lessons, and short-but-sweet tid-bits of useful information, beloved Zen master John Daido Loori shares the way of Zen meditation in terms that even those starting from the very beginning can understand. Guided audio instructions--available for download online--supplement the teachings throughout the book, giving beginners the tools they need to take that first step into Zen practice and meditation.

Shunryu Suzuki’s extraordinary gift for conveying traditional Zen teachings using ordinary language is well known to the countless readers of Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. In Zen Is Right Here, his teachings are brought to life powerfully and directly through stories told about him by his students. These living encounters with Zen are poignant, direct, humorous, paradoxical, and enlightening; and their setting in real-life contexts makes them wonderfully accessible. Like the Buddha himself, Suzuki Roshi gave profound teachings that were skilfully expressed for each moment, person, and situation he encountered. He emphasized that while the ungraspable essence of Buddhism is constant, the expression of that essence is always changing. Each of the stories presented here is an example of this versatile and timeless quality, showing that the potential for attaining enlightenment exists right here, right now, in this very moment.

An illustrated depiction of Steve Jobs' friendship with Zen Buddhist Kobun Chino Otogawa and the impact it had on Jobs' career Apple cofounder Steve Jobs (1955-2011) had such an enormous impact on so many people that his life often took on aspects of myth. But much of his success was due to collaboration with designers, engineers and thinkers. The Zen of Steve Jobs tells the story of Jobs' relationship with one such person: Kobun Chino Otogawa. Kobun was a Zen Buddhist priest who emigrated to the U.S. from Japan in the early 1970s. He was an innovator, lacked appreciation for rules and was passionate about art and design. Kobun was to Buddhism as Jobs was to the computer business: a renegade and maverick. It wasn't long before the two became friends--a relationship that was not built to last. This graphic book is a reimagining of that friendship. The story moves back and forward in time, from the 1970s to 2011, but centers on the period after Jobs' exile from Apple in 1985 when he took up intensive study with Kobun. Their time together was integral to the big leaps that Apple took later on with its product design and business strategy. Told using stripped down dialogue and bold calligraphic panels, The Zen of Steve Jobs explores how Jobs might have honed his design aesthetic via Eastern religion before choosing to identify only what he needs and leave the rest behind.

What happens when 21 university students encounter the teachings and practices of Zen for the first time? Most writings on Zen have come from Zen masters, scholars, and experienced practitioners. Here, a cross-section of American students with no prior experience of Zen read contemporary Zen texts, engage in meditation practice, and participate in in-class inquiry, documenting their emerging understandings, challenges, doubts, and questions over the course of a fifteen-week semester in a college course titled Non-argumentative rhetoric in Zen. Despite the common framework of texts, meditation practice, and class discussion, each chapter is a unique and fresh account of this work.

For parents of young children, homeschool parent-teachers, teachers in training, and for adults interested in discovering a more loving way for children to blossom in school, Beginner's Mind is the how-to book we have been waiting for--a book that describes teaching the way we so passionately wish it for our children, each and every day they go off to school. Told through the eyes of a ten-year-old, Beginner's Mind asks the question, "How do we want teachers to teach, inspire, and guide our children?" The answer is provided through a series of fourth grade classroom scenes that take us back to a shipyard town in New England where a loving teacher opens her students' eyes to all-but-unimaginable dreams and opportunities. This is a book that reminds us of what teaching can look like: daily lessons where standardized and measurable curriculum goals are less prized than the immeasurable blossoming of our children, and a classroom that puts on display the possibilities before us when a teacher's love is combined with the beginner's mind. As the author shares in these classroom stories, a beginner's mind knows that art is not just for artists and music is not just for musicians. Beginner's Mind is a cautionary tale about an enlightened teacher who led the battle and proved the value of educating the whole child: mind, body, and soul. Beginner's Mind is a tender and sometimes heartbreaking field guide for parents and teachers on how to educate our children, with an emphasis on bringing something into the classroom that cannot be explained in mere words; it can only be experienced, chapter by chapter, lesson by lesson.