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    Zen to Go
    Zen to Go
    Zen to Go
    Ebook134 pages1 hour

    Zen to Go

    By Jon Winokur

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    This provocative guide offers bite-size wisdom from East and West, from such intuitive Zen masters as Henry Miller, Albert Einstein, Yogi Berra, Woody Allen, and Joan Didion. It conveys the essence of Zen with an eclectic mix of pithy ponderings on life, death, art, nature, reality, time, and nothingness. Witty and wise, airy and deep, Zen to Go is open to all (lotus position optional). Or in the ultimate act of Zen, it can be ignored altogether. As Gertrude Stein said, "There ain't no answer. There ain't never going to be any answer. There has never been an answer. That's the answer."

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJon Winokur
    Release dateJul 8, 2011
    ISBN9781466111134
    Zen to Go
    Author

    Jon Winokur

    Jon Winokur is the author of various nonfiction books, including The Portable Curmudgeon, Zen to Go, and Advice to Writers. He lives in Los Angeles.

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    Reviews for Zen to Go

    3.5/5

    22 ratings2 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Quotes about finding Zen in every-day life. Enjoyable enough, but not very deep.
    • 5/5
      I love this book! Here's a review I wrote in 1996 for a now-defunct newsletter.FLBs: Something to Chew OnFunny little books (FLBs) of one sort or another have been around for some time. Captivated by Charles Schultz’s Happiness Is a Warm Puppy back in the sixties, the public has devoured a steady stream of impulse-counter miniatures, from cute sentiments and pocket wisdom to humor and satire. Regardless of the specific subject matter or theme, the marketplace appears to have a big appetite for attractively packaged tidbits that nearly anybody can read all the way through. The recipe seems simple: just gather a few witty brevities that appeal to some personal or professional interest, add a liberal helping of charming graphics (optional), and publish. Voilà: an FLB.In general, I haven’t been much of a consumer of FLBs, with or without clever illustrations. I like big books, the thicker the better, and I prefer to distill their essences myself, without the aid of a cartoonist’s interpretations. So I’ve resisted tiny volumes about cats and angels, palm-sized anthologies of political one-liners and snappy comebacks, and even comical instances of fractured English from around the world.But I suppose it was just a matter of time until I happened onto an FLB that suited my own taste. The subject matter was Zen, and I didn’t even know I was interested in it until after I’d read this FLB, which must have turned up at just the right moment in some internal process of which I was completely unaware. Zen lends itself especially well to the FLB treatment because so many Zenlike things can be said in brief, high-impact statements and so many Zen stories conclude with a punch line that invites illustration. So even though these books look funny, and probably are funny, and are certainly little, they are not the empty salt and sugar you find in most FLBs. There’s plenty of meat in them. I was fooled the first time, to be sure, but not after that. I now have a small but substantial FLB section on my Zen bookshelf, and I regard it quite seriously. Even a nibble can take a long while to digest.The FLB that moved me from a spiritual window shopper to a Monday night regular at a zendo was Zen to Go, compiled and edited by Jon Winokur (Plume, 1990; $7.95). This modest-looking offering bills itself on the cover as “Bite-sized bits of wisdom from the East and West—from the Buddha to Yogi Berra.” I bought it because it was displayed cover-out on the bookstore shelf and the whimsical picture of a pretzel in the shape of a yin-yang caught my eye. I thought it would be a lightweight, easily digestible Buddhist snack that would please my philosophical palate without demanding any investment—not effort, not thought, scarcely even attention, and certainly nothing like commitment.That should give you a pretty good idea of how much I knew about Zen, which thrives on short, cryptic statements that can enthrall a mind for years. I’d heard of “one hand clapping,” but, with my own education firmly rooted in the Western tradition, I never guessed that anything that nonsensical was serious business to anybody; I thought it was a parody of something.So, all unawares, I took the hook with the bait before I even realized I’d swallowed anything. Not only had I become a consumer of FLBs after all but I had also had my first solid helping of Zen teachings—and was about to become a guest at the banquet.I read the book through, made little of it, and read it through again, this time with a glimmer of sense here and there. The quotations, all short, are arranged under general topics (“Action,” “Illusion,” “No-Mind”) in a sequence that has a felt logic to it even if not a readily analyzed pattern. Interspersed among them are occasional brief explanatory passages and traditional Zen stories that add a dimension and a larger context to the quotations. I like the editor’s introduction, which is one of the nicest short explanations of Zen I’ve encountered. The concluding paragraph of the introduction, in truth, is what made me want to know more:Zen is simple and unpretentious. It’s friendly. It doesn’t take itself too seriously. It doesn’t sit on its behind in some shrine, it gets out and mingles. It’s flexible and portable, but it isn’t junk food for the soul, it’s hearty spiritual nourishment. It has dignity, a sense of humor, and a gritty, iconoclastic spirit. This book is meant to convey that spirit.Fairly frequently, I still like to read this book all the way through from the introduction to the bibliography.Two years later, I am still bringing a vigorous appetite to the Zen table. I’ve partaken of some rather heavy fare in that time, working my way through Suzuki, Humphreys, Conze, Beck, Aitken, Kapleau, and others, as well as several books on Sanskrit (an interest that predates my Zen study) and two Zen and Buddhism dictionaries, cover to cover. I have scarcely begun to touch the masses of scholarly works. I know that reading and study will not sate the appetite. But they do show me how to take nourishment where it can be found—sometimes even in just a single bite, a pretzel for the mind.

    Book preview

    Zen to Go - Jon Winokur

    Zen to Go

    Compiled and Edited

    by

    Jon Winokur

    Copyright 2011 Jon Winokur

    Smashwords Edition

    Smashwords Edition License Notes:

    This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

    To the Memory of

    TOBI SANDERS

    CONTENTS

    INTRODUCTION

    INTRODUCTION TO THE SECOND EDITION

    ZEN

    Zen

    Action

    Art

    ILLUSION

    Illusion

    Attachment

    Self

    Time

    Life

    Death

    Reality

    ENLIGHTENMENT

    Nature

    The Way

    No-Knowledge

    Meditation

    Satori

    MIND

    Beginner’s Mind

    Ordinary Mind

    No-Mind

    NOT-TWO

    Nothingness

    Oneness

    SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

    ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

    ABOUT THE AUTHOR

    A special transmission outside the Scriptures;

    No dependence upon words and letters;

    Direct pointing to reality;

    Seeing into one’s own nature and realizing

    Buddhahood.

    Bodhidharma

    There ain’t no answer.

    There ain’t going to be any answer.

    There never has been an answer.

    That’s the answer.

    Gertrude Stein

    INTRODUCTION

    Six centuries before the birth of Christ, a young prince named Gautama Siddhartha lived in a palace on the slopes of the Himalayas in what is now Nepal. According to legend, he led an opulent, sheltered life until the day he left the palace for the first time. While traveling with a servant, he saw an old woman and discovered that people grow old and infirm; he saw a sick child and learned of the existence of disease; he encountered a funeral procession and for the first time confronted mortality. Finally he met a grinning, half-naked beggar. How can this man smile in the face of such misery? Gautama asked his servant. He’s smiling because he’s a holy man. He’s enlightened, the servant replied. His peace of mind shattered, with a yearning for liberation from worldly suffering and an unaccountable sense of destiny, Gautama renounced his patrimony and left the palace in search of enlightenment.

    For seven years he wandered about India without success. Finally he sat down under a fig tree near Gaya and vowed to stay there until he had attained enlightenment. On the seventh day he opened his eyes, saw the morning star, and had a Great Awakening in which he grasped Ultimate Reality. Liberated from all worldly pain and illusion, he ha become the Buddha, the Enlightened One, for the next forty-nine years he traveled up and down India preaching the doctrine which is the foundation of Buddhism.

    The Buddha taught that the ego, or self, is the cause of all suffering. In its frantic pursuit of comfort and security, it imprisons us in a vicious cycle of joy and pain, because comfort and security are illusions. In an effort to promote its separate existence, the grasping self alienates us from our original condition of oneness with the Absolute and condemns us to a life of delusion.

    We try to ease the pain of separation from our true nature by resorting to what the Buddha called the five thieves: sex, gluttony, pursuit of status, greed, and insanity. We take refuge in ultimately meaningless activity. We deify the intellect and denigrate the mystical. We seek but we never find, because the intellect is useless for realizing Ultimate Truth. We’re out of sync with the cosmos because we experience life through a veil of duality, wrongly discriminating between subject and object, mind and body, observer and observed. We’re born free from such delusion, but as we’re gradually educated, the self grows, takes control, and isolates us from our true nature.

    By means of zazen, a special form of sitting meditation, and sanzen, the interplay between master and student, Zen awakens us from our cultural trance, silences the self, and returns us to our original state of grace.

    The Buddha left no writings. After his death disciples passed down his teachings orally, but eventually scriptures were compiled, monks and nuns were ordained, and monasteries sprang up throughout India. Zen, a school of Buddhism strongly influenced by Taoism, developed in China in the sixth century A.D., and was eventually brought to Japan. (Zen is the Japanese word for meditation.) By the beginning of this century, Zen had taken root in the West, where it has flourished since the end of World War II.

    Zen is not a religion. It offers no heaven, no hell, no sin, no guilt, no miracles, no sacraments, no saints. Zen is not ritualistic, dogmatic, or sanctimonious. Zen is not a cult: It doesn’t proselytize, preach, or moralize. It doesn’t explain or promote itself. Although it has masters and students, strictly speaking there is nothing to teach and nothing to learn. Zen defies analysis: The harder you try to understand it, the more elusive it becomes. As the maxim says, When you seek it, you cannot find it.

    Zen isn’t a moral philosophy; it avoids metaphysical speculation and focuses on the concrete. It’s goal is experience, not understanding. It deals not with constructs and symbol of life, but with life itself. Zen is eminently practical, giving its adherents a way of living their lives, a way of being in the world, a way of doing ordinary things (hence the many Zen in the Art of… books).

    Because Zen involves a personal experience, an epiphany, many of the books about Zen published in English have addressed the problem of describing the ineffable. These books customarily have disclaimers to the effect that no amount of writing or talking about Zen can communicate its essence, because Ultimate Truth cannot be dragged to the level of mere language. A book about Zen is thus a paradox, in the same way that Words can describe a glass of water, but they cannot quench your thirst of The finger pointing at the moon is not the moon itself.

    It’s true that language is inherently dualistic and categorical, and just as the finger is not the moon, this book is not Zen. It doesn’t presume to explain Zen, but can only hint at the experience at its heart and beckon the reader beyond the printed word toward that experience. Even

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