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The Butterfly's Dream: In Search of the Roots of Zen (Tuttle Library of Enlightenment)

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This book illustrates in entertaining detail how large and significant is the spiritual life. While the ideas underlying Zen Buddhism have been around for centuries, it is only during the last 50 years that European and American roshis and senseis have enabled new forms of approaching the living heart of enlightenment. The many faces of "I don't know", the "on/off" thinking, the "me-as-center and me-as-periphery", the paradox of the center, the omnipresent issue of pure awareness and so on draw the reader into the amazing world of knowing and being in a vital new way. Training methods of Japanese monasteries have undergone much modification through the creative work and assiduous struggles of Western Zen students in the past, now Zen teachers, such as the author of the present book. He is the director of the Montreal Zen Center. He is a layman who has devoted 30 years to practice and to assist others in their way to awareness and awakening. He received the full trasmission as a teacher of Zen from Roshi Phillip Kapleau. He belongs to the second generation in the West, that is, grasping the roots of Zen spirituality withing the context of Jewish, Christian and Sufi cultural and religious backgrounds. There is a French version of this book.