Customer Reviews

Chop Wood, Carry Water: A Guide to Finding Spiritual Fulfillment in Everyday Life

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Just under 290 pages this is a classic that has just as much meaning in 2001 as it did the first time I read it 20 years ago. A book I cannot help buying, over and over when copies get lent out and the message keeps getting passed on.

15 Chapters. Beginnings; Learning; Intimate Realtionships; Sex; family; Work; Money; Play; Tuning the Body; Healing; Technology; The Earth; Social Action; Inner Guidance; Perils of the Path. Etc.

The subtitle actually explains better than anything what the book is all about. "A Guide to Finding Spiritual Fulfillment in Everyday Life". The Chop Wood Carry Water comes from a thousand year old Chinese Zen Master who spoke of the spiritual aspect of everyday things.

This reminded me (I am not a Christian) of reading where the wife of Billy Graham, Ruth Graham has a small plaque in her kitchen that says "Godly service done here daily" or something to that effect. This is what this book is all about. AAppreciating the simple joy of things like sex, gathering with community to make the earth healthier and fight injustice etc etc.

The Chop Wood Carry Water book has been helpful so often in reminding me that their is joy and honour in doing the laundry, cleaning, paying bills, bathing, cooking, and doing what many people sadly think is boring everyday needs.

In this day and age where people rush here and there and express a sense of loss, because they feel they need to always be doing something noticable, I think this book would be a great healing tool, in teaching people that doing the "chores" of life, can in fact be a relaxing and growth enhancing activity.

I found this book to be a wonderful bridge from a seemingly unspiritual world to the path toward enlightenment.

I have been carrying my copy with me for seven years and refer to it quite often. In the last seven years I have embarked upon a relationship that I care deeply about and have also become a father twice. I have also grown within myself to understand better what it truly means to work with people not necessarily for or against them.

This book has been my steadfast companion through all of this and I have recommended it often.

I hope that you will find it as helpful a stanchion as I have.

I thought that this book was written by one person. This book is a compilation of essays, quotes, and articles by various authorities in religion (Buddhist in particular), psychology, and other how to thrive in the modern world experts. I'm not dismissing the book. I think it's a good collection. I was expecting a sharper focus. This is a good primer for someone just beginning to live as a mindful person today.

If you want a book that has interesting spiritual quotes, but doesn't take a specific stand on any of them...this is your book; it's really more of a "spiritual quote book" edited by a politically correct quorom of authors. It struck me that it was almost like I was sitting next to a hippie who has deeply studied religions, but thanks to all the pot they've smoked, can't really decipher what the point of the quotes was in the first place, and who lives his life by none of them.

Don't get me wrong, it has a lot of great quotes; however, if you have any inkling at all of what kind of spirituality you'd like to explore, you're better getting a more specific book. This book hits in such a broad way as to make it's chapters somewhat irrelevant in the final analysis. I understand that their goal is to cover what every major philosophical/religious idea is, but it seems kind of silly to have "modern humanist perspectives" next to Buddhist, Christian, Muslim, and Confucianist statements. It's basically a poorly designed text book that was written without analytical analysis.

I guess that a lot of the book strikes me as more of a "nobody's right" approach to spiritualism that is dangerously close to moral relativism. My feeling is that if you want to study what the great teachers, philosophers, and religious icons think, you're better off studying them specifically, as this book tries to please everyone, and likely pleases very few.

This is a stew of quotes and excerpts. There is some general focus, but no original thought. Examples:

Chapter 1:
Page 1: Quote from a Tibetan lama, from Lao Tzu, from Marilyn Ferguson (who?), Brother Lawrence, and "anonymous."
Pages 2-3: Mostly excerpts from Abraham Maslow, quotes from T.S. Eliot. De Lubciz (who?)
Pages 3-7: St. John of the Cross, Peter Matthessen, P.Ouspensky, G. Gurdjieff, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Nikos Kazantzakis, Naeihiera, the I Ching, Baba Ram Das, Sufi proverb.
Page 8: Ray Faraday Nelson, William Bridges, Shunryu Suzuki-Roshi, Bodhidharma.

And so on, including, by the time you get to page 17, Confucius, The Work of the Chariot (what?), Alan Watts, Nathaniel Branden, Peter Marin, Tom Wolfe, Daniel Yankelovich, Dogen, Carlos Casteneda, Piero Ferucci, G. Spencer Brown, Thoreau, Lin Yutang, the Bible, Jean Houston.

The chapter on Technology begins the first sentence with Hans Kung, proceeds in the 3rd paragraph to Amaury de Riencourt, and then casts its net to include The Chaldean Oracle, Larry Dossey, Da Free John, Fritjof Capra, Albert Einstein, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, the Supreme Court, Henry Morgenau, Werner Heisenberg, Sir James Jeans, James Wheeler, David Bohm, Peter Blue Cloud, Karl Pribram, Ken Wilber, Evelyn Underhill, Ilya Priongine, Buckminster Fuller, Stanislow Grof, John Lilly, Jean Houston, Itzhak entov, Sengstan, Jeremy Rifkin, Gregory Bateson, Rabindranath Tagore, Susan Griffin, Frank Herbert, Francis Jeffrey, Ivan Illich, Shakespeare, and so on. This chapter includes photographs of smokestacks, a man using a computer, and a large engine.

These 2 chapters comprise 33 pages of this 287-page hodgepodge. I leave to your imagination and your calculator how many other quotes and citations there are. The layout itself is distracting. There is a column for the main text, a column for quotes, and space for photographs. Sometimes all 3 appear on the same page. If you are looking for peace and depth, look somewhere else.

This book outlines so many aspects of our daily living and then injects spirituality in a way that synergizes the mundane and the sublime.

Such an incredible source of wisdom for living the practical/everyday in a full-hearted and spiritual manner.

I use Chop Wood, Carry Water as a meditation text in the dharma lectures that are a part of a weekly yoga class. The material presented in this volume is useful, thoughtful and worthy of meditation and reflection. I would recommend it to anyone who wanted to look deeper into the surface concerns of life, love and being on this planet. A very useful guide to living fully.

This book pulls wisdom from many sources to cover topics across all aspects of life. It is a good book to have handy for difficult times or just a bad day.

I use Chop Wood, Carry Water as a meditation text in the dharma lectures that are a part of a weekly yoga class. The material presented in this volume is useful, thoughtful and worthy of meditation and reflection. I would recommend it to anyone who wanted to look deeper into the surface concerns of life, love and being on this planet. A very useful guide to living fully.

Chope Wood, Carry Water is, surely, a classic masterwork...as timely in the 21st century as in the 20th.