Dirty Laundry: 100 Days in a Zen Monastery [Paperback]

Robert Winson (Author), Miriam Sagan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1999

The poetry, reflections, rants, and dreams in this curious documentation of the authors' winter at a Zen monastery explore the influence of the dharma in human relationships. Their candid record offers insight into the challenges - spiritual and otherwise - of raising a family, sustaining a marriage, and participating in an eccentric spiritual community in Colorado.

Product Details

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: New World Library; 2 edition (December 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1577311051
• ISBN-13: 978-1577311058
• Product Dimensions: 7.3 x 5.9 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.9 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,429,522 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars an intimate look at buddhist monastic life in the U.S., July 26, 2000

By 

L. Rephann "curious about everything" (Brooklyn, New York United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Dirty Laundry: 100 Days in a Zen Monastery (Paperback)

Dirty Laundry, like all good spiritual memoirs, has that "peeping through the keyhole" quality that makes the reader feel he is getting inside information on a taboo or guarded topic. As per the title, Dirty Laundry has it all: marital problems, abbot/junior initiate sexual relationships, jealousy and intrigue in the monastery, financial problems, even the raising of a young child part-time at the monastary, part-time at home. Dirty Laundry's best quality is its ability to make Buddhist practice, even monastic practice, seem possible, if not practical. For all who have considered a retreat or even a longer period of monastic practice, Dirty Laundry shows what it might be like: the possible problems, possible solutions, etc. In this respect, it's a valuable book, as it is for taking the cover off the secrecy of domestic Buddhist practice.

However, while Dirty Laundry does a decent job of showing us the underbelly of monastic life, the book offers very little detail on the good stuff: practice, zazen, ritual, even the physical appearance of the monastary. This is probably due to the fact that the book is actually a journal kept in tandem by ordained monk Robert Winson and his lay wife, Miriam Sagan. Fully one-half the entries have little to do with Buddhism at all, except as an outsider's observation of how it fits into her life (or doesn't, as the case may be).

The squabbles and seemingly un-enlightened behavior that goes on can be infuriating to those who take their Buddhism a little more seriously, but Dirty Laundry is quick and easy to read and for its ease of digestion, offers some insight to the problems facing domestic monastic practice.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars First rate book on zen and "real life"., July 7, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Dirty Laundry: 100 Days in a Zen Monastery (Paperback)

Robert Winson and Miriam Sagan writes alternating chapters in this engrossing book. Robert is going to spend 100 days in a zen monastery in New Mexico. Miriam stays at home with their daughter. This book describes vividly their lives inbetween visits and their weekend meetings at the monastery. The book also has much to say on the inner life of a monastery and on the role of the resident zen master : Richard Baker roshi. It's a relief to read autobiographical writings on zen that is not written from an academic, male, 60-ies only perspective. I've read several of them and this book beats them all!

The authors were involved in Santa Fe punk-groups "The Poetry Devils" and "Bichos". Robert Winson died in 1995.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Truth about Living in a Zen Monastery, May 7, 2004

By 

J. Sunseri "Daishin Sunseri" (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Dirty Laundry: 100 Days in a Zen Monastery (Paperback)

Miriam Sagan and Robert Winson's book is a very small slice of the truth told in a crafty and interesting way through the convention of simultaneous diary entries. It's the description of 100 days in Crestone Zen Monastery in Colorado, but it is also a synopsis of how dysfunctional a group of human beings can become when they allow a sociopath zen "teacher",like Richard Baker, to run their lives. To me this is just more of the same "zen neurosis" spread by Mr. Baker and his corrupt followers put down on paper for everyone to see.
I know many of the principals in this book, and their descriptions by Winson and Sagan are scarily accurate.(Sadly Robert died not a long after this 100 day retreat.) But don't fret, dear reader, you too can experience such humiliating and dehumanizing treatment...just head to your local Soto Zen Center under the lineage of Shunryu Suzuki. And not to worry. They're everywhere!