Grassroots Zen [Hardcover]

Perle Besserman (Author), Manfred Steger (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 2001

Many Zen Buddhist practitioners have come to question some of Japanese Zen's less democratic aspects-from the strict, male-dominated hierarchies to the racial overtones. At the same time, modern American Buddhists often find it difficult to integrate zazen (seated Zen meditation) with lives of family, work, and social engagement. This book offers a fascinating guide to overcoming both these dilemmas. A study of how one Zen group returned to an ancient Chinese tradition of community meditation practice without a leader or hierarchy, this book also outlines an authentic, "grassroots" approach, urging people from all walks of life to come together in meditation and the study of dharma. Grassroots Zen focuses on the challenge of truly becoming one with the moment in our frantically paced society; of finding a space for the passing self; and of achieving balance between Zen practice and daily life, as well as individuality in community. A thoughtful and absorbing work, Grassroots Zen is an important book for those seeking a practice that is truly of the people, by the people, and for the people.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Over some 13 centuries of development, Zen Buddhism, especially in its Japanese form, has accumulated a certain amount of cultural and organizational baggage--the robes, the shaved heads, the stern master, the rituals. Some Zen masters will tell you, though, that you can drop the baggage and still travel comfortably. Husband-and-wife team Manfred Steger and Perle Besserman studied first under the cultural weight of Japanese Zen, then with the light-footed lay master Robert Aitken. As Westerners, they found the freedom from tradition liberating. They brought this creative freedom into a group under their own direction, which they call Grassroots Zen. Retaining only the bare bones of Zen--meditation, retreats, interviews, koan--Steger and Besserman return to an early Chinese manifestation of Zen in which lay people got together to meditate as a community. Like vipassana, this form of Zen is heavy on the meditation, light on the ritual; long on the community and short on the impulsive individual. Grassroots Zen, Steger and Besserman say, is a goalless practice that rewards incalculably by bringing every aspect of one's life into balance. --Brian Bruya

From Publishers Weekly

Married university professors and authors Steger (Gandhi's Dilemma: Nonviolent Principles and Nationalist Power) and Besserman (The Shambhala Guide to Kabbalah and Jewish Mysticism) name and describe a phenomenon that is occurring all over the country: relatively small, democratically run groups of Zen Buddhist practitioners are banding together and sustaining a sangha, or community, free of the hierarchy and formality of the monastery. After conceiving this way of practice with the Princeton Area Zen Group, the members discovered that they were actually operating within an old Chinese tradition (ts'ao-pen ch'an) wherein "without official sanction from Buddhist priests and beyond the monastery walls... like-minded men and women gathered together to sit in meditation." The authors assert, "We eliminated monastic robes and tonsure [head shaving], as well as every vestige of militarism and male dominance inherent in Japanese Zen training." They also prescribe how to hold on to what they perceive to be the essential elements: zazen (formal sitting meditation), sesshin (silent meditation retreats), dharma (talks by teachers), koans (verbal puzzles that provoke insight) and dokusan (student-teacher interviews). In Zen practice "nothing special" can mean a kind of ideal, but compared to the flood of fine Buddhism books now available this is also "nothing special" in the more commonly applied turn of the phrase. Ultimately, it offers not much more than a new name for the heart of a hallowed practice.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 176 pages
• Publisher: Tuttle Publishing; 1 edition (June 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0804832439
• ISBN-13: 978-0804832434
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,751,764 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Clearly Zen, July 13, 2001

By 

Dan Beauchamp (Bisbee, AZ United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Grassroots Zen (Hardcover)

This is one of the best book on Zen for Westerners that I know. Along with Steve Hagen's Buddhism Plain and Simple, Stephen Batchelor's Buddhism without Beliefs, Mark Epstein's books on Zen, and Guy Claxton's The Heart of Buddhism, it offers a vision of Zen Buddhism stripped of its monastic trappings and religious attachments. This book is Zen and all spiritual practice seen clearly. (Thus, as a person who still clings to his Christian heritage, Grassroots Zen has helped me see what is worth keeping and what must be let go in Christian spiritual practice.) Grassroots Zen works because the authors have tried it all and decided to work for a community of practice that is democratic and open, one that is unafraid to leave behind the shaved heads, the abbot's rules, and the roshi's robes.

The book is organized around three basic categories: time, space, and motion. Our ways of seeing time, space, and motion, through the eyes of a persisting "self" standing at the center and peering out, deeply shape our experience of existence, our sense of who we are and what we are doing in our strange appearance on a minor planet. In approaching Zen this way, the authors are especially successful in opening up the deep challenge offered by Zen to our commonsense ways of shaping experience.

Grassroots Zen urges us to stop making existence a category and a story and to instead leave it as it is, as we find it: an extraordinary experience. Here is where the book is at its best as the authors try to speak of what the experience of living like that is like, without arguing for yet one more story among the long and dreary menu of Western accounts of enlightenment or of the quest for no-self or for the true self.

For me, this makes Zen more anti-story than story-free, a practice that constantly prompts us to observe the narratives unfolding in our head and instead to wait for, and attend to, the freedom and freshness of the never-ending story of the present moment with all of its difficulties, humor, pain, and joy.

As Basho put it in his lovely Haiku (A Haiku is included with each chapter heading): Hello: Light the fire: I'll bring inside a lovely bright ball of snow!

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Must read for Lay Zen folks, October 1, 2010

By 

Himanshu Dave (Parlin, NJ United States) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Grassroots Zen (Hardcover)

After you read joko Beck and Shunryu Suzuki , you may think you knew everything one suppose to know about zen practice.Here comes fresh air of american zen spirit ,never same and always changing .

'Concept ' of Time , space and motion is explained very clearly to undesrtand in ordinary terms by beginner or experienced.

Must read for every Lay zen practitioner .