The Zen Commandments: Ten Suggestions for a Life of Inner Freedom. [Paperback]

Dean Sluyter (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 19, 2001

The Ten Commandments tell us how to behave, but they don't say much about the inner awareness from which outer behavior springs. Do the right thing, of course-- but better yet, find your inner light and doing the right thing becomes as natural as breathing. Here are ten powerful nudges toward that light.

Drawing on sources from Zen stories and the Bible to jazz and rock 'n' roll, from American movies to Tibetan meditative techniques, Dean Sluyter steers clear of dogma and emphasizes what works-- a sort of spiritual street smarts. He shows that the state of boundless freedom and happiness isn't something distant or exotic, but is right here, while you're stuck in traffic or taking out the trash. And revisiting the Ten Commandments, he shows how on a deeper level they offer some surprising enlightenment wisdom of their own.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In Dean Sluyter's clever The Zen Commandments, the author lays down 10 guidelines for living a more present life and experiencing moment-to-moment awareness. Some of his "commandments" are Zen interpretations of the 10 laws Moses brought down from Mount Sinai; others have nothing to do with the prophet's inscribed tablets. In one example, Sluyter takes the Fourth Commandment--Remember the Sabbath day, and keep it holy--and gives it a Zen twist:

The whole idea of Sabbath is a temporary withdrawal from limited worldly activities in order to connect to the limitlessness that some people call God. Here ... we're learning to be in a state of utter rest seven days a week, 60 seconds a minute, transcending and silently witnessing all physical and mental activities, even while performing them."

Through the moment-to-moment awareness that Zen demands, we constantly stay in touch with God, or the Infinite (or whatever individuals choose to call it), Sluyter reminds us. Other Zen commandments are more contemporary and have nothing to do with biblical precepts. Perhaps one of his most useful guidelines is his enjoinder to "Notice the Moment":

On our journey through life, we think of the time we spent walking down the hall from Office A to Office B as intermission, dead time, mere connective tissue. But there is no intermission. The show never stops. Every moment is the only moment.

Sluyter sprinkles his chapters with eclectic quotes from Bob Dylan, Indian gurus, Miles Davis, Franz Kafka, even Bill Clinton. This is a lively book and one that will almost certainly give you pause in your day, whether it's to simply stop and take a breath while rushing through your morning routine, or to notice the roadside flowers while stalled in rush-hour traffic. --Demian McLean

From Publishers Weekly

Meditation teacher Sluyter (Why the Chicken Crossed the Road and Other Hidden Enlightenment Teachings) draws 10 life "suggestions" from the world's religions, scriptures, philosophers, literature and popular culture (in his words, "any tradition that promotes compassionate outer behavior and enlightened inner awareness"). Sluyter's suggestions involve acting with kindness, noticing the moment, keeping things simple, blessing others and remaining devoted. His sources include Jesus and the Dalai Lama, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Bob Dylan, Monty Python and Ramana Maharshi, the Wizard of Oz and the Prajnaparamita Sutra. The strength of this eclecticism is that the book is extremely well written and joyously entertaining; its weakness is that in finding the commonalties among so many different perspectives, Sluyter omits much of the background that makes those perspectives uniquely true. This approach may be downright jarring to someone who regards a particular belief system seriously. Sluyter's point--that we often make life too complex when we really need to just relax and be--is a simple one, as are pithy maxims such as "No Appointment, No Disappointment." For those who find simplicity hard to attain, his chapters also include exercises in meditation. The book enthusiastically suggests that readers experiment and adhere to anything that works for them "as if your life depended on it," because, according to Sluyter, it actually does.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  
• Paperback: 188 pages
• Publisher: Tarcher (March 19, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1585420840
• ISBN-13: 978-1585420841
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #611,580 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent writing; user-friendly wisdom, March 27, 2001

By 

JOEL D. BAEHR (Cambridge, MA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Zen Commandments: Ten Suggestions for a Life of Inner Freedom. (Paperback)

This is the book that I will recommend to anyone who wants an interesting and user friendly book on (mostly) Eastern spirituality that is also deep and grounded in tradition. Sluyter's excellent writing brings regular "hits" of smiles and wonder. It does not break new ground; it is about timeless wisdom. But it does open new, friendly versions of old spiritual practices, and it identifies spiritual signposts in our own familiar cultural landscape. Quotes range from Plato to Pogo, from Dogen to Dylan.

In one chapter we are taken into a class with Charles Genoud, the originator of "Gesture of Awareness," an adaptation of Tibetan Dzogchen meditation. "In one exercise, each student picks out a spot across the room and walks toward it. After a few repetitions, Charles interrupts them halfway to their goal and has them walk to a different spot instead. Then he invites them to consider: "if we never reach the original goal, in what sense were we ever walking `toward' it? Where did that `toward' exist?....In our minds, we're always going somewhere; in actuality we always are somewhere." This exercise, like so many in "The Zen Commandments," can actually be done by the reader. So on one level this book is an easy, breezy read. On another level it leads to an engagement with conundrums and wisdom practices that can profitably be followed for years.

Here is some tantric wisdom on marriage. "The procedure is simple: if you worship (that is, acknowledge) your partner as the infinite, then you get to set up house with the infinite, eat breakfast with the infinite, make love to the infinite. Such worship doesn't require you to relate in an artificial or saccharine way; that would just confuse the issue...It doesn't require you to suppress your occasional anger or other "negative" feelings, which are a natural, ordinary feature of relationships.... Instead of fantasizing about the person of our dreams, we devote ourselves to a real person and so awaken." Thomas Merton similarly advised, "Make a chair as though an angel were going to sit in it." Make your bed as though a god/goddess were going to lie in it. Tantra like this turns projection on its head. Instead of being ruled unconsciously by the mental pictures we make of others, we openly embrace the whole projection project and do it positively, and consciously.

This book is successful because it is modest. It does elegantly what it sets out to do: makes wisdom accessible from our ordinary experience. Sluyter notes the joke about the seeker who asks the guru for the secret of life. The guru answers: "You do the Hokey Pokey and you turn yourself around; that's what it's all about." Sluyter's suggestions make good Hokey Pokey. You have to do the turning yourself.

Unfortunately, for those committed to specific traditions the title is dishonest and a turn-off. Dean Sluyter, a student of Dzogchen, is not a Zen practitioner and has no business using "Zen" in his title, just as California wineries have no business calling wine "Burgundy." "The Zen Commandments" is excellent jug wisdom. Zen it isn't.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars modern spiritual classic, December 16, 2001

By 

"iotamcgranule" (Pinetop, Arizona United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Zen Commandments: Ten Suggestions for a Life of Inner Freedom. (Paperback)

There are certain spiritual classics that come to mind right off the bat that have stood the test of time and have provided manna for weary wayfarers and the rest of us. Titles like "The Dark Night of the Soul" and "The Cloud of Unknowing" are the first two I think of. These are books that you begin to read mostly out of curiousity and soon realize that every page is to be SOAKED in, slowly, savoring the deliciousness of it all. Merton's "(New) Seeds of Contemplation", CS Lewis' visionary "Great Divorce", St. Augustine's Confessions...etc. Then there are modern books, written within the last ten years that I am convinced are of this caliber. Terence Grant's "The Silence of Unknowing" was the only one I thought I had found. But "the Zen Commandments" is another one of those special books. Reading it on a wistfully breezy friday evening almost gave me the feeling of being on a weekend spiritual retreat, shacking up in some monastery. Some may attack it for being too user-friendly and call it bubble gum spirituality. I wonder why anything has to be cryptic to be spiritual. Sluyter invites us to take a look at the Ten Commandments in a new helpful light. He wanders with us through each commandment and strips each one down to it's pure naked core. For example, the first commandment:

I am the Lord your God, Who brought you out of the land of Egypt and the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before Me.

Is reworded to bring out it's flavor:

I am the supreme oceanic boundlessness that has saved you from all wavelike turbulence and constriction. Don't go back to it by mistaking any single wave for the whole ocean.

It was at this point that I knew this was a book to be savored.
If you're itching to see life in a new, ancient way, I highly recommend taking this particular journey.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fine Writing, Useful Info, August 13, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: The Zen Commandments: Ten Suggestions for a Life of Inner Freedom. (Paperback)

There are many wonderful spiritual teachers who write books, but they're not all wonderful writers. Sluyter is. His witty, inventive approach and his exceptionally clear prose style held me from the first page (a cosmic riff on "Singin' in the Rain") to the appendix (seven pages of the most useful meditation tips I've seen anywhere in print). The title is a joke which most people get; Sluyter states at the outset that he's not a Zen teacher and that the book embraces much more than Zen. (His fresh look at the Ten Commandments as an enlightenment manual is eye-opening.) The book is eclectic without being superficial, full of practical how-to's without being boring. Its pop culture sensibility (Elvis, Dylan, Homer Simpson, "Groundhog Day," etc., are cited alongside the Buddha) makes "Eastern" teachings lively and accessible to Westerners. I think even advanced meditators and seekers will find fresh insights here, while beginners will receive a thorough, entertaining, dogma-free introduction to the path.