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69 of 73 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Zen of Jesus's way in the world, August 3, 2001
This review is from: The Zen Teachings of Jesus (Paperback)
Kenneth Leong's book will let you see a very different Jesus. For me, it was the first time that anyone has helped me win a strong sense of how Jesus might well have lived his life, how he might have come across to the people he met, and of how he walked out the door of the house each day and went about waiting on God (and not for God)in the experience of everyday life, in every encounter met along the road. Leong does this by taking the `religion" of the everyday, Zen, and especially the Zen that keeps to its Taoist and Chinese roots, and translates this Zen into a series of key qualities, key ways of being in the world. These include a powerful and sustained awareness, insight, simplicity, gentleness, a devotion to the ordinary (as opposed to the supernatural), zest for the everyday encounter, a strong sense of humor, and a deep acknowledgement of the paradox at the root of everything. This is not the Zen of a militant monasticism, the Zen of Japan. This Zen is the art of living, of accepting the world as it is, and of desiring not what you don't have but what you already are. When the key attributes of this way of being in the world are puzzled out, they seem to fit how Jesus might very well have been, of how he encountered the Spirit at table, on the road, at the well, and on the cross. Leong also argues that the Gospels and Jesus' words are best seen as Zen-like koans or puzzles that often have no rational solution, puzzles that jar the seeker into a completely different way of seeing the world, of finding the path to the I AM. Here is the biggest koan of all: Jesus saying, I am the Way. Many Christians believe that Jesus was saying, "Believe in me [the Christ] for I am the only Way to God." The words of Jesus have been used to shore up the orthodoxy of the established church or the fundamentalist's vision of the Bible as the inerrant Word of God. Leong struggles with this koan and comes to a different, more Gnostic view: Paraphrasing Leong, he renders this koan as: The path of the I AM [is] the way. Leong's hard struggle with the `I am the Way' koan helps the reader find his own reaction to Jesus' words. Here is my feeble attempt to understand I am the Way. "The path to the Kingdom is found through my way of being in the world, my way of attemding to and knowing the ordinary miracle of the world. Follow this way or path to freedom, to finding the Kingdom in our midst." Leong's interpretation of the resurrection is very brave. He sees the resurrection not as the event of the bodily raising of the dead Jesus, but rather the transformation in the disciples that was won in Jesus' deep acceptance of death as a reality of life, as his way of overcoming [the fear of] death. Jesus waited on death, where waiting means that he attended to and underwent the pain and suffering of death as the last and ultimate path toward life lived in the Presence. This extraordinary acceptance finally opened the eyes of the disciples. The Zen Teachings of Jesus is the best handbook I know for meeting Jesus again, for the very first time.
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25 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
K. Leong has done a great service to the world., March 12, 2001
This review is from: The Zen Teachings of Jesus (Paperback)
I have been piecing together my personal insight together for many years concerning the words of Jesus. On occasion I would talk with people about it. I received in return many quirky smiles and condencending attitudes which is what many of you readers today may have also received when you approached the same 'sacred' subject' . It was just better not to talk about it. The way I saw Jesus and the more traditional views were radically different. And much of which I perceived cannot be put into words and, if you understand the nature of this book you will understand what I am referring to. So imagine my extreme joy at finding this gem of a book. I don't care what people think, I really don't, but it is nice to find 'like thinking ' individuals on a subject that is so expansive and yet yields so little fruit. This book is a wonderful find. You will be glad you found it too. For me it clarifies what I have found myself and puts it into a organized fashion that I have not had time to do. This book is not a huge tome and yet it covers an impressive depth and wide range of thought and non-thought. The presence of J. Krishnamurti is very obvious to me. His unique way of cutting through to the heart of the matter is what Leong has brought to this book. Mr Leong also uses quotes from spiritual teachers troughout time in a compelling and enlightening way. Thank you Kenneth Leong. You have done the world a great service.
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25 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
One of the finest "Christian Zen" books, March 11, 2001
This review is from: The Zen Teachings of Jesus (Paperback)
Kenneth Leong's interpretation of Jesus's teachings along Zen lines is among the very best of its kind. I don't mean to imply my full agreement with his approach in general or with his interpretations in particular -- but on the other hand I think he's done a wonderful job overall. Oh, there are one or two minor problems. For example, Leong consistently identifies "rationality" with abstract, "left-brain" activity and insists that (in this sense) truth and reality are mysteries to the "rational" mind. But that this is not the whole story is indicated even by his own writing, in which he tries carefully to follows Jesus's "logic" and employs inference freely. I'd really enjoy seeing one of these Zen books take a crack at improving our _understanding_ of rationality rather than just dismissing "reason" as inadequate. Then, too, Leong occasionally makes references to the "Pharisees" that have little foundation in the actual history of the Perushim. In fact there is a good case to be made that, historically, Jesus was closely aligned with the Pharisees himself (and indeed most of his teachings can be paralleled from within the Jewish tradition of his time). But as far as the teachings themselves are concerned, on the whole Leong does a nice job of presenting and explicating them. There is a good deal of truth in his presentation and I highly recommend it. I especially recommend it to readers of Stephen Mitchell's _The Gospel According to Jesus_, which I've just recently reviewed. Mitchell, while acknowledging that his translation may have omitted passages whose light he hasn't been able to see, nevertheless proceeds to leave out ninety percent of the material in the synoptic gospels (to say nothing of John). And Mitchell expressly takes Thomas Jefferson as his example in hacking the gospels to pieces. By contrast, Leong writes as follows [p. 195]: "Before writing this book, I agreed with Thomas Jefferson that parts of the New Testament 'have proceeded from an extraordinary man; and other parts are of the fabric of very inferior minds.' For a long time, I have shared with many scholars and intellectuals the opinion that the words of Jesus have been tampered with and his central teachings distorted to serve the purpose of the religious establishment. But . . . it seems that the suspicion of foul play has to be reconsidered." In consequence, Leong leaves in nearly everything Mitchell leaves out, and thus provides a much more rounded presentation of Jesus's words and deeds. Mitchell tosses out what he does not understand; Leong has the intellectual and spiritual humility to recognize that there may be more to a passage than he has understood, and therefore keeps digging until he _does_ reach some understanding of it. Another result is that there is nothing in this volume that expressly interferes with or contradicts more mainstream views of Jesus (or so it seems to me; I am not a Christian myself, so please treat my opinion accordingly). Theoretically, it appears, a theologically conservative Christian could retain all of his or her present views about the nature of Jesus and simply use Leong's book as a guide to understanding his teachings. This, too, is a nice contrast to Mitchell's book, which -- while explicitly dedicating itself to both "believers and unbelievers" -- rather smugly bases itself almost entirely on views that professing Christians can only regard as unbelief. At any rate, Leong's presentation succeeds quite well on its own terms. His topics range from the nature of Zen to Jesus's use of humor and the dangers of "scapegoating," and he is always both clear and interesting. He closes with a salutary warning not to regard his own conclusions as final and with the hope that he has helped to provide something of a new "paradigm" for reading scripture. His work should thus appeal to a broad audience in general, and in particular it should be of great interest to readers of the rest of the "Christian Zen" literature (e.g. William Johnston, Dom Aelred Graham, Robert Kennedy).
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