Amazon.com
The paradox of Zen is that learning to just live in the present requires lots of hard work. In
Being Zen, seasoned Zen teacher Ezra Bayda unpacks this paradox. He demonstrates the need to just be and then instructs us how to undertake the hard work with precision and persistence. Through personal anecdotes he shows us how we keep ourselves from living a genuine life. Instead, we maintain an ideal image of ourselves by creating strategies that depend on delusive self-images, blind spots, and knee-jerk reactions. He then shows how, by "living the practice life," we can relentlessly observe this process and transform our edifices into open spaces of natural awareness and innate compassion. Bayda offers specific practices for dealing with such automatic emotions as anger and fear, teaching how they can be dampened and eventually dissolved. A "how-to" book in the best sense of the word,
Being Zen is about how to just live.
--Brian Bruya
From Publishers Weekly
Novice author and veteran meditator Bayda writes with exceptional clarity and simplicity about the awakened life. Bayda is a recognized teacher in the Ordinary Mind Zen School founded by Charlotte Joko Beck (who provides the foreword), and he has a gift for describing that "ordinary mind," or the customary thoughts, feelings and experiences of everyday life. His style is as plainspoken as Tibetan teacher Pema Chdrn's; it's not surprising that she acknowledges his work in her latest book. Bayda's grounding in life as it's lived makes his teaching and writing unpretentious and inviting, as if ready to apply. Indeed, one of the book's strengths is the techniques and exercises that the meditation teacher describes. None of them is startlingly new, but his explanations are precise, discriminating among similar practices and noting how results change over time as the meditator grows more experienced with tools for inner inquiry. Meditation, after all, takes as much time as any other habit to acquire. The book breaks no new ground a big expectation, true, after 2,500 years of Buddhist teaching and practice and it's on the small side for its price point. But Bayda offers clear instruction, as a teacher pointing the way toward Ultimate Clarity should. He deserves membership in the ranks of respected meditation teacher-authors.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
See all Editorial Reviews