Appreciate Your Life: The Essence of Zen Practice (Shambhala Classics)

Here is the first major collection of the teachings of Taizan Maezumi Roshi (1931-1995), one of the first Japanese Zen masters to bring Zen to the West and founding abbot of the Zen Center of Los Angeles and Zen Mountain Center in Idyllwild, California. These short, inspiring readings illuminate Zen practice in simple, eloquent language. Topics include zazen and Zen koans, how to appreciate your life as the life of the Buddha, and the essential matter of life and death. Appreciate Your Life conveys Maezumi Roshi's unique spirit and teaching style, as well as his timeless insights into the practice of Zen. Never satisfied with merely conveying ideas, his teisho, the Zen talks he gave weekly and during retreats, evoked personal questions from his students. Maezumi Roshi insisted that his students address these questions in their own lives. As he often said, "Be intimate with your life." The readings are not teachings or instructions in the traditional sense. They are transcriptions of the master's teisho, living presentations of his direct experience of Zen realization. These teisho are crystalline offerings of Zen insight intended to reach beyond the student's intellect to her or his deepest essence.

Do a roll call of the major foreign Zen priests who lived in America to transmit Zen, and you have a pretty short list: Shunryu Suzuki, Seung Sahn, and Taizan Maezumi. Of these, Maezumi is the least well-known, though he transmitted to 12 successors and established 35 Zen centers. In the great Zen tradition of recording a master's words, Maezumi's students have brought together a number of his teisho, presentations to the disciples of a master's realization. Rather than general lectures or public talks, these short pieces were meant to be heard at times of intense practice, during breaks in meditation, when the student's mind is piqued for sparks of enlightenment. Maezumi touches on subjects relevant to the serious practitioner--the bodhi mind, life as a koan, practicing the paramitas, copying sutras, etc. Though not technically difficult, these pieces assume a background in the fundamentals of Buddhism, perfect for the increasing number of readers who have progressed beyond the introductory level and seek more sophisticated guidance. --Brian Bruya