Zen at Work

This book is an amazing journey through a high tech world, with juxtaposition with the author's spiritual world. While I will probably never dive as deeply into zazen as a spiritual practice, the author teaches how spiritual practice can actually facilitate a healthier and more productive work environment. This book reiterates the divine flows through all of us... even stubborn geeks who think they know it all. A true enlightenment experience!

Let me first qualify this by noting that I am a Zen practitioner, so many of the teachings and practices were already familiar to me. And my love of this book is entirely from that point of view: this book is a great help to me, but I don't know if it's helpful for non-Zen practitioners. With that said... I've practiced for a couple years, doing sitting meditation, chanting, reading sutras, kong-ans, etc. And sometimes, I've found it difficult at times to truly attain stories about some Zen master or monk who had some great insight several hundred years ago due to a circumstance involving an errant cow, a circumstance at a Buddhist monastery, or a funny incident while begging for scraps in some little village. It's fair to say I don't find myself in those situations (much), and it would certainly be convenient if Buddha had become enlightened in 1995 while working at Microsoft - the context of his teachings would be much easier to grasp. This book helps to bridge that gap. Within just the first few pages, I could tell that the author had attained great insight into practicing Zen in the corporate environment. His explanations of how sitting meditation, right-now mind, and compassion relate to work answered a number of questions I had also pondered. And his explanations were direct and simple. The "meat" of the material is covered within about the first 30 pages. In fact, most of the remainder can be referred to randomly from time to time, like a collection of individual topics. Practice, practice, practice. Keep a don't-know mind. Save all sentient beings. And thanks to books like this, you don't stop just because you're in a cubicle :)

This book is a master piece on spirituality. I mean spirituality that is relevant and spiritualtiy that matters. I am an ex-IBMer myself and have been in meditation for many years. This book was the missing link in my understanding of spiritual life and professional life in an integrated whole, as varying expressions of the same grand idea that the soul sometimes knows intuitively but can't easily express. The spirituality that is relevant has to be expressed in one's works. If we can't exercise spirituality in work, we have defeated God's purpose in our creation . Les Kaye refers to God as "Big Mind" and states all that we do has to be expression of this "Big Mind". The work-ethic that flows out of its integration with the "Big Mind" neither leads to boredom, nor to anxiety. Your work becomes your meditation, your prayer, your sacred liturgy! Though there is nothing new in this idea. It has been taught in many cultures. The Hindu doctrine of "Karma Yoga" ("yoga of action") , as taught in "Bhagvad Gita" , is perhaps the most comprehensive classical treatise on the idea of "Zen at Work". Similarly , many Sufis Masters in Islam have tried to teach the same idea. In Christianity, we have the writing of Brother Lawrence about practising the "presence of God" in our mundane work. So although "Zen at Work", is essentially a Buddist idea, it does find echo in other spiritual teachings. But what gives force to this book is not the originality of the idea, but the originality of the interpetation of this idea in the contemporary corporate milieu, enriched by author's own life long experience at the Big Blue. We are the instruments of God, the "Big Mind", for his sacred task of creation. Creator is creating with us and through us. If our sprituality comes in the way of this divine task of creation, for whatever reason, then obviously we have betrayed the spiritual purpose that we were created with. This is a vital idea that all serious spiritualists/meditators need to grasp. Spirituality that makes us hide from our 'worldly' responsibilities is a false spirituality. If you have absorbed spirituality properly, then the falseness of dichotomy between 'spiritual' and 'worldly' immediately becomes clear. Both are in reality expressions of each other, when rightly understood. Zen at Work teaches us how to make ourselves the intruments of the Divine Creator, by removing our ego from the way, so that the "Big Mind" expresses its peace, harmony and majesty through us. Letting go of the 'small mind', i.e. ego, so that "Big Mind" flows spontaneously through us. This is the kernel of this great book. When we let the "Big Mind" express through us, then all our worries, anxieties and boredom - that are sometime natural products of our unfeeling capitalist evironment- also disappear. The work , however mundane and tedious, becomes an expression of an ecstatic union with the divine. The 'hot Buddha', the 'cold Buddha', the 'home Buddha', the 'temple Buddha'...a

Just the right amount of yin-yang, between business and bliss; this book is a pocket tucker. There are 166 pages fraught with stories and experience from this Zen Master. Chapter's entitled--True Nature, Enlightenment at Work, and Spiritual Life, Daily Life, encompass the freedom you'll gain by imbibing in the gem of a book. A worthwhile tax deduction at the price!

Review of Zen at Work. Bright side. Les Kaye is a Soto Zen teacher who spent several decades in training, starting with Suzuki-roshi, and concurrently worked as an engineer at IBM for the same period of time. In this text he shuttles back and forth between work anecdotes and more standardized spiritual teachings (sermon-like). In doing so he intertwines threads of the theoretical and the real to illustrate how Zen contextualizes problems so they appear as they are rather than as we imagine them. The book covers a fair ground of topics, i.e., relationships, self-expression, communication, fearlessness, letting-go, emphasizing two principles; big (oceanic) mind, and no separation between subject and object. Most Zen authors mention the need for an integration of spiritual practice and everyday life. Les Kaye has taken this recommendation one step further by illustrating how he dealt with corporate problems spiritually. This is clearly the strength, as well as the emphasis of the book; carrying water and chopping wood really are the focus of everyday practice. It is fun to imagine that Les has a subtle sense of humor, that is, the title reads as a pun. Take it as "Men (Zen) at Work", an icon of religious effort, or read it simply as Zen brought to the marketplace. Dull side. Les Kaye's description of his work life and his practice life seems incomplete. During the three plus decades covered by this memoir-teaching, San Francisco Zen centers and IBM went through momentous changes in growth and leadership, some positive and some negative. I assume that Les Kaye wanted to restrict his description of Zen and worklife to basically positive events but a description of Zen and "real life" might demand an assessment of what makes Zen work under trying circumstances. Not every Zen manual has to describe how traumatic life can be, but Les lived through historic times for western Zen practice and I feel he has a responsibility to tell us how he dealt with it. Possibly, Mr. Kaye was never strongly concerned with these dramatic changes; raising a family and working full time are certainly involving by themselves, but if this is true he should tell us rather than leave us wondering.