Zen in America: Profiles of Five Teachers: Robert Aitken, Jakusho Kwong, Bernard Glassman, Maurine Stuart, Richard Baker

This book is a wonderful journey into the recent past. The introduction leads us through the early steps of Zen in the United States, and the afterword (in my copy - which I've already loaned to a friend) gets us nearly caught up (a point after Maureen Stuart's passing, but before Robert Aitken's wife's passing). In between those two sections are five articles about five Zen teachers with very distinct personalities. These five profiles were each intimate, unflinching, and honest. Each shows the true humanity of each teacher, including "faults." The author never strays into gossip or judgement, but instead gives us a professional journalist's tribute to each. If you ever need to be shaken from your own flavor of teacher-worship, read this book. There is some fair discussion about the meaning of Dharma Transmission in the context of American culture, and the relationship between enlightenment and ethics. Some criticisms: The author occasionally wanders into her own opinions and fears about Zen and its future, and those opinions are occasionally lacking in logic and insight. Were I her editor, I would have suggested cutting all of that out of the book. She did a wonderful job with the research and interviews, and the book would have stood on those merits alone. She also seemed to jump around from point to point on the timeline (worse than a "spacetime" episode of Star Trek). It didn't bother me, because I was reading the book just for the joy of it, but I pity anyone who wants to get a clear mental timeline from these articles. If, like me, you read this book and feel like history passed you by, please don't sell all your belongings and move to Green Gulch. There is the other sub-textual lesson found in any historic account: Don't lament about having missed the glorious past. Today is tomorrow's exciting history. I will certainly look upon my own wonderful teachers and aging sangha-members with more interest and compassion.

Zen in AmericaFive Teachers and the Search for an American BuddhismBy Helen TworkovHelen Tworkov wrote this book before she began Tricycle magazine, and its portrait of American Buddhism reflects the eclectic and panoramic vision that guided Tricycle through its first ten years under her leadership. Based on interviews with five prominent teachers who received dharma transmission from Japanese masters (Robert Aitken, Jakusho Kwong, Bernard Glassman, Maurine Stuart, and Richard Baker), Zen in America presents its subject as a sprawling movement filled with contradictions, true vision, hope as well as disappointment, and some serious characters. It's an enthralling read.At the book's heart is the struggle for Americans to find an authentic Buddhist practice, which for most means an attempt to create a lay practice with the depth and resonance traditionally associated only with monastic Buddhism. Each of the five teachers profiled has pursued a different vision of Zen and its incorporation into American life. What emerges over the course of the book is how these differing visions have given rise to a wide variety of interpretations as to what practice is and what the consequences of a commitment to practice mean for the both the individual and the Buddhist community.Tworkov's main concern in this book seems to be to throw her questions back at the reader: What is Zen? Can Zen become American, or is its transformation by American teachers into something Americans can practice changing it into something altogether different?The book is very well written: Tworkov never stoops and her impressive command of English allows her to constantly present ideas in a fresh, original way. The book might have benefited from a different form, however; it is organized rather like a series of magazine articles each expanded to a length of fifty pages. Each article begins with a portrait of the subject in the present, and then backtracks to relate the subject's biography up to that present. This is fine journalistic style for shorter articles but with a longer text can bog the reader down without the use of chapters or other organizational devices.Some of the portraits also seem quite incomplete, as one would expect from a magazine article. Robert Aitken's portrait in particular begs a full biography; short shrift indeed is made of his prolific (for a Zen master) authorship and its effect on "Zen in America". However, full biography is not the mission of the book, and so each section is tailored to fit the overlying sociological theme. Notably missing from the roster of Zen worthies is Philip Kapleau, who reputedly declined to participate in the project. Kapleau's influence on American Zen is considerable and his absence renders the book incomplete; even if he had not founded a lineage of his own, his The Three Pillars of Zen (1965) is perhaps the most important work on Zen to appear in English and has had tremendous influence on the transition of Zen in Am

Portraits of five Americans who came to head their own zen centers:- Robert Aitken (Hawaii)- Bernard Glassman (Los Angeles, then New York)- Maurine Stuart (Cambridge, Mass.)and two students of Shunryu Suzuki:- Bill Kwong (Sonoma, Calif.)- Richard Baker (San Francisco, then New Mexico/Colorado). Each portrait is balanced and informative; the author takes care to include the controversies that have sprung up around each figure, then goes beyong the plain historical record to discuss in some depth the subject's philosophy and approach to zen training. Although the organization of each essay is sometimes hard to follow, and there are spots of dryness, I found this book very informative. It treats each subject as human, draws contrasts between individual perspectives and styles, and maintains a critical distance from each figure. Well worth reading for anyone whose interest has been piqued by books like "Shoes Outside the Door" or "Crooked Cucumber."