Returning to Silence: Zen Practice in Daily Life

by Dainin Katagiri

Book Overview

For twenty-five hundred years Buddhism has taught that everyone is Buddha--already enlightened, lacking nothing. But still there is the question of how we can experience that truth in our lives. In this book, Dainin Katagiri points to the manifestation of enlightenment right here, right now, in our everyday routine. Genuineness of practice lies in "just living" our lives wholeheartedly. The Zen practice of sitting meditation (zazen) is this not a...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0877734313
• ISBN13: 9780877734314
• Release Date: April 1988
• Publisher: Shambhala
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.1" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Wonderful

One of Roshi Katagiri's most profound books. I was lucky enough to have known him in San Francisco. His teachings changed my life.

A Great Book!

This is perhaps one of the most profound books I ever read on Zen practice. His phrasing style is sometimes reminiscent of Heidegger's best philosophical prose. I strongly recommend it for the Zen practitioner... for the merely curious its considerations might appear too immaterial, for they are extremely subtle.

Strange and wonderful

Of all the (many) Buddhism books i read this one stands unique. At first i didn't know how to handle it, it was so crazy, the paragraphs didn't seem to connect together, and every subject handled so strangely. I mean, the book starts with detailed analysis of a poem by a Japanese, II world war, war criminal ...I never finished this book, i didn't even read half of it continuously but i keep on coming back to it for a number of years now, realizing it is a rear treasure.

Perhaps not for everybody - but a great book nonetheless!

I enjoyed this book tremendously. However, I think that to someone who is not a fairly regular practitioner of zen meditation it may seem very strange. For those who DO practice zazen on a regular basis, this book has a lot to offer. It's a very pleasant, quasi-poetic extended meditation on many topics. Don't want to try to pigeonhole it much beyond that. I thought it was a great read and I'm grateful to the author for writing it.

A book to be read and re-read

The silence of the title is our essential core of being. In these essays, Dainin Katagiri Roshi talks about how to connect with this core, and to let it penetrate and resound through the moments of our lives. Katagiri Roshi was a sucessor of Shunryu Suzuki (Zen Mind Beginner's Mind) and like the later, he is at once simple and deep. These talks are not discourses, but "live words," spoken from the heart. They penetrate-- they beg read and read-read, to be taken in thougtfully and thoroughly digested. Katagri, in my mind one of the great modern masters, died in the early 90's. He has left us with this wonderful volume on what it is to know our essential self and to live our lives in this knowledge.