(214 pp., Harper & Row, 1989)

This is such a fine, fine book that the best I can do in reviewing it is to find a way to let it speak for itself. (If I fail, ignore the review and read the book.) Joko, the founder and teacher at the Zen Center of San Diego, says “When I give a talk I’m trying to elucidate, by any means I can find, what life is about for me and what it might be for someone else.” Many of the talks in the present book initially appeared in the ZCSD Newsletter where, month after month, I would have the experience of Joko speaking directly from the middle of her life into the middle of mine. Like this, for example:

“I never give a dharma talk that I don’t hate, because it’s never possible to tell the exact truth: I always tend to go a little too far this way, or a little too far that way, or I use the wrong words and someone gets mixed up. . . . Today I want to add to the confusion. I’m going to tell a little story and then head off in some different directions, and see what we make of all that. . . . Suppose we are out on a lake and it’s a bit foggy—not too foggy but a bit foggy—and we’re rowing along in our boat having a good time. And then, all of a sudden, coming out of the fog, there’s this other rowboat, and it’s heading right at us. And . . . crash! Well, for a second we’re really angry—what is that fool doing?. . . . [Then] suddenly we notice that the rowboat is empty. What happens to our anger? Well, the anger collapses. . . . But if the rowboat that hit ours had another person in it, how would we react?. . . . Now our encounters with life, with other people, with events, are like being bumped into by an empty rowboat. But we don’t experience life that way.”

One could write pages about that empty rowboat. But not another word is necessary. Just the experience of that sudden collapse of thought, emotion, fantasy. Who’s there?

The crux of practice, Joko says, “is this: all we must do is constantly to create a little shift from the spinning world we’ve got in our head to right-here-now.” Again and again she calls us back to the experience of our lives. “By experiencing, I mean that first moment when we receive life before the mind arises. . . . Only to the degree that we live a life of experiencing can we possibly understand the life of another.” Compassion, she says, is not an idea or ideal, but a formless and all-powerful space, always there, which we cover over with our ignorance.

One of the things I love about Zen is how it plays with paradox (i.e. what’s impossible is). Intrinsic to Joko’s style of teaching is a recurring dive into paradox that is exhilarating, freeing. Some examples:

“We don’t have to ‘find’ anything—which is why the Buddha said that after forty years he had achieved nothing. What is there to achieve? It’s always right here.”

“When we walk the razor’s edge [non-verbally experiencing the present moment] we’re not important; we’re no-self, embedded in life. This we fear, even though life as no-self is pure joy. . . only in walking the razor’s edge, in experiencing the fear directly, can we know what it is to have no fear.”

To “be willing to be muddled and confused is, paradoxically, the clarity itself. . . . In times of confusion and depression the worst thing we can do is to try to be some other way.” (This excerpt comes from a talk with the wonderful title, “New Jersey Doesn’t Exist.”)

“Attachment to what we call ‘spiritual’ is the very activity that hampers a spiritual life. . . . To sit a long sesshin is a major blow to our hopes and dreams, the barriers to enlightenment. And to say that there is no hope is not at all pessimistic. There can be no hope because there is nothing but this present moment.”

“We have to embrace the misery, make it our best friend, and go right through it to freedom.”

“Practice is not a mystical push into some other place, God knows where. The absolute isn’t somewhere else; where else could it be but right here?. . . if I’m nervous, that is nirvana, that is the absolute. . . . Where could we be except where we are?”

Like the story of the empty rowboat, Joko’s metaphors stay in the mind. She says we are like a little squid: “When we wake up in the morning we immediately start squeezing out ink. What is our ink? Our self-centered preoccupation, which clouds the water around us.” She says we are like baby birds, waiting for mommy and daddy to put food in our mouths. Or like baby bears, terrified and alone, at the top of a tree. And she does mean “we,” not “you.” There is no mistaking that with Joko.

It’s hard to stop. And I haven’t included a single excerpt on the subject of relationships. Joko unmasks our relationship-dances like no one else. Yet she sees them as the most illuminating arena for discovering who we are, as a powerful channel for life to move and change us. But read the book for the real story, the real meeting—with Joko and with yourself.

∞

From the Fall 1990 issue of Inquiring Mind (Vol. 7, No. 1)

Text © 1990–2022 by Lenore Friedman