Zen Bridge: The Zen Teachings of Keido Fukushima - Buddhist Meditation Book for Mindfulness, Enlightenment & Spiritual Growth - Perfect for Home Meditation, Yoga Practice & Zen Study

Zen Bridge is a wonderful, even exciting, book about Rinzai Zen, its training methods and its use of koans to bring out "mushin" ("no mind"). It does so by focusing on one Zen teacher, Keido Fukushima. Keido's ability to use colloquial English in his lectures makes the book flow easily and to a degree entertainingly. (If Zen could ever be described as "entertaining," which is not generally considered its dominant feature.)Grace and Peter Schireson have done a wonderful job on this book. It is arranged so that lectures covering similar material are grouped together. The book is divided into four main topics: What is Zen? My Training. Zen Master Joshu and Classical Teaching Stories. I found all fascinating, especially the portion that deals with Fukushima's training.Apparently Rinzai training in Japan is an ordeal to survive, with a lifetime's effort in Zen packed into a 3 year period.Here is an excerpt from that section:"The realization of no-self requires severe training and zen monastic training is quite difficult. It's not just strict, it's excessive: monks get up at three every morning, every day of the year and often practice until eleven at night. There is no rest and there are no holidays during the year. On average we do six hours a day of zazen, but for a monk serious about training, six hours a day of zazen is insufficient. It's essential to deepen the monks' experiential understanding of Zen itself. This is the focus of the direct koan question-and-answer sessions each morning and evening. But these sessions alone aren't enough. During the year there are seven sesshins of seven days each. During sesshin monks stop cleaning, begging and working in the fields. We just do hour-long periods of zazen, one after another...during the final seven-day sesshin of the year, there is no sleeping."It's enough to make an American Zen student cringe. I feel my own inadequacy when I read these words. "Not for me!" I want to cry, as Keido exhorts us that Ummon got off easily, trading a leg ruined by his teacher for satori. But it also led me to cross-examine my ruined childhood and wonder if that was why I became a Zen student. Would satori be worth 17 years of impossibly strict discipline at the hands of my father?And what if despite all that suffering, I never find the discipline enough to realize no-mind on my own?Ultimately, this is a very helpful and enlightening book. As you can see from the quotation above, Keido Roshi's English is smooth and easy to follow. His thesis is simple: we must penetrate into Mu and enter into no-mind. That is the key to Zen, and the true beginning of the Way.