Les Kaye is a Zen priest who came to that work and practice in the midst of a career at IBM as an engineer, salesperson, and senior manager. He lived in Silicon Valley, and continued to work there throughout his formative years in Zen training. Then Shunryu Suzuki Roshi ordained him.
We reviewed Kaye’s book Joyously through the Days back in 2011. That book had a foreword by Huston Smith, and like Huston Smith, Les Kaye writes and teaches in ways that reach far beyond his religious/spiritual community.
This book is about all that Kaye learned from Suzuki Roshi (1905-71). Born the son of a Japanese Zen Buddhist priest, and a direct spiritual descendant of the great thirteenth-century Zen master Dogen, Suzuki Roshi became a monk at 13 and arrived in California at 54, when he founded the San Francisco Zen Center. He was the most important teacher who brought Zen to America in the twentieth century. He is also the author of what is perhaps the most important publication in American Zen: Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind.
This book begins with a foreword by Norman Fischer (another priest in the lineage of Shunryu Suzuki), followed by an editor’s Introduction by Giuseppe M. Prisco, then twenty-one short dharma talks (Part One), ten personal teachings stories (Part Two), and a few closing chapters.
Topics and teachings include the subjects of happiness and its pursuit, finding a rhythm in one’s life, the meaning and purpose of activity, being nice, and what it means to love without attachment. This is essential Zen at its succinct best.
