Lin Jensen is the founding teacher and senior teacher emeritus of the Chico Zen Sangha in Chico, California. He is the author of Uncovering the Wisdom of the Heartmind and Pavement. In this sterling collection of essays, Jensen explores the many dimensions of the path of Zen, which, if it had a motto (and it doesn't) would be "Add nothing extra."

When the Emperor Wu of China asked Bodhidharma, "What is the holiest principle of Buddhism?" Bodhidharma replied, "Nothing holy in it." There are no abstractions of noble ideals to cling to on this path. Instead, "Zen offers a one-way ticket to the heaven of the ordinary." It does not lift kneeling at the temple altars above cleaning the bathroom. Jensen sums up the everyday spirituality of this path:

"Every object you or I touch is Buddha, and every house — including a homeless shelter or a prison complex or the downtown mall with its sprawling parking lot — is the exact place where the Buddha takes up residence. And we are all keepers of the Buddha's house. The proper labors of a Buddhist begin and end right here on our own familiar, native ground."

Giving ourselves completely to what we are doing in the present moment is an act of love for we are affirming there is no distinction between the sacred and the profane. We rejoice in the miracle that the ordinary can elicit wonder and joy in us. Jensen does a fine job assessing the suffering that accompanies clinging to what we value most. He correctly points out that much of our attachment is a result of our defense against the threat of change. Closely related to this subject is the Buddhist practice of relaxing our grip on possessions and other things: "I hold my entire life on loan in common with everyone else."

A delusion we share in our consumer culture is a feeling of entitlement, that we deserve the very best and should not have to experience the worst. Jensen says: "Greed drives us to cling to or hoard the things we want, and aversion drives us to avoid and resist what we don't want. Delusion is the folly of thinking we can get what we want to the exclusion of what we don't want. It's an attempt to split up circumstances into categories of our own devising." Instead of trying to divide the world up into things that are for us or against us, a pernicious form of dualistic thinking, it is far better to accept what is happening in this moment.

Jensen's treatment of the role of compassion on the Zen path is revealing as is his definition of enlightenment as "the immediate perception of all existence as one seamless whole, the inexplicable union of the one in the many, the many in the one."