Dennis Genpo Merzel is the spiritual head of the White Plum Asangha, the largest Zen school in the West. He is also the abbot of the Kanzeon Zen Center in Salt Lake, Utah, and has founded Zen meditation centers in Maine, Paris, Amsterdam, London, Dusseldorf, and Warsaw. He is one of the dharma heirs of the legendary Zen master Taizan Maizumi Roshi.
In this collection of essays on the Bodhisattva way, edited by Wynn Seishin Wright, liberation is seen as moving beyond dualism, giving up attachment, learning to sit in silence, walking the Middle Way without judgments or preferences, refusing to seek answers, and living each day in the presence of what comes. As Bernie Glassman notes in the introduction, Zen is awakening to "our Buddha nature, our true nature — not just ours but the true nature of everyone and everything in the universe. As Genpo Roshi writes, Zen gives us the tools to look inward, to study ourselves, to awaken to and truly appreciate the moments of joy and the moments of grief, the dark and the light." The book is divided into four sections: Searching for the Way: Raising the Bodhi-Mind; Stepping onto the Path: Practice; Returning Home: Realization; and Walking the Path: Manifesting the Liberation.
In a fine chapter on koans, Genpo Roshi notes: "In order to pass this koan, we have to go beyond dualistic thinking, which means we have to drop all fixed notions of right and wrong, good and bad, first and last, this and that. Why do we find that so difficult to do? Something keeps pulling us back into our old habits of judging our life, ourselves, and others. The same thing always hooks us: our conditioning. In order to be free, we have to cut through our conditioned patterns of thinking." The ways in which we separate ourselves from others and the things of the universe is a hindrance to our awakening. This habit also locks us in servitude to the egoistic self that divides the world into 'me" and 'them.' Zazen is a tool that helps us see how the mind works in self-centered and self-destructive ways. Genpo Roshi is a seasoned Zen master who clarifies many of the main teachings of Zen.
