Grassroots Zen: Community and Practice in the Twenty-First Century

By Manfred Steger, Perle Besserman, Manfred B. Steger

Book Overview

"Future generations may come to see the publication of Grassroots Zen as a pivotal moment in the emergence of a uniquely American Zen."
--Rami Shapiro, Minyan: Ten Principles for Living a Life of Integrity

"Steger and Besserman offer something quite different, and quite welcome... a Zen that comes to terms with, and ultimately transcends, the hierarchical, sexist, otherworldly, and pseudo-militaristic overtones of the Zen tradition." --Library Journal

"This book will appeal to all] who are uncomfortable with Zen's hierarchies and moral prescriptions." --Shamhbala Sun

"... Steger and Besserman name and describe a phenomenon that is occurring all over the country: relatively small, democratically run groups of Zen Buddhist practitioners are banding together and sustaining a sangha, or community, free of the hierarchy and formality of the monastery."
--Publishers Weekly

"A short, clear presentation on one way to make Zen less Japanese and more Western... " --Rita M. Gross, Buddhism After Patriarchy

Grassroots Zen envisions a socially engaged Buddhism where zazen is integrated each day with work, family, and social obligations. Though both authors have practiced traditional Zen for decades, here they eschew the militaristic, patriarchal tendencies of Zen in favor of "an egalitarian community of socially mobile members who place less emphasis upon transmission and hierarchy than on individual responsibility."

Married university professors and authors Manfred Steger (Gandhi's Dilemma: Nonviolent Principles and Nationalist Power) and Perle Besserman (aka Perle Epstein) (The Shambhala Guide to Kabbalah and Jewish Mysticism) studied first under the cultural weight of Japanese Zen, then with the light-footed lay master Robert Aitken. Founders of the Princeton Area Zen Group in NJ, they have been teaching their democratic, grassroots-style of Zen for over twenty-five years.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1939681693
• ISBN13: 9781939681690
• Release Date: May 2017
• Publisher: Monkfish Book Publishing
• Length: 200 Pages
• Weight: 2.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.4" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Clearly Zen

This is one of the best book on Zen for Westerners that I know. Along with Steve Hagen's Buddhism Plain and Simple, Stephen Batchelor's Buddhism without Beliefs, Mark Epstein's books on Zen, and Guy Claxton's The Heart of Buddhism, it offers a vision of Zen Buddhism stripped of its monastic trappings and religious attachments. This book is Zen and all spiritual practice seen clearly. (Thus, as a person who still clings to his Christian heritage, Grassroots Zen has helped me see what is worth keeping and what must be let go in Christian spiritual practice.) Grassroots Zen works because the authors have tried it all and decided to work for a community of practice that is democratic and open, one that is unafraid to leave behind the shaved heads, the abbot's rules, and the roshi's robes. The book is organized around three basic categories: time, space, and motion. Our ways of seeing time, space, and motion, through the eyes of a persisting "self" standing at the center and peering out, deeply shape our experience of existence, our sense of who we are and what we are doing in our strange appearance on a minor planet. In approaching Zen this way, the authors are especially successful in opening up the deep challenge offered by Zen to our commonsense ways of shaping experience. Grassroots Zen urges us to stop making existence a category and a story and to instead leave it as it is, as we find it: an extraordinary experience. Here is where the book is at its best as the authors try to speak of what the experience of living like that is like, without arguing for yet one more story among the long and dreary menu of Western accounts of enlightenment or of the quest for no-self or for the true self. For me, this makes Zen more anti-story than story-free, a practice that constantly prompts us to observe the narratives unfolding in our head and instead to wait for, and attend to, the freedom and freshness of the never-ending story of the present moment with all of its difficulties, humor, pain, and joy. As Basho put it in his lovely Haiku (A Haiku is included with each chapter heading): Hello: Light the fire: I'll bring inside a lovely bright ball of snow!