The three pillars of Zen

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• thucydides · Feb 27, 2014 · Recommends

  Great introduction! My favorite book for beginners is Philip Kapleau's Three Pillars of Zen. The author was a Zen teacher for many years and helped steer me in the right direction.

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• danieldk · Oct 30, 2011 · Recommends

  …to sit in with different groups once or twice to see where you feel at home. With respect to books, I really enjoyed "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind", but it can be a bit daunting. Philip Kapleau Roshi's "Three Pillars of Zen" is said to be a good introduction.

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• grabarz · Oct 28, 2018 · Recommends

  "Three pillars of Zen" by Phillip Kapleau. Contains chapters on practice and main concepts of Zen.

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• pmoriarty · Nov 19, 2022 · Recommends

  Speaking of Zen-themed books, I can recommend The Three Pillars of Zen by Kapleau.

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• krueger71 · May 11, 2018 · Recommends

  The Three Pillars of Zen by Roshi Philip Kapleau

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• gnosis · Mar 24, 2013 · Recommends

  …meditations utilize mantras[6] or other techniques for maintaining focus. One other type of meditation that I did try briefly was kinhin[7], or walking meditation, which is described in some detail in "The Three Pillars of Zen" (a book I highly recommend, though with a grain of salt, as it seems to have a bit of a bias towards a particular tradition of Zen). It was quite interesting, and may be a good way to start and end…

• emptysongglass · Aug 26, 2019 · Recommends

  …for hundreds of years after but across those earliest texts flung across space and time, we find an astonishing harmony. Look, I'm seeing calls to end my supposed promotion of sectarian strife: I love Three Pillars of Zen, have obsessively studied the Mahayana epic the Surangama Sutra, and washed myself in the pure poetry of the Complete Reality school. But I cannot stress enough, and neither did the Buddha, in the importance…

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• dkarl · Jan 22, 2022 · Recommends

  …audience and provided a modern voice for a tradition where some of the foundational works such as the Platform Sutra are roughly a thousand years old. For other modern Zen voices, there are books such as Three Pillars of Zen, Dropping Ashes on the Buddha, Opening the Hand of Thought, and probably many others. (Albert Low is on my to-read list.) All of those are by authors who died before Thich Nhat Than, though. He also…

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• waivej · Jun 25, 2010 · Recommends

  …deep down to see how I am "really" feeling. It's like practice so I remember to do that throughout the day, and feels like a natural consequence of quieting your thoughts. As for reading, I recommend "Three Pillars of Zen" to hear about other people's experiences with enlightenment, and www.101zenstories.com for koans to contemplate.

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• gala8y · Jun 22, 2023 · Recommends

  Three Pillars of Zen, read when I was 16, it felt like "This is it. This is how I see it." Few books by Ken Wilber, gave me a framework, a meta-frame of sorts when I was young. Introduction to NLP (esp. chapter V on Meta…

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• krueger71 · Nov 27, 2019 · Mentions

  The book The Three Pillars of Zen by Philip Kapleau contains anecdotes of zen practitioners, including himself, and their experiences of Kenshō https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kensh%C5%8D

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• flatline · Sep 24, 2010 · Mentions

  …dying.' They think you're being a Victorian actress. They think you're doing Bernhardt." Not exactly unheard of, maybe you feel like your battery is just running out. Reminds me of a footnote from "Three Pillars of Zen", p31: "Yasutani-roshi died in his temple in Kyoto on March 28, 1973, at the age of eighty-eight. He was about to take his breakfast when he toppled over and, without pain, passed away. A week earlier…

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• ramblerman · Jan 2, 2013 · Mentions

  "to meditate for any reason other than because it's the truth will eventually be self-defeating" Not sure I agree. You quote a zen master. The book I am currently reading "The Three pillars of zen" gives much less judgmental advice. I'm not gonna type the whole thing up, but it basically states that there is no problem with people just going after the goal of increased concentration, a state they…

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• stiff · Jun 25, 2013 · Mentions

  …only go this far and we humans get tired fast when just thinking hard inside our heads without any interaction with the external world and no real-world problem to solve. I believe it was the book "The Three Pillars of Zen" that illustrated this effect by comparing the posture of Rodins Thinker [1] with the posture of a meditator [2]. So not only do we run circles around our own concepts that are most likely grounded in…

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