7 Zen Books That Actually Changed My Practice

From Deshimaru and Suzuki to Camus and Fante — a reading list from inside the practice There are many lists of Zen books. This is not really one of them. What follows are seven books that have done actual work in me over the years — some from squarely inside the tradition, some from surprisingly far outside it. I return to each of them. They function as the ballast of a practice, not as its curriculum.

Two of the seven are novels by writers who were not Zen practitioners in any formal sense. They belong here anyway. Zen, as I have come to understand it, is not a set of books. It is a way of seeing, and it will accept help from wherever the help comes.

1. The Ring of the Way — Taisen Deshimaru

I return to this book a few times a year, as ballast. Deshimaru writes in a no-nonsense, matter-of-fact, frustratingly circular style that cuts through the noise the way almost nothing else in my library does. If you have watched footage of Lou Reed talking to reporters, you know the tone — plain, slightly annoyed, unwilling to dress up a thing that could just as easily be said flat. Deshimaru brought the Sōtō lineage to Europe in the 1970s and gave the tradition a European sinew. He does not perform depth. The depth is just there.

2. How to Cook Your Life — Kosho Uchiyama on Dogen

Dogen wrote Tenzo Kyokun, the Instructions to the Cook, in the thirteenth century. Uchiyama's commentary makes it available to a modern reader without stripping any of its edge. The kitchen, in Dogen's telling, is a zendo. Preparing a meal is not preparation for practice; it is practice. The line that has stayed with me longest is Dogen's question: do you separate the sand from the rice, or the rice from the sand? I have not stopped thinking about that question in years. What it asks of me changes depending on the year.

3. The Zen Teachings of Homeless Kodo — Kodo Sawaki (with Uchiyama and Okumura)

Sawaki was Uchiyama's teacher and one of the great reformers of modern Japanese Sōtō. He suffered no fools and spoke plainly — the homeless epithet was earned; he refused attachment to any single monastery and preferred to travel and teach. My favorite line of his, which has continued to inform every action in my adult life, is characteristically direct: do you eat so you can take a shit? I do not think a more useful question about intention has ever been posed. Everything I do now, I ask what my motivation for this is. I recorded an entire YouTube episode on Must I Evolve? on the topic: https://youtu.be/buNkwUcBWcc

4. The Snow Leopard — Peter Matthiessen

A travelogue that is also an interior expedition. Matthiessen went to the Nepalese Himalaya with George Schaller in 1973, ostensibly to look for the elusive cat of the title, and returned with a book about grief. His wife had died the year before. He was still learning how to be alive without her. The mountains, the Buddhist monks he encountered, and the Zen practice he had been building for years came together on that trip in a way he could not have engineered. It is one of the great books about grief. It is also one of the great books about walking, and about not knowing whether the thing you traveled to see will ever appear.

5. Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind — Shunryu Suzuki

The beginning of everything, for me. My brother handed me a copy when I was seventeen — the same brother who first introduced me to the parts of a city that made me a writer. I have read it steadily ever since. Some years I return to it as if for the first time; some years I find lines I have known so long they have become part of my inner grammar. The audiobook is narrated by Peter Coyote, who has one of the great American voices for this kind of material. If you have never heard it, do yourself a favor.

6. The Stranger — Albert Camus

A masterpiece, and one of the stranger inclusions on a list like this. Meursault is divorced from his own emotions in a way that is haunting on the surface and instructive underneath. He refuses to perform a grief he does not feel. He refuses to invent a self that is more presentable than the one he actually has. Camus was not a Zen writer, and would have resisted the label. But there is something in Meursault's refusal to add meaning to what he sees that comes close to what Zen practice, at its most demanding, asks of the practitioner. The undoing of the constructed ego is, for reasons the book makes uncomfortably clear, part of finding what is underneath it.

7. Ask the Dust — John Fante

Simplicity in prose personified. Arturo Bandini is a scoundrel and a lug — vain, selfish, a fabulist, occasionally cruel. But Fante's style redeems the whole enterprise. The sentences are stripped to the point of transparency — nothing extra. Bandini's foolishness is rendered without apology and without ornament, and the effect, oddly, is a kind of unwilled clarity. Charles Bukowski once called Fante his god. What he was praising, I think, is the same thing that puts this book on a Zen reading list. It sees without dressing up what it sees. That is not nothing. That is, in some readings, most of the practice.

None of these books, taken alone, is the practice. But together they map something. What they share, across differences of tradition and style and century, is a willingness to see plainly and to refuse to dress up what is seen. That is most of what Zen has ever asked of me. The rest is showing up to be present in the here and now.

If you have not read any of them, start wherever you are pulled. The tradition is patient. So is the reader you are becoming.