Our brains seek order and resist the unexpected, inconsistent, and counterintuitive. But life is more often paradoxical than predictable — which is why formulas for fulfillment and success often fail. Instead of fighting the tide of contradiction and confusion, Marc Lesser asserts, we can learn to understand and even embrace them using the simple tools he presents in these pages. Readers learn to master five core competencies: Know Yourself, Forget Yourself; Be Confident, Question Everything; Fight for Change, Accept What Is; Embrace Emotion, Embody Equanimity; and Benefit Others, Benefit Yourself. The result is balance, a version of Buddhism’s “middle way,” which prompts understanding of what is required in any given moment and actions through which we skillfully “dance” with paradox in enriching and joyful ways. Bolstered by the latest in neuroscience, this guide is nuanced and direct, profound and practical.

Dogen used to say, ”It was a great opportunity that both the people who could have distracted me, who loved me and I loved them ... and that was the danger. They died at the right time. I am infinitely grateful to them just because they died at the right time without destroying me.”

This updated landmark volume makes available for the first time in decades the teachings that were formative to a whole generation of American Zen teachers and students. Conceived as an overarching primer on the practice of Zen, chapters in this volume address every aspect of practice: beginning practice, shikantaza, chanting, sesshin, working with Mu, and the nature of koans. In the intervening years since the publication of the earlier edition, countless books have appeared on Zen. Few, if any, have approached the strengths of On Zen Practice as a reference or teaching tool, and the book retains a lively, immediate quality that will appeal to today's readers.

The practice of Sōtō Zen is a practice of encounter and realization, an intimate path in which the self and its relationship to all beings are transformed. This poses challenges to anyone who takes it up, challenges that call us to understand the elements that make possible a deep engagement with the practice. Of these elements, trust is central--a well-founded trust in the teachings, in one's capacity to realize them with others, and ultimately in dynamic reality itself. Dōgen states that "To study the Buddha Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be authenticated by the myriad things." Studying and forgetting the self is not leaping over the self--it is full engagement with all aspects of our being, bravely looking at how we ourselves, others, and the world interact, and supporting what makes realization possible.