July 20th, more Zen musings

Reading about Zen has always slipped by me, consciously. I've avoided it somehow. Normally I would pour into it's volumes, comparing "true" Eastern scriptures with their modern, Western, proponents -- etc. but I only read quotes and note authors and titles out of bibliographies. It's always been this way.

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Maybe the calm, gentle voice knows that the Aryan aggressor academe in me, the dogma-lover, would claim victory over the precepts of Zen after having only read it, knowing nothing at all about it, really.

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I've read the *results* of Zen on a few western minds (I won't even try to resolve the contradictions and hypocrisies in that statement), Gary Snyder's poetry, prose, essays, interviews, for instance. But I haven't read The Three Pillars of Zen by Philip Kapleau Roshi. (notice that I know a title right off my head, however).

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