founding teacher at the Brooklyn Zen Center Soshin Teah Strozer
This book is written by someone who has had a deeply rich life. It is full of anecdotes from that life, told with humor and clarity, that serve as metaphors for teaching Buddha’s dharma. It acknowledges and confirms a path for non-monastics—lay people immersed in daily life. It shows us how we can organize everyday life as the practice of liberation. This is a deeply compassionate book, joyously written by an accomplished storyteller. This book will help the West envision what Buddhism could look like 300+ years from now. Enjoy.
author of Crooked Cucumber and early student of Sh David Chadwick
In Zen in the Vernacular, Peter Coyote brings us along on his Zen path and with concise language shares his unique understanding of Buddhism, birth and death, mind and body, and daily life. In engaging with things as it is, he delves into the social and political issues that he’s passionately concerned with. In these chapters, based on a series of talks he gave during the pandemic, Coyote speaks with remarkable intelligence and compassion about how to awaken to truth far greater than our small mind while not turning away from the suffering and turmoil that surrounds us. All the while his fire is fueled and peace of mind maintained through Zen practice and meditation and an unwavering commitment to all beings.
author of Cultivating the Empty Field: The Sil Taigen Dan Leighton
This large book full of wisdom provides an updated and nuanced presentation of basic Buddhist teaching. Peter shares personal stories from the depths of Zen communities and from a range of friends: Governor Jerry Brown to American Zen pioneer Gary Snyder to a Mohawk poet and artist working as a logger in the Northwest. Peter employs his wide experience to envision Zen practice and life anew for modern contexts, something American Zen folks now work to express this worthy ancient tradition for contemporary application. Peter’s vernacular Zen, stripped of exotic trappings, is an important contribution to this project. Peter gets down into the weeds. He faces loss and grief with open dignity amid our present afflictions of the pandemic and climate fires as well as in poignant situations of personal loss. But perhaps his greatest gift to an American vernacular Zen is his affirmation that Buddhism is not about ‘spiritual bypass’ or mere self-help programs, turning away from the challenges of societal oppression. Rather, Zen is a practice of universal awakening. Returning to his early inspirations from Gary Snyder, Peter Coyote expresses how a modern Zen can offer support and some settledness to engage with systemic suffering.
Edward Espe Brown
Zen in the Vernacular wonderfully points out and elucidates how Buddhism is always awakening in new language, language which can speak directly to us and from our own lips, as we discover how our narrative weaves its way through the countless narratives of our world: intimately connected, yet often at odds. How will we navigate our way? How can ‘things as it is’ inform and clarify our narrative along with the world’s? Let’s listen to what Coyote has to say.
Dharma teacher at Global Sangha David Brazier
This stimulating book is a truly American take on life, politics and social issues through the lens of a contemporary interpretation of Zen Buddhism. If that is your interest, this book is for you. Don't miss it.
filmmaker Ken Burns
This is a wondrous and generous book. Peter Coyote honorably follows D. T. Suzuki and Paul Reps, who both sought two generations ago to introduce Zen Buddhism to a curious United States. Coyote goes a step further, contextualizing the practice from within American life and culture, deftly reconciling contradictions, challenging the solipsistic to look inward. A thunderous ovation from my one hand!
author of Painting Peace: Art in a Time of Glo Kazuaki Tanahashi
An actor, narrator, and long-term seeker, Peter Coyote elucidates the essentials of Zen in his naked voice. His wide-ranging insights on social action with wholesome values and intention, woven into his biographical anecdotes, is captivating.
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2024-04-23
Coyote shares his views of modern Buddhism in the real world.
The author, a popular actor and a Buddhist priest, mentions that this work’s chapters originated as lectures given on Facebook during the Covid-19 pandemic: “I felt that the translation of Zen Buddhism into an American vernacular required the physicality of a book, with its portability, permanence and ease of bookmarking. There is something user-friendly about a book that does not require whizzing back and forth through the videotapes of lectures stored on an online channel.” In these pages, Coyote outlines the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism (Dukkha, Samudaya, Nirodha, Marga) and their meanings. He also discusses the Eightfold Path and other foundational Buddhist teachings. His concentration is on the secular Buddhism that’s most commonly practiced in the United States, grounding Buddhist thinking and practices in the context of the issues of the day, such as the murder of George Floyd and, as he puts it, “the aftermath of a violent attempt to block a legitimate election, overthrow an elected president, and place democracy’s head on the chopping block.” The author asserts that this approach is in line with the teachings of the Buddha himself, who “cautioned all who would listen against seeking childish, romanticized relief from our actual lives.” He offers no such childish relief here, instead writing very directly about human iniquities ranging from the Holocaust to the systemic racism of modern-day American law enforcement. The calm, inexorably sensible way Coyote links the deeper principles of Buddhism to secular social awareness is cumulatively convincing. He never browbeats, and he never allows even his non-Buddhist readers any easy excuses. “Once we have experienced the infinite interconnections between all parts of the Universe,” he writes, “why do we wait until people are impoverished, imprisoned, suffocated, and murdered in the streets before we intervene on their behalf?” When he writes that people don’t have to be perfect before doing what’s right, he makes readers believe it.
A quietly uplifting, practical view of Buddhism.
