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Synopsis
From the Back Cover
WHEN NOTHING IS SPECIAL, EVERYTHING CAN BE
The best-selling author of 'Everyday Zen' shows how to awaken to daily life and discover the ideal in the everyday, finding riches in our feelings, relationships, and work. 'Nothing Special' offers the rare and delightful experience of learning in the authentic Buddhist tradition with a wonderfully contemporary Western master.
"A splendid tour of the uncompromising and uncompromised teachings of Zen…Beck's lively texts lead the reader to the special 'no thing' of Zen tradition".
'Publishers Weekly'
"Deep wisdom; strong, clear, practical advice- wonderful common sense Zen".
JACK KORNFIELD, author of 'A Path with Heart'
"Joko Beck speaks from the timeless and the perennial, so her metaphors of ordinary things and everyday incidents illumine my mundane life. 'Nothing Special' is Zen alive and how to live it".
ROBERT AITKEN, author of 'Taking the Path of Zen'
We are rather like whirlpools in the river of life. Read the first page
Concordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
131 of 132 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Can change your life,
By
This review is from: Nothing Special: Living Zen (Paperback)
Following on from "Everyday Zen", this book is another collection of Charlotte Joko Beck's dharma talks to her students in San Diego. Joko - as she's known - is a little granny look-alike, in her sixties I guess, and once an ordinary white American housewife and mother - now an extremely powerful Zen teacher. Having read lots of Zen and Buddhist literature, I keep on coming back to Joko's common sense wisdom. She has little time for doctrine, lazy religious belief, and her teaching has more to do with critical pyschology than classical Buddhism. But in this sense it is perhaps closer to the Buddha's original, revolutionary sceptical teaching. In essence, Joko exhorts us to sit meditatively with the reality of our life. Don't live in fantasy - fear or desire - she says, live in the hard, beautiful realness of life with all it's pain and confusion. She speaks really eloquently about the way in which our egos - habitual patterns of thought, learnt ad hoc throughout our lives and elevated to the status of concrete reality - how this illusionary sense of ego is the very thing that is keeping us unhappy and half dead. This book is just as confrontational as Everyday Zen, but perhaps a little more accessible. There are some very simple but powerful images that can really unlock a lot of clogged up life. Read it and meditate. It will change your life. It has mine.
83 of 84 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Only what is real,
This review is from: Nothing Special: Living Zen (Paperback)
What amazes me about Zen teachings in general is their uncompromising hold on what is real and what is not. This is not to say that they reject the unnexplainable and mysterious, but their stance that things such as apparitions or prophecies are both as unreal and unnecessary as science and materialism in considering a spiritual life, simply because they do not exist in the unbending reality of the present moment.I have read both of Joko's books now and conclude that for someone who has read quite widely about Buddhist meditation, she is the source of the most painfully honest, blunt and beautiful teachings I have yet to come accross. You will learn alot about yourself simply by reading this book, and putting her words into consistent practice will undoubtedly change the way you live your life. Her metaphors for human life are so simple and direct that you find yourself wondering how such things had not occured to you before. If you are a practicioner of Zen, I can only say that this book, along with Everyday Zen, have been the greatest aid to my practice thus far. Enjoy this book, and take it very, very seriously, because people like Joko are the greatest treasure this world has given us.
20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Inspiring!!!,
By
This review is from: Nothing Special: Living Zen (Paperback)
This book is fantastic. Once you have read one page you are drawn into power. Its changed my life. It makes you see people and the world in a whole new light. And most importantly yourself. It shows you your place on this planet that we are all conected. Once you experience these teachings like the other reviews have said you wont go back. A must buy.
If you are looking for something life changing you have found it. In my opinion it is inspiring. You decide i maybe wrong. Try it i think you will love it.
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