Dropping Ashes on the Buddha
The Teachings of Zen Master Seung Sahn
About the book
A man walks into a Zen center with a lit cigarette, blows smoke in the face of the Buddha statue and drops ashes in its lap, and the student watching must decide how to respond. That puzzle, a favorite of Korean Zen Master Seung Sahn, gives Stephen Mitchell's collection its title. The book records the exchanges between Seung Sahn and his American students in the teacher's own words, through letters, Dharma speeches, stories, dialogues and formal Zen interviews. It shows the Zen practice of instant dialogue, in which a master uses astonishment and paradox to lead a student toward understanding reality, and one description calls it irreverent and often funny.
In Tools of Titans, songwriter and author Amanda Palmer named it one of her favorite books of all time and said it changed her life, describing a short book of letters between a funny, blunt Korean monk and his students in the 1970s.
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This book has 1 recommendation
Amanda Palmer (Songwriter, author)
One of my absolute favorite books of all time, because it changed my life, is a book called Dropping Ashes on the Buddha. It's by Zen Master Seung Sahn, who was a Korean Zen monk. I read it when I was maybe 24, and it's a short book: just a series of letters that this really funny, very direct, very no-bullshit Korean monk wrote back and forth with his students in the 1970s. It was one of those, 'Oh, my God, I think I get it' books... I have given that book to probably 30 or 40 people, especially people who have told me that they are feeling kind of lost and/or depressed or directionless, or younger people who are at crazy crossroads in their life and need something to hang unto. If you like it, there is a companion book that was his second collection of letters, which was called Only Don't Know.
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