How to Cook Your Life: From the Zen Kitchen to Enlightenment

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Shambhala Publications, Nov 8, 2005 - Philosophy - 136 pages
This modern-day commentary on Dogen’s Instructions for a Zen Cook reveals how everyday activities—like cooking—can be incorporated into our spiritual practice

In the thirteenth century, Zen master Dogen—perhaps the most significant of all Japanese philosophers, and the founder of the Japanese Soto Zen sect—wrote a practical manual of Instructions for the Zen Cook. In drawing parallels between preparing meals for the Zen monastery and spiritual training, he reveals far more than simply the rules and manners of the Zen kitchen; he teaches us how to "cook," or refine our lives.

In this volume Kosho Uchiyama Roshi undertakes the task of elucidating Dogen's text for the benefit of modern-day readers of Zen. Taken together, his translation and commentary truly constitute a "cookbook for life," one that shows us how to live with an unbiased mind in the midst of our workaday world.
 

Contents

Translators Introduction
INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE ZEN COOK Tenzo Kyōkun by Zen Master Dōgen
HOW TO COOK YOUR LIFE Jinsei Ryōri no Hon by Kōshō Uchiyama Rōshi
The Tenzo Kyōkun and Shikantaza
Concerning the Religious Life
The True Form of the Self
Everything You Encounter is Your Life
Seeing the World Without Holding Worldly Values
Having a Passion for Life
Direction and Goal
Making Life Calculations
Working with Clear Vision
Living Through the Life of the Self
On Life Force and Life Activity
The Function of a Settled Life
Throwing Your Life into the Abode of the Buddha

On Parental Mind

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About the author (2005)

Dogen (1200–1253) is known as the founder of the Japanese Soto Zen sect.

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