The Zen Teaching of Huang Po (Huang Po and John Blofeld)
The Best Zen Book
[My 5-star Amazon review (NDA) of “The Zen Teaching of Huang Po” by Huang Po and John Blofeld.]
I’ve been reading spiritual books for over forty years (I’ve read well over a 1,000), and the first book I read on Zen, in 1972—The Zen Teaching of Huang Po--remains the best book I’ve read on Zen. I practiced Zen for years, and have read all the “classics”—Zen Mind, Beginners Mind, The Three Pillars of Zen, The Diamond Sutra and the Sutra of Hui Neng, et al—and dozens of other texts on the subject by authors such as Alan Watts, D.T Suzuki, and Thomas Cleary. But none of these authors/ books provides the non-stop barrage of brilliant, pithy wisdom that Zen master Huang Po does.
I still retain many of Huang Po’s classic statements in my mind. My favorite is: “There’s never been a single thing; then where’s defiling dust to cling? If you can understand the gist of this, why talk of transcendental bliss?” And when people ask me, “What’s happening?” I typically respond with Huang Po’s “only the spontaneously arising Absolute.”
Although I’m now a spiritual teacher, and emphasize Hindu Kashmir Shaivism, Christian Hermeticism, and Tibetan Dzogchen more than I do Zen, I still strongly recommend The Zen Teaching of Huang Po to my students. And speaking of Dzogchen, if you read Huang Po and dig him, then get The Precious Treasury of the Way of Abiding, by Longchen Rabjam. Rabjam, a legendary Dzogchen master, will so remind you of Huang Po, you’ll think the two are brothers.
[My 5-star Amazon review (NDA) of “The Zen Teaching of Huang Po” by Huang Po and John Blofeld.]
I’ve been reading spiritual books for over forty years (I’ve read well over a 1,000), and the first book I read on Zen, in 1972—The Zen Teaching of Huang Po--remains the best book I’ve read on Zen. I practiced Zen for years, and have read all the “classics”—Zen Mind, Beginners Mind, The Three Pillars of Zen, The Diamond Sutra and the Sutra of Hui Neng, et al—and dozens of other texts on the subject by authors such as Alan Watts, D.T Suzuki, and Thomas Cleary. But none of these authors/ books provides the non-stop barrage of brilliant, pithy wisdom that Zen master Huang Po does.
I still retain many of Huang Po’s classic statements in my mind. My favorite is: “There’s never been a single thing; then where’s defiling dust to cling? If you can understand the gist of this, why talk of transcendental bliss?” And when people ask me, “What’s happening?” I typically respond with Huang Po’s “only the spontaneously arising Absolute.”
Although I’m now a spiritual teacher, and emphasize Hindu Kashmir Shaivism, Christian Hermeticism, and Tibetan Dzogchen more than I do Zen, I still strongly recommend The Zen Teaching of Huang Po to my students. And speaking of Dzogchen, if you read Huang Po and dig him, then get The Precious Treasury of the Way of Abiding, by Longchen Rabjam. Rabjam, a legendary Dzogchen master, will so remind you of Huang Po, you’ll think the two are brothers.
