ZEN Masters of Japan: The Second Step East

well written book well done

Nice overview..well written and great seller

I am waiting already for the third volume, the sequence is of great value not only for practitioners but also for students and scholars and those interested in the evolution and transmission of the teachings since the historical Buddha to our present time.

This is a worthy companion and follow-up to McDaniel's book on Zen Masters of China. Lucid, illuminating, and occasionally humorous, it is marred only by a single sentence in the "Epilogue," where -- unnecessarily and arbitrarily -- McDaniel offers a cynical and uninformed put-down of H.P. Blavatsky in particular and Theosophy in general. In the late 19th century, Blavatsky and her Theosophical co-workers made an enormous contribution to the introduction of Buddhism to the West. I was shocked by McDaniel's momentary betrayal of the Zen spirit of humility, compassion and open-mindedness. Nevertheless, I thoroughly enjoyed his books on Zen in China and Japan, and look forward to his forthcoming volume on Zen in the West.

Richard Bryan McDaniel's Zen Masters of Japan: The Second Step East is clearly a labor of love -- part of a three book series (Zen Masters of China, Zen Masters of Japan, and the upcoming Zen Masters of the West) that presents a chronicle of the lives of some of the most important Japanese Zen teachers. The book begins -- after a brief prologue in China-- with the earliest Japanese pilgrims who brought Zen from China to Japan, and concludes with Soyen Shaku's 1893 visit to the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago. The book's prose is clear, clean and uncluttered, and a pleasure to read. The wisdom, poetry, and wit of the Zen ancestors -- Japanese Zen patriarchs like Dogen, Hakuin, Basho and Ryokan -- comes shining through. McDaniel frames the lives of these Zen masters in their cultural and historical context, so that the reader painlessly absorbs a reasonable amount of Japanese culture and history along the way. Who is this book right for? It occupies a peculiar niche. It contains too much information for someone just casually interested in Zen, and yet may not be scholarly enough for someone who's already well versed in it -- its ideal readers will be Zen enthusiasts/practitioners who know a little but not a lot about Japanese Zen history. As a reader, I'm somewhere in the middle of this continuum, so that I found myself both thankful to McDaniel for learning about Zen figures I'd never known and delighted by various nuggets of Zen lore and mondo (teacher-student dialogues) I'd either never known or had long forgotten, but also frustrated by the book's shortcomings. As a summation of stories already contained in a number of well-known English language publications (e.g., Ferguson, Dumoulin, Cleary, Suzuki, and Reps), the book lacks new scholarship, or a familiarity with their original Japanese sources. It often fails to distinguish between fact, as an historian might define it, and lore as it comes down through the Zen tradition -- what's biography and what's hagiography. It also presents Zen as Zen would like to present itself, without delving critically into what's lost and what's gained as Japanese Zen bows to political and economic pressures from shoguns, samurai, and nationalist Meiji restorers. And where, by the way, are the Zen matriarchs? Those criticisms aside, if you're a Zen practitioner just beginning your journey -- and you aren't too finicky about what's history and what's lore -- this book is a painless way to begin to familiarize yourself with Zen's Japanese history.