Zen and the Art of Anything

I. My Story and This Book my story The year was 1990, and I was presenting a paper on Zen at a Buddhism conference in southern Taiwan. In the course of the paper, I made a passing reference to Bodhidharma, the traditional bringer of Zen to China from India. After the presentation, a resident Buddhist monk approached me, and, with a whimsical smile, pointed to me, and said, "You are Bodhidharma!" I was rather pleasantly mystified by that, but could elicit no further elaboration. The monk simply left, and I was left to ponder the classic Zen koan, or riddle: "Why has Bodhidharma come from the West?" And why, then, had I come from the West to talk to a largely Buddhist audience, about Zen? In what way was I, late in time, following Bodhidharma's model? And why, as a Westerner, several years later, should I attempt a book about Zen? I am in many ways an unlikely candidate for such a project. First, I'm an academic, and academics don't write much about Zen. They may study about it, and teach a small segment or even a rare course about it, but they don't write about it. Practitioners do. Professors write about lots of things religious, but not much on Zen. The ones who write about Zen are persons, East and West, who have spent years in Zen centers and monasteries, who have received extensive training with Zen masters, and have been initiated. I understand that, and am intimidated. Second, it isn't just the profession, it's personal. I'm a still more unlikely candidate by way of origins. So I'm still more intimidated. But this isn't an expert's book on esoteric Zen. That might intimidate you, too. Zen here is "nothing special," for "nothing special" people like you and me. I have to pick up the story a little more than a century ago, to detail my own journey toward wanting to write about Zen. On September 1893, over 100,000 people lined up to cross the border into a section of Oklahoma known as the Cherokee Strip. Other segments of the Indian Territory were opened a few years earlier and later, but this was the largest and the most dramatic such entry. My grandfather was among those who raced to establish a claim. It was in many ways the closing of a frontier. Five days earlier, in Chicago, the World's Parliament of Religions had opened. It was, in many ways, the opening of an incredible new frontier. My early life was shaped much more by the first event. Perhaps my grandfather's horse was slow. At any rate, the land he claimed was poor, and he came back in a few years to settle in Kansas with his family, having buried two small boys in the soil of Oklahoma. As the Indian Territories were opened for settling, the frontier closed. Yet, by the time I appeared, elements of it remained. We lived, in my boyhood, in a small town near Dodge City, "Land of the Fast Draw." The lore of the cowboy was a living thing, not just memorialized in the graves at nearby Boot Hill. The most visible markers in Mullinville, my town, were windmills and grain elevators. My father operated one of the elevators, and my mother had taught home economics, which gave me an early appreciation for wonderful basic cooking, a subject for further discussion in chapter five. The vital church in Mullinville, just across the street from our home, had a strong measure of frontier Christianity, evangelical in style and content. It was, and its impress remains, whatever else has been appended, very important to me. I did my first public speaking as an earlyFrench, Hal is the author of 'Zen and the Art of Anything' with ISBN 9780767907972 and ISBN 0767907973.