No Fear Zen: Discovering Balance in an Unbalanced World

Lovely book. I could feel Richard Collins’ breathing and posture from here in how sentences and paragraphs were constructed. My favorite chapter was “Zazen Does Zazen” which read like a Japanese poem. I passed the book to my husband, a retired philosophy professor who has an academic aversion to all things Buddhist, because I knew he would be attracted to Collins’ dislike of words like “spirituality” and “mindfulness.” The clear writing, the perfect sentences and disciplined structure of the book, which in the age of bloggy memoirs and rambling narratives, made the Sunday morning I read it an especially engaged, intense time. The writing is so good. If you'll forgive me a zen-like turn of phrase, clear writing holds a reader the way an empty bowl holds nothing and yet everything. Admittedly, most of my knowledge of zen has always been superficial, coming from stories from manga and anime and a smattering of classes. I taught at Naropa in Boulder a couple summers and came away with this sense that American Buddhism was an itchy sweater that didn’t fit; this book brought up so many of my old questions about zen practice and maybe if it didn’t answer them all, it gave me permission not to put on anything itchy. There’s a chapter late in the book about Hamlet and Sophie’s Choice—maybe I should not have been surprised that Richard Collins, an academic, would talk about literature to clarify Buddhist concepts. By this time, though, I’d become so at ease with his familiar erasures of self, expectations, and outcomes that expressions of doubt seemed as natural as I’d always experienced doubt to be—it’s at this point, Collins coins the term “right mindlessness.” Stuff worth reading for the young grasshopper or for the more advanced student. Collins teaches with humor and clarity, and I’ve come away wanting to know more.

Richard, I have finished reading your book and I am pleased that we now have a book which teaches the path of our lineage with compassion and understanding. The emphasis on “just sit” remains as it should but it becomes a path to the end of the illusion of self and, consequently, an end to attachment and an opening to compassion. A student can read your book and discover a lineage with “soul” which cares for and understands the challenges and difficulties faced by the student of our path without harshness or judgment. Many of the pitfalls and dangers on the path are addressed in an understandable way without making people wrong. The hardest truth to teach and the “issue” most easily avoided is the illusion of a separate and permanent self. You touch on this in a way which denies the possibility of “understanding” and thus avoids an easy denial of this core reality.

This is the book on Zen that I have been looking for.

Excellent book on Zen, by a brilliant Zen master and scholar.

Not only is this wonderful book a worthy addition to the zen literature produced by those in the Deshimaru lineage, it is in my opinion the best. This is in my new favorite top 10 books on zen

Livro muito bom. Temas provocantes, diretos. Não achei que pudesse ser tão bom, mas gostei muito. Bem atual.

Con parole accessibili e senza cadere nell'indottrinamento, Richard Collins ci fornisce un quadro completo dello Zen secondo il lignaggio di Deshimaru. Naturalmente, l'attenzione è tutta sullo zazen di cui Collins fa una descrizione da mettere subito in pratica