Volume 49, Number 5 · March 28, 2002
Zen & the Art of Success
By Frederick C. Crews
Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion, and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center
by Michael Downing
Counterpoint, 385 pp., $26.00
Michael Downing's dramatic and thoughtful book begins with, and then encircles in widening orbits, a conference held in March 1983 at Zenshinji, or Zen Mind Temple, better known to the world as Tassajara. Tucked narrowly into a canyon of the forbidding Santa Lucia Mountains ten miles east of Big Sur and 150 miles south of San Francisco, Tassajara's hot springs were known to the Esselen Indians for centuries before they became, in 1860, Monterey County's earliest resort. In 1966 that isolated, ramshackle, unelectrified property was bought by San Francisco Zen Center and transformed into what Downing calls the first Buddhist monastery established outside Asia in the 2,500-year history of that religion.[1]
Review, 4087 words
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