• Shows how Zen offers a creative problem-solving mechanism and moral guide ideal for the stresses and problems of daily life

• Shares the author’s secular, vernacular interpretations of the Four Noble Truths, the Three Treasures, the Eightfold Path, and other fundamental Buddhist ideas

During the nearly 3,000 years since the Buddha lived, his teachings have spread widely around the globe. In each culture where Buddhism was introduced, the Buddha’s teachings have been pruned and modified to harmonize with local customs, laws, and cultures. We can refer to these modifications as “gift wrapping,” translating the gifts of Buddha’s teachings in ways sensible to particular cultures in particular times. This gift-wrapping explains why Indian, Tibetan, Vietnamese, Japanese, Chinese, and Indonesian Buddhism have significant differences.

In this engaging guide to Zen Buddhism, award-winning actor, narrator, and Zen Buddhist priest Peter Coyote helps us peer beneath the Japanese gift-wrapping of Zen teachings to reveal the fundamental teachings of the Buddha and show how they can be applied to contemporary daily life. The author explains that the majority of Western Buddhists are secular and many don’t meditate, wear robes, shave their heads, or believe in reincarnation. He reminds us that the mental/physical states achieved by Buddhist practice are universal human states, ones we may already be familiar with but perhaps never considered as possessing spiritual dimensions.

Exploring Buddha’s core teachings, the author shares his own secular and accessible interpretations of the Four Noble Truths, the Three Treasures, and the Eightfold Path within the context of his lineage and the teachings of his teacher and the teachers before him. He looks at Buddha’s teachings on our singular reality that appears as a multiplicity of things and on the “self” that perceives reality, translating powerful spiritual experience into the vernacular of modern life.

Revealing the practical usefulness of Buddhist philosophy and practice, Zen in the Vernacular shows how Zen offers a creative problem-solving mechanism and moral guide ideal for the stresses and problems of everyday life.

Peter Coyote is an award-winning actor, narrator, and teacher. Recognized for his narration work, he narrated the PBS series The Pacific Century, winning an Emmy Award, as well as eleven Ken Burns documentaries, including The Roosevelts, for which he won a second Emmy. In 2011 he was ordained as a Zen Buddhist priest and in 2015 received “transmission” from his teacher, making him an independent Zen teacher. The author of several books, including The Lone Ranger and Tonto Meet Buddha, he lives in northern California.

Foreword by Lewis Richmond

PART I
What the Buddha Taught

Introduction: Orientation

1 The Four Noble Truths: Dukkha

2 The Four Noble Truths: Samudaya

3 The Four Noble Truths: Nirodha

4 The Four Noble Truths: Marga, the Eightfold Path

5 Marga Part II

6 An Introduction to the Precepts

7 The Precepts

Part II
Things as It Is Introduction: Infusing the Ordinary

8 What Is This Thing We Call the Self?

9 Form and Ceremony

10 Emptiness and the Heart Sutra

11 Enlightenment: Seeing the Unseen

12 Believing in Nothing

13 The Three Treasures: Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha

14 The Role of Faith in Buddhist Practice

15 On Time: Host and Guest

16 Fuketsu’s Speck of Dust

PART III
Engaged with Vernacular Zen Introduction: Flashing in the Dark

17 On Anxiety

18 On Busyness

19 Wild Body, Wild Mind

20 Misunderstanding Emptiness

21 Values Not Embodied in Behavior Do Not Exist

22 Karma

23 On Loss: Issa’s “And Yet . . .”

24 Contradictions

25 Buddhist Anarchism

Acknowledgments

Annotated

Bibliography of Further Reading