The Zen Teachings of Jesus

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 240 pages
• Published by: The Crossroad Publishing Company; Rev Exp Su edition March 1, 2001
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0824518837
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0824518837
• Book Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 0.7 inches
• Weighs: 11.2 ounces

Product Description
"I left Jesus to search for the Tao when I was sixteen," writes Kenneth Leong. "Now I am forty and realize that I could have found the Tao in Jesus." This is an intriguing book that reveals how Zen philosophy parallels the core message of the gospel. It is the spiritual side of Zen, the art to trust and accept life that coincides with the core of the Gospel message. For power, dogma and doctrine were not Jesus' passion, but the mystery of life and the possibility of love. Sometimes people have overlooked the joy, the humor and the depth of Jesus' teachings—often because they could not surmount the narrow confines of openness to the scripture's power to transform our lives.

Publisher Description
It is the spiritual side of Zen, the art to trust and accept life that coincides with the core of the Gospel message. For power, dogma and doctrine were not Jesus' passion, but the mystery of life and the possibility of love. This book reveals these truths and brings new depth to the perception of Jesus.

Reader Reviews
Kenneth Leong's book will let you see a very different Jesus. For me, it was the first time that anyone has helped me win a strong sense of how Jesus might well have lived his life, how he might have come across to the people he met, and of how he walked out the door of the house each day and went about waiting on God (and not for God)in the experience of everyday life, in every encounter met along the road. Leong does this by taking the `religion" of the everyday, Zen, and especially the Zen that keeps to its Taoist and Chinese roots, and translates this Zen into a series of key qualities, key ways of being in the world. These include a powerful and sustained awareness, insight, simplicity, gentleness, a devotion to the ordinary (as opposed to the supernatural), zest for the everyday encounter, a strong sense of humor, and a deep acknowledgement of the paradox at the root of everything. This is not the Zen of a militant monasticism, the Zen of Japan. This Zen is the art of living, of accepting the world as it is, and of desiring not what you don't have but what you already are. When the key attributes of this way of being in the world are puzzled out, they seem to fit how Jesus might very well have been, of how he encountered the Spirit at table, on the road, at the well, and on the cross. Leong also argues that the Gospels and Jesus' words are best seen as Zen-like koans or puzzles that often have no rational solution, puzzles that jar the seeker into a completely different way of seeing the world, of finding the path to the I AM. Here is the biggest koan of all: Jesus saying, I am the Way. Many Christians believe that Jesus was saying, "Believe in me [the Christ] for I am the only Way to God." The words of Jesus have been used to shore up the orthodoxy of the established church or the fundamentalist's vision of the Bible as the inerrant Word of God. Leong struggles with this koan and comes to a different, more Gnostic view: Paraphrasing Leong, he renders this koan as: The path of the I AM [is] the way. Leong's hard struggle with the `I am the Way' koan helps the reader find his own reaction to Jesus' words. Here is my feeble attempt to understand I am the Way. "The path to the Kingdom is found through my way of being in the world, my way of attemding to and knowing the ordinary miracle of the world. Follow this way or path to freedom, to finding the Kingdom in our midst." Leong's interpretation of the resurrection is very brave. He sees the resurrection not as the event of the bodily raising of the dead Jesus, but rather the transformation in the disciples that was won in Jesus' deep acceptance of death as a reality of life, as his way of overcoming [the fear of] death. Jesus waited on death, where waiting means that he attended to and underwent the pain and suffering of death as the last and ultimate path toward life lived in the Presence. This extraordinary acceptance finally opened the eyes of the disciples. The Zen Teachings of Jesus is the best handbook I know for meeting Jesus again, for the very first time.