How to Cook Your Life: From the Zen Kitchen to Enlightenment

In
the thirteenth century, Zen master Dogen—perhaps the most significant of all
Japanese philosophers, and the founder of the Japanese Soto Zen sect—wrote a
practical manual of
Instructions
for the Zen Cook
.
In drawing parallels between preparing meals for the Zen monastery and
spiritual training, he reveals far more than simply the rules and manners of
the Zen kitchen; he teaches us how to "cook," or refine our lives. In
this volume Kosho Uchiyama Roshi undertakes the task of elucidating Dogen's
text for the benefit of modern-day readers of Zen. Taken together, his
translation and commentary truly constitute a "cookbook for life,"
one that shows us how to live with an unbiased mind in the midst of our
workaday world.