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“To live life fully,” Dainin Katagiri tells us, “means to take care of your life day by day, moment by moment, right here, right now.” To do this, he teaches, one must plunge into our life completely, bringing to it the same wholeheartedness that is required in Zen meditation. When we approach life in this way, every activity—everything we do. Everything we say—becomes an opportunity for manifesting our own innate wisdom. With extraordinary freshness and immediacy, Katagiri shows us how the same wisdom that enlivens our spiritual practice can help make our life a rich, seamless whole.
Dainin Katagiri (1928-1990) was a central figure in the transmission of Buddhism to America. His first book, Returning to Silence, emphasized the need to return to our original, enlightened state of being, and it became one of the classics of Zen in America. In You have to Say Something, selections from his talks have been collected and edited to address another key theme of his teachings: how to bring Zen insight to bear on our everyday experience. Dainin Katagiri studied Zen at Eiheji Monastery and attended Komazawa University. In 1963, he came to the Zenshuji Soto Zen Mission in Los Angeles, then moved to assist Shunryu Suzuki Roshi at the San Francisco Zen Center. In 1972, he became the first abbot of the Minnesota Zen Meditation Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota. |
“This book can be unhesitatingly recommended to all Zen trainees, whether longtime practitioners or beginners. Dainin Katagiri has certainly ‘said something.'”
—Gary Gelade, author of The Middle Way “Katagiri Roshi’s teachings are clear, direct, and also subtle and insightful. You Have to Say Something is a very valuable book.” —Peter Matthiessen, author of The Snow Leopardand Nine-Headed Dragon River: Zen Journals |