The Further Adventures of Zen Patriarch Dōgen - James K Zimmerman - Bog

Finalist in The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize, 2023

The poems in The Further Adventures of Zen Patriarch Dōgen were inspired by the life and teachings of Dōgen Zenji, a thirteenth-century Japanese monk credited with bringing Chan Buddhism to Japan and founding the Sōto school of Zen. The writing is founded upon the presumed experience and perspective Dōgen would have if he were alive today. Essential Buddhist concepts of bare attention, full presence, impermanence, no-self, and the path to liberation from suffering play out through the "eyes of a river" - in a self-driving car, a dentist's chair, the water's edge, the contemplation of circularity. In a world of bare attention and full presence, there are no words; inherent in these poems is the paradox of attempting to express this experience through the medium of language.

"The Further Adventures of Zen Patriarch Dōgen elucidates the intricacies of Zen philosophy in poems spare as 'a winterbreath of silence' and lush as 'the rhythm/ of hands, / gullwing, / flutter/ of beachplum/ blossoms.' Reader, you will find here wisdom, and its sister, compassion." --Gillian Cummings, author of The Owl Was a Baker's Daughter

"The poet holds moments of life in his open hands, sings them and lifts them beyond words, bringing me to deepest stillness. I treasure this unique book and shall keep it close to my meditation seat and my heart." --Judith S. Schmidt, Ph.D, author of In the Garden of Love and Loss

"Nouns fall upon us like snowflakes and melt away. A slow and attentive reading of this spare collection offers a taste of the continuity of motion found in stillness-an endless becoming that moves inevitably like cormorants to chum." --Kathryn Weld, author of Waking Light

"In poems both playful and profound, Zimmerman taps into the beauty, strangeness, difficulty, and promise of the meditative life. I thought about these poems long after reading them." --Lynn Schmeidler, author of History of Gone