Reports from the Zen Wars: The Impossible Rigor of a Questioning Life

In 1972, Antinoff (Spiritual Atheism) arrived in Japan determined to pursue the Zen path toward enlightenment. In this memoir, he provides detailed portraits of the practitioners, scholars, and teachers he met in that country over a lifetime of dedicated study. The author, now an instructor of philosophy and religion at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts, doesn’t spare himself (or the reader) as he details his attempts to practice meditation in sometimes brutally rigorous Japanese monasteries where he is wracked by physical pain, extreme cold, and mental anguish. The narrative truly begins to shine when Antinoff turns his attention fully, with little judgment or analysis, to the perplexing but dedicated masters he encounters and their many conversations about meditation and enlightenment. Some of those he describes remain anonymous; others (Shin’ichi Hisamatsu, Masao Abe) are noted figures in 20th-century Japanese Zen. Aspects of violence and cruelty along the traditional Zen path may put off some readers, but Antinoff portrays with kindness, respect, and admiration a generation of practitioners who struggled, as he has, to solve the impossible koan of being alive. (June)