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Zen at Work By Les Kaye ( Three Rivers Press )
Release Date: 1997-01-01
Average Customer Rating:
List Price: $10.00
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Product Description
A Zen teacher who balanced his commitment to Zen practice with a high-level business career shares the wisdom and practical experience he gained by integrating spiritual practice into the workplace. 192 pp. National publicity. 10,000 print.
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 For a work environment, Zen is NOT a 4 letter word ( leslie_hodge )
This book is an amazing journey through a high tech world, with juxtaposition with the author's spiritual world. While I will probably never dive as deeply into zazen as a spiritual practice, the author teaches how spiritual practice can actually facilitate a healthier and more productive work environment. This book reiterates the divine flows through all of us... even stubborn geeks who think they know it all. A true enlightenment experience!
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Zen practice at work - simple and direct ( c_barron )
Let me first qualify this by noting that I am a Zen practitioner, so many of the teachings and practices were already familiar to me. And my love of this book is entirely from that point of view: this book is a great help to me, but I don't know if it's helpful for non-Zen practitioners. With that said...
I've practiced for a couple years, doing sitting meditation, chanting, reading sutras, kong-ans, etc. And sometimes, I've found it difficult at times to truly attain stories about some Zen master or monk who had some great insight several hundred years ago due to a circumstance involving an errant cow, a circumstance at a Buddhist monastery, or a funny incident while begging for scraps in some little village. It's fair to say I don't find myself in those situations (much), and it would certainly be convenient if Buddha had become enlightened in 1995 while working at Microsoft - the context of his teachings would be much easier to grasp.
This book helps to bridge that gap. Within just the first few pages, I could tell that the author had attained great insight into practicing Zen in the corporate environment. His explanations of how sitting meditation, right-now mind, and compassion relate to work answered a number of questions I had also pondered. And his explanations were direct and simple. The "meat" of the material is covered within about the first 30 pages. In fact, most of the remainder can be referred to randomly from time to time, like a collection of individual topics.
Practice, practice, practice. Keep a don't-know mind. Save all sentient beings. And thanks to books like this, you don't stop just because you're in a cubicle :)
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Clarity and integrity ( calmly )
If a human incarnation is a rare opportunity, not to be squandered, as Buddhists suggest, I'm in trouble. During the years that I have lived in Silicon Valley, Les Kaye's zendo has been nearby, open to all with an opportunity weekly to sit in zazen and to hear a dharma talk. Although I practiced daily zazan, during that period I usually preferred to sit alone.
I recall one time when there was a tea service after the zazen session. I thought, as something special, that I wasn't included in that and left. But when I was about 20 feet from the zendo I heard a call: it was Les Kaye, letting me know that it was fine for me to join them. I did and I appreciated his awareness and sensitivity. That might seem a small kindness but more than a decade later I haven't forgotten it.
One reason I avoided group sitting was because sitting for 45 minutes or so was uncomfortable for me. It was inclusive for me to read here in "Zen at Work" that Les is not militant about zazen and recognizes that some meditators may do better with a chair and that some may need to stretch or even get up during a zazen session. Not that I often saw anyone take advantage of this flexibilty but, given the perfectionistic zeal of Silicon Valley high achievers to do perfect zazen, it's comforting that Les allows for those of us who are less capable.
Les's dharma talks, some of which I heard first-hand and others of which I read in this book, are clear. No mind-bending Zen puzzles from Les.
I have often said, selfishly, that what I want of a spiritual practice is something that will help me survive the demands of the workplace. Les understands that and this book shares his own unselfish response to that challenge.
This is a suprising book that makes Zen warmer and more accessible than you may have thought possible - without reducing its wisdom or challenge.
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A spiritual master piece. ...the "Yoga of Action"
This book is a master piece on spirituality. I mean spirituality that is relevant and spiritualtiy that matters. I am an ex-IBMer myself and have been in meditation for many years. This book was the missing link in my understanding of spiritual life and professional life in an integrated whole, as varying expressions of the same grand idea that the soul sometimes knows intuitively but can't easily express.
The spirituality that is relevant has to be expressed in one's works. If we can't exercise spirituality in work, we have defeated God's purpose in our creation . Les Kaye refers to God as "Big Mind" and states all that we do has to be expression of this "Big Mind". The work-ethic that flows out of its integration with the "Big Mind" neither leads to boredom, nor to anxiety. Your work becomes your meditation, your prayer, your sacred liturgy!
Though there is nothing new in this idea. It has been taught in many cultures. The Hindu doctrine of "Karma Yoga" ("yoga of action") , as taught in "Bhagvad Gita" , is perhaps the most comprehensive classical treatise on the idea of "Zen at Work". Similarly , many Sufis Masters in Islam have tried to teach the same idea. In Christianity, we have the writing of Brother Lawrence about practising the "presence of God" in our mundane work. So although "Zen at Work", is essentially a Buddist idea, it does find echo in other spiritual teachings.
But what gives force to this book is not the originality of the idea, but the originality of the interpetation of this idea in the contemporary corporate milieu, enriched by author's own life long experience at the Big Blue. We are the instruments of God, the "Big Mind", for his sacred task of creation. Creator is creating with us and through us. If our sprituality comes in the way of this divine task of creation, for whatever reason, then obviously we have betrayed the spiritual purpose that we were created with. This is a vital idea that all serious spiritualists/meditators need to grasp. Spirituality that makes us hide from our 'worldly' responsibilities is a false spirituality. If you have absorbed spirituality properly, then the falseness of dichotomy between 'spiritual' and 'worldly' immediately becomes clear. Both are in reality expressions of each other, when rightly understood.
Zen at Work teaches us how to make ourselves the intruments of the Divine Creator, by removing our ego from the way, so that the "Big Mind" expresses its peace, harmony and majesty through us. Letting go of the 'small mind', i.e. ego, so that "Big Mind" flows spontaneously through us. This is the kernel of this great book. When we let the "Big Mind" express through us, then all our worries, anxieties and boredom - that are sometime natural products of our unfeeling capitalist evironment- also disappear. The work , however mundane and tedious, becomes an expression of an ecstatic union with the divine. The 'hot Buddha', the 'cold Buddha', the 'home Buddha', the 'temple Buddha'...and the "WORK Buddha'!
Thank you Les Kaye for this "great gift" from the "Big Mind".
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 Man becomes zen monk while working at a large company
I think the title is misleading. It may better be labeled "Man Becomes Zen Monk While Working in a Good Position at a Large Company." I was expecting a more generic coverage of what "American" Buddhism might be about, especially Zen and capitalism/competition or even more detail about his progress via zazen. I was also disappointed that he did not elaborate on his feelings about his master's death (he brought it up and immediately dropped it) and at his suggestion that a male Zen Buddhist would have the ability to make a woman not feel like she was "taken for granted." Enlightenment is knowing oneself and not necessarily others but in that latter point I felt he missed all that that complaint may emcompass. At that juncture the book lost me.
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