Book Review: Blowing Zen

From: Bruce Jones (bjones@weber.ucsd.edu)
Date: Thu Mar 02 2000 - 19:58:08 PST


Ray Brooks, *Blowing Zen: Finding an Authentic Life* (Tiburon, CA:
H. J. Kramer, 2000) is one man's account of how he found the
shakuhachi and what happened thereafter.

To say much about the content of the book would be to spoil it for
the eventual reader (not to mention that Brooks tells his own story
much more entertainingly than I could). Suffice to say that Brooks'
experiences with the shakuhachi in Japan are the sort that those
of us who ocassionally fantasize about studying there spin into
our day-dreams.

The shakuhachi provided Brooks with a passport to people and aspects
of Japanese life usually closed off to Westerners. His play took
him, not just into the shakuhachi community, but into the homes
and lives of Japanese for whom the traditional arts are still
meaningful and who were surprised and pleased by Brooks' study.

Aside from the shakuhachi enthusiast reader, the experiences with
the shakuhachi Brooks relays in the book, along with his minor
forays into Zen philosophy, make the book an interesting read for
people unfamiliar with the shakuhachi. Zen, the martial arts and
oragami are fairly well known outside Japan. The shakuhachi is
far less well known, even among Western musicians. Books that make
it more understandable to Westerners are also likely to attract
more of us to the shakuhachi.

Brooks' experiences also make *Blowing Zen* a useful read for the
non-playing partners of shakuhachi enthusiasts in that he gives a
clear, if a bit thin, exploration of what one goes through while
learning a traditional art form from another culture. If your
significant other is like mine, more interested in European culture
and golf than honkyoku, sankyoku and in the restuarants in LA's
Little Tokyo, it's nice to have someone else help explain the more
esoteric aspects of the shakuhachi, particularly when they do that
explaining as well as Brooks.

Back to my own thoughts about the book. A few years ago I gave up
reading books by Westerners on Zen philosophy (to paraphrase Muso
Kokushi, it's better to practice a little than read a lot - and I
practice as little as anyone:-). These days I mostly like two
kinds of books on Buddhism and Zen: the poetry of Zen - east or
west, Ikkyu and Ryokan, Harrison and Budbill - and the first person
accounts of Westerners who've "gone off" on Zen in one fashion or
another. Not Zen philosophy, but Zen travelogues (cf. *The Accidental
Buddhist* - D. W. Moore). I like the voice of experience that
speaks understandably close to my ear.

Brooks' *Blowing Zen* is one of these books (notwithstanding the
fact that he labels himself a "zen tourist"), made considerably
more interesting by the fact that Brooks didn't set out to explore
either Zen or the shakuhachi. He's a bit more like someone who
decided to go for a stroll, learned that a hiking staff made walking
easier and then discovered (in both senses of the term) himself on
a pilgrimage.

*Blowing Zen* is available from amazon.com and from Brooks at
www.raybrooks.com

bj

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