Description

---

This introduction to Zen teachings is a “watershed book for Zen students, a good study companion and a trustworthy guide” (Norman Fischer, author of The World Could Be Otherwise)

In Infinite Circle, one of America's most distinctive Zen teachers takes a back-to-basics approach to Zen. Glassman illuminates three key teachings of Zen Buddhism, offering line-by-line commentary in clear, direct language:

• The Heart Sutra: the Buddha's essential discourse on emptiness, a central sutra of the Mahayana Buddhist tradition.
• "The Identity of Relative and Absolute": an eighth-century poem by Shih-t'ou His-ch'ien, a key text of the Soto Zen school.
• The Zen precepts: the rules of conduct for laypeople and monks.

His commentaries are based on workshops he gave as Abbot of the Zen Community of New York, and they contain within them the principles that became the foundation for the Greyston Mandala of community development organizations and the Zen Peacemaker Order.

About the Author

---

Bernie Glassman is a Zen master and the first dharma successor to Taizan Maezumi Roshi, founder of the Zen Center of Los Angeles. He is well known for integrating Zen practice with social, economic, and educational initiatives. He is also the author of Instructions to the Cook and Bearing Witness: A Zen Master's Lessons in Making Peace.

Praise For…

---

"A timely and spiritually wise book. Glassman is a very profound and skilled teacher who manages to illuminate some very difficult Zen subjects."— Spirituality and Health



"Glassman's style and thinking are like thick, polished glass: clear, compact, and strong. Marrying metaphor, illustration, and abstraction, he reaches into the heart of many essential concepts, reminding us firmly that, among other things, 'we don't practice to become enlightened . . . we practice because we are enlightened.'"—Publishers Weekly

"A watershed book for Zen students, a good study companion and a trustworthy guide."—Zoketsu Norman Fisher, founding teacher of the Everyday Zen Foundation