Zen Soup Bones

File under: The Siddhi of PR

Today we caught the aroma of Edward Espe Brown, who's been the head teacher at just about every Zen school situated in Northern California, as well as being something of a gourmet chef and the subject of a recent documentary:

Brown teaches spiritual well-being along with food preparation, and he's a warm, funny and often quite insightful guru most of the time. His doubts, occasional tears and minor rages only make him a more accessible messenger of simple but profound life lessons, which boil down to such Be Here Now basics as focus on whatever you're doing and do it with love, humility and as little extra baggage as you can.

Here we have another example of a guru being a normal person doing normal person stuff, like having minor rages, placing Brown well above all the other gurus who work so hard to hide their humanity from folks out of a fear they it will break the money-making delusion they've installed in their students.

Being a gourmand ourselves, if he doesn't do mac and cheese, he's not going to impress us with his cooking. But we like his personal style as much as we can tell from what little we've read. We need more gurus who are willing to go out on a limb and display those behaviors the rest of us experience each and every day of our lives. Brown seems to fill this recipe nicely.