Guruphiliac: Zen Soup Bones



Friday, December 07, 2007

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.

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4 Comments:

At 12/07/2007 5:03 PM, Blogger Vinny said...

Hey man! You're losing it.
Gurus - behaviors?? really? ;-)

What gives? Time to re-read karma 101 before you really upset someone.
LOL

I have to agree - Brown's the man.

 
At 12/08/2007 11:32 AM, Blogger Peggy Burgess said...

GP said...His doubts, occasional tears and minor rages only make him a more accessible messenger of simple but profound life lessons.
Hey how come these things only make me a bitch but they make Ed a lovable , cuddly old guru? I wanna get me soma that mojo. I worked with Ed in the 80's and he's ok, however if he was a far side of middle aged woman i doubt his charms would be so apparent, though i hear Pema Chodrin can be kind of edgy, yay Pema! anyway, its not Ed's tradition to call teachers gurus, and even though I'm sure he loves it, he's not supposed to .

 
At 12/09/2007 11:43 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

>>>"Hey how come these things only make me a bitch but they make Ed a lovable , cuddly old guru? I wanna get me soma that mojo. I worked with Ed in the 80's and he's ok, however if he was a far side of middle aged woman i doubt his charms would be so apparent"<<<


HA HA HA! Yay and Yo Mamacita!

love
Dhuma Devi

 
At 12/09/2007 11:57 AM, Blogger stuartresnick said...

yo mamma wrote...
its not Ed's tradition to call teachers gurus

In lots of traditions, when teachers are called "gurus," it's packaged with the belief that the teacher is on some higher level than the student or ordinary humanity.

The analogy used in Zen style is more often like this: If you're lost in the woods, and you find someone holding a flashlight, see if that light will help you find your own way. Certainly make use of that light (the teaching) if you can... but it doesn't mean that the person who's holding the flashlight is fundamentally different from you or anyone else.

Stuart
http://stuart-randomthoughts.blogspot.com/

 

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