Summary

It is a real joy to review the Three Pillars of Zen by Roshi Philip Kapleau. I have listened to this book on Audible several times and read a paperback version. The book is fairly long with the paperback being 441 pages and the audio version 14 hours and 27 minutes. The book covers in detail the practice of Zazen or what some might call meditation in great detail. While I am equating Zazen to meditation the author makes a distinction that Zazen is not traditional meditation. Roshi Philip Kaplan spent over 14 years in Japan studying Zen from the masters, most notably Yasutani Roshi. There is also a historical account of the great Dogen along with sources of information presented from both the Rinzai and Soto Zen disciplines perspectives. Much of this book is about the Yasautani Roshi’s encounters with Western students documented in painstaking detail by Roshi…