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You can transform your life, and it is imperative that you do it. Because only you can do it. No guru can make your life right. No Zen master can show you the way. Only you have the power to make this place you’re living in right now a realm so beautiful even God himself couldn’t dream of anything better. And doing this will transform the universe.

It is up to you.

It’s not just your right; it’s your duty.

Only you can find the path and only you can walk it.

To do this, you need to establish balance within yourself. You need a practice that will enable you to see yourself for what you truly are. Zazen is one way you can do that. And zazen can help you establish balance and keep it.

People long for big thrills, peak experiences, deep insights. Some people take up zazen practice expecting that enlightenment will be the ultimate peak experience, the peak experience to beat all peak experiences. But real enlightenment is the most ordinary of the ordinary.

And our ordinary, boring, pointless lives are incredibly, amazingly, astoundingly, relentlessly, mercilessly joyful.

You don’t need to do a damned thing to experience such joy either. You don’t need to snort an ounce of coke, get a turkey-baster full of hot grease shoved up your ass, blow up the Washington Monument, win the Indy 500, or walk on the moon. You don’t need to go hang-gliding over the Himalayas, or kayaking down the Amazon. You don’t need to screw that oh-so-willing babe with the dark hair and the pouty lips or the smokin’ seventeen-year-old on your brother’s baseball team, and you don’t need to party all night with the beautiful people. You don’t need to do any of that stuff to know what it means to be alive.

You’re alive when you’re sitting in your bedroom cleaning wax out of your ears. You’re alive when you’re looking at your turds floating in the toilet and noticing bits of last night’s dinner in there. You’re alive when you’re at the supermarket wondering whether to go for the Hostess® Ho-Hos™ or the Little Debbies®. You’re alive right now. Just be what you are, where you are. That’s the most magical thing there is. The life you’re living right now has joys even God could never know.

No one else has ever lived this moment and no one else will ever live it. No one in the whole universe. Oh, there may have been people who stood on subway platforms looking at a book before. But they weren’t you. It wasn’t this book. They weren’t as hungry for a nice slice of pizza as you are right now. They hadn’t schtupped the people you have. They hadn’t made the same stupid mistakes with their lives as you have. Nor have they felt the same joys. They haven’t made happy the people you’ve made happy. The snot in their noses hasn’t hardened into the same shapes that the snot in your nose has.

Your life is yours alone, and to miss your life is the most tragic thing that could happen.

So sit down, shut up, and take a look at it.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

FIRST AND FOREMOST, I gotta thank the two people who kept telling me I should write a book about Buddhism in spite of my protests that I was supremely unqualified to do any such thing: my current Buddhist teacher, Gudo Wafu Nishijima, and my first teacher, Tim McCarthy. Don’t blame me, folks—they made me do it.

Next up, thanks to my editor (I have an editor—cool, huh?) Josh Bartok of Wisdom Publications for making my manuscript into something people might actually want to read. And to Rod Meade Sperry, the guy in charge of trying to get people to buy this thing. And to everybody else at Wisdom Publications for helping to bring this book into being. When I sent my manuscript to Wisdom I figured the best I’d get was the same “Dear Author: We didn’t even bother to read your submission”-type form-letter I received from another well-known publisher of Buddhist books (who shall remain nameless) or the strange uncomprehending (and often incomprehensible) replies I got from mainstream publishers. But here I am, a Buddhist author at a Buddhist press. Who’da thunk it?

And, of course, thanks to