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I found this book to be a pleasure to read. Jennings's agenda is clear, cogent, and simply stated throughout the text as an “active and joyful participation in the world” (p. 137) which “requires a deeper engagement with our own reality at any given moment” (p. 142). Jennings writes in a personal autobiographical style and expresses a strong commitment that prioritizes Buddhism as a religion, which for her continues to be a “precious experience of immersion” (p. xii). Jennings's voice and vantage point are quite refreshing in a literature that, with few exceptions, has secularized Buddhism.
Secularized Buddhism in the United States reflects an underlying orthodoxy expressed as an “anti-religious” tradition that has sprouted through D. T. Suzuki's highly influential writing; for many years, he served as the sole purveyor of Zen to the West. His writings reveal a highly ambivalent attitude concerning Zen as a religion and resulted in his development of a highly secularized, empirical, and psychological framework (Faure, 1997, p. 63). This position became further entrenched through a “medicalized” healing ethic, which in terms of psychoanalysis translates into psychoanalytic theory that, with few exceptions, views the religious impulse as pathological. Perhaps the meeting of the secular and the religious, like the Zen image of “two arrows meeting in mid-air,” will engender a creative dialectic tension that will nurture the emergence of a maturing American Buddhism as exemplified in this offering. Perhaps these two distinct strands can become mutually coproductive in