120 BUDDHADHARMA: THE PRACTITIONER’S QUARTERLY
“Miso that smells like miso is not good miso,” says Soto Zen
priest Gesshin Greenwood. “Our life is functioning its best when
things are just as they are—nothing overly exaggerated.” She
observes that in contemporary Western culture, we are often condi-
tioned to define “enough” as requiring a kind of abundance. Mind-
ful of this phenomenon of excess and overconsumption, she provides
guidance on mindfulness and meditation through the mundane but
powerful activity of cooking. In Just Enough: Vegan Recipes and
Stories from Japan’s Buddhist Temples (New World Library 2019),
alongside more than thirty recipes based on authentic Japanese
temple cuisine, Gesshin Greenwood shares anecdotes of her time as
a nun in Japanese Buddhist temples. All the recipes are vegetarian
(most are vegan), and though they come from a centuries-old prac-
tice and lifestyle, they can also be readily prepared in most Western
kitchens. Indeed, this cookbook–memoir, written in the spirit of the
Japanese Buddhist philosophy of oryoki, or “just enough,” teaches
“how to cook and live where you are.”
What does a poison arrow have in common with a smartphone?
Through the eyes of the Venerable Myokyo-ni, both are equal dis-
tractions preventing us from “finding out what we are really running
away from.” Look and See: Buddhist Teaching Stories with Com-
mentaries (The Buddhist Society) is a collection of commentaries by
Myokyo-ni (1921-2007), lifelong teacher at the Buddhist Society and
head of two Rinzai Zen training monasteries in England. Trained at
Daitokuji in Kyoto and ordained as a Rinzai Zen Buddhist nun, she
wrote a number of books on Zen practices in the West; this most
recent posthumous publication brings her modern lens to a range of
Buddhist narratives, from Indian classics like the Story of the Poi-
son Arrow to the East Asian tale of The Great Wave. All the stories
collected show how our trials, in various ways, can become skillful
means to bring suffering to an end.
Samsara, Nirvana, and Buddha Nature (Wisdom 2019) is the
third and most recent addition to the Library of Wisdom and Com-
passion, a multivolume series that is the fruit of more than twenty-
five years of collaboration between the Dalai Lama and Thubten