Throw Yourself Into The House Of Buddha: The Life And Zen Teaching Of Tangen Harada Roshi

I’ll get right to the point here – if you buy one Zen book this year, this would be my strong recommendation. Harada Tangen Rōshi (1924-2018) was one of the few truly great Zen masters that I’ve met. Meeting Roshi-sama, as he is called by his students, and training with him at Bukkokuji, changed my life and practice in profound ways that still reverberate today, thirty years later.

When my winding path intersected with Roshi-sama in the fall of 1990, I was a refugee from Zuioji, a very PMSO monk-finishing school. Katagiri Roshi had insisted before he died that I go to Zuioji and stay there a month. A several hour argument hadn’t dissuaded him. He thought that after a month I’d see the virtue of Zuioji-style training and stick around for a few years. But after a month of ceremony practice and little zazen, I booked it out of Zuioji and headed to Bukkokuji.

I hadn’t yet met Tangen Harada Roshi, but had heard of him through a chance encounter with an old Zen friend on the plane from the US to Japan and Zuioji. One of the things this friend told me was that Roshi-sama had literally saved his life.

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Throw Yourself Into the House of Buddha: The Life and Zen Teaching of Tangen Harada Roshi