Cave Of Tigers

Cave of Tigers is an utterly unique contribution to modern Zen literature — a collection of edited transcriptions of actual "dharma encounters" between students at Zen Mountain Monastery in Mount Tremper, New York, and Abbot John Daido Loori, Roshi. In dharma combat, the teacher introduces a topic and then invites students to come forward and present their understanding of the subject or ask a question about it. The highly charged teacher-student encounters presented here range from pithy, koan-like exchanges to more discursive discussions — on zazen, the practice of everyday life, moral and ethical teachings of Buddhism, liturgy, karma, the monastic rule, the Middle Way — and the students in these encounters are primarily laypeople: mothers and professionals, college students and car mechanics. Cave of Tigers shows that Zen is alive and well here in America at the turn of the twenty-first century, that it is accessible to us, and that it is completely relevant to the ways in which we live our lives.

"A unique presentation of Zen by a unique teacher — a fascinating perspective on the teacher-student relationship that rests at the heart of Zen training." Philip Kapleau Roshi, author of The Three Pillars of Zen