Bring Me the Rhinoceros: And Other Zen Koans to Bring You Joy

Bring Me the Rhinoceros is an unusual guide to happiness and a can opener for your thinking. For fifteen hundred years Zen koans have been passed down through generations of masters usually in private encounters between teacher and student. This book deftly retells fourteen traditional koans which are partly paradoxical questions dangerous to your beliefs and partly treasure boxes of ancient wisdom. Koans show that you dont have to impress people or change into an improved more polished version of yourself. Instead you can find happiness by unbuilding unmaking throwing overboard and generally subverting unhappiness. John Tarrant brings the heart of the koan tradition out into the open reminding us that the old wisdom remains as vital as ever a deep resource available to anyone in any place or time. Heres a book to crack the happiness code if ever there was one. Forget about self-improvement five-point plans and inspirational seminars that you cant remember a word of a week later. Tarrants is the fix that fixes nothing because there is nothing to fix. Your life is a koan a deep question whose answer you are already livingthis is the true inspiration and Tarrant delivers.Roger Housden author of the Ten Poems series Every life is full of koans and yet you cant learn from a book how to understand them. You need someone to put you in the right frame of mind to see the puzzles and paradoxes of your experience. With intelligence humor and steady deep reflection John Tarrant does this as no one has done it before. This book could take you to a different and important level of experience.Thomas Moore author of Care of the Soul and Dark Nights of the Soul Bring Me the Rhinoceros is one of the best books ever written about Zen. But it is more than that: it is a book of Zen pointing us to reality by its own fluent and witty example. John Tarrant has the rare ability to enter the minds of the ancient Zen masters as they do their amazing pirouettes upon the void and with a few vivid touches to illuminate our lives with their sayings.Stephen Mitchell author of Gilgamesh: A New English Version This books straightforward honesty clear writing and destabilizing insight have a profound effect. John Tarrant does indeed bring on the rhinoceros and a host of other powerful but invisible creatures ready to run us down when we refuse to acknowledge the fierce awkward and beautiful world we inhabitDavid Whyte author of Crossing the Unknown Sea John Tarrants talent for telling these classic Zen tales transforms them magically into a song in which as you read the words disappear as the music continues to echo in your mind and make you happy. Mysteriously like koans. Sylvia Boorstein author of Pay Attention for Goodness Sake