I finished Red Pine’s The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma, a very short book. Of the four writings included, only one, Outline of Practice, is reliably the work of Bodhidharma; he didn’t write very much. This short work in less than 3 full book pages provides the core of Zen in four steps of practice, none of which sound very appealing or exciting. I provide them here because they were of help.

1. Suffer injustice.
2. Adapt to conditions
3. Seek nothing
4. Practice the Dharma

The following are excerpts and paraphrases of the actual text.

Accepting the injustice in one’s life and others is based on accepting that “what one is” is what one has been. Accept that with an open heart and without complaint.

A Turkish Muslim author’s book, The Atlas of Creation, sent to French schools, in sort of a mass mailing campaign prompted an outcry from WoodMoor Village Zendo in an article titled Turkish Creationist Book.

I agree with the repugnance of religious cosmogony as a substitute for science. I also think this issue is not easily brushed aside as yet another example of ignorant, arrogant “fundamentalists.”

The larger dynamic in society as a whole is a search for ethical values in a world bent on destroying the foundations they have traditionally been built on. It is not science, per se, that is the culprit, but a groundswell of awareness that the older mythologies just don’t cut it very well in the modern world. If you are sick, would you take a pill or go to a scientific doctor, or to a a minister in hopes that the evil spirits causing your cold could be dispelled? No answer is necessary. Prayer as a medical device has been relegated even by religionists to the narrow niche of the final resort when everything else has failed.