A hundred old koans. This book invites you to meet them the way you'd meet a stranger on the road ? with a jab, a laugh, a craving for lunch.
The author doesn't explain the koans; scholars have done that, by the cartload. He answers them ? bluntly, in the present tense, from wherever he happens to be. A monk asks whether a dog has Buddha-nature, and the neighbor's dog just barks. The Buddha holds up a flower, and two and a half thousand years on, it's still holding up.
This is Zen without the incense: earthy, funny, unguarded. Not a path laid out for you to follow, but one man treading it out loud, stumbling as he goes. If you're with him, you stumble together.
The finger is not the moon ? but it's a good place to start.
