Book review: “La via dello zen”

By Alan W. Watts

It was my time to know a bit more about Zen Buddhism. Why? Because it is part of Human culture. So I took Alan Watts’ book being him one of the maximum expert in trying to explain Oriental thinking to Occidental people.
It is an hard goal because the roots of Oriental thinking are a lot different from the Occidental ones. What the book makes me discovering is how wrong was my even vague idea of the Zen Buddhism. It is not a religion, it is not a philosophy, it is something our culture does not have. Zen is viewed as a “Way of liberation”. It was incredible how superficial and ridiculous was my understanding of Zen, just a “stamp collection” of cliche, while its real meaning is far away from what I could guess. Important was reading also about the historical background of the Zen Buddhism, coming back to Indian Thaoism, related to Confucianism too, and then to Buddhism until evolving in the Zen form. Definitely the most important takeaway for me is that Zen is for everybody, it’s not outside our daily life, you don’t need to be like a monk sitting in silence all day long. Anyhow it’s hard explaing in few word even the little I understood reading such a book, absolutely worth to be investigated by everybody.
Enjoy!