"Here we witness one of postwar Japan's best-known Rinzai masters making an energetic effort to interest his compatriots in Zen. Yamada Mumon uses Hakuin Zenji's famous doctrinal verse as a unifying strand for a series of brief essays that lay out in accessible terms some of his venerable tradition's basic teachings. Writing in the 1950s for lay readers in a country reeling from decades of imperial warfare, subsequent devastation, and defeat, he addresses sundry news events, family life, ethical dilemmas, and the like. The book, expertly translated, is also a hand extended across the seas and the intervening decades–of all his writings, the one he most wanted Westerners to see."
–Nelson Foster, author of Storehouse of Treasures