Zen:  A good vehicle, but a bad destination
358555
Before I recommend this book, let me be blunt about its limitations.  I don't recognize much philosophical weight in the old Eastern schools of Confucianism, Taoism, and Zen (although Neo-Confucianism is quite a bit more substantial).  These traditions of parables and riddles are aesthetically pleasing and valuable to a certain extent, but modern Western thought completely overpowers them.  Anyone who understands the outlines of Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason," for example, necessarily understands where Zen tries to lead us and, simultaneously, that the goal is unattainable.  So while I am deeply skeptical of the truth that Zen aims for, I do believe that Zen can be useful psychologically as a vehicle for understanding, accepting, and honoring truths that emerge from other lines of inquiry.

And that's the capacity in which Zen and the Art of Poker is valuable.  It helps readers integrate the paramount virtues of discipline and patience into their game-concepts that you don't need to be a Buddhist monk to appreciate, but that you have to be a little like a Buddhist monk to live by.
4816583
This is where I'm coming from. The best book on applying Buddhism to modern and Western life:

The Wise Heart: A Guide to the Universal Teachings of Buddhist Psychology by Jack Kornfield

That's the best thing Jack Kornfield has ever written (i.e. don't bother buying his other works) and one of the best books for improving your life with Buddhist practice.

As far as "The Dude and the Zen Master" is concerned...

Maybe I'm not the intended audience for this book. There was very little about Zen Buddhism. I was hoping for a new perspective on the subject and I got a preachy book that tries to tenuously attach Buddhism to a character in a movie.

Jeff makes quite a bit of commentary that many times is a non sequitur. Although, some of the stories about the kindness of his father were quite helpful. Lloyd was a class act - at least from the eyes of his son.

And there were some things that I would call unskillful. Just because one may have achieved the equanimity where life shouldn't be taken so seriously (the whole put the clown nose on thing), doesn't mean others would understand the message. If one is trying to express their suffering or pain, only to have someone pop a clown nose on to illustrate how in the grand scheme of things their problem isn't that much of a problem is quite insulting.

Sure, a cancer survivor or a Zen Master would have quite a different view of a car breakdown than say someone whose biggest problem in life is to get to the mall to get in on the latest sale at Macy's, but that person whose "little" issue doesn't match up will not be able to hear the message of the clown nose: it's a bit condescending.

A master would know how to give a skillful message.

Towards the end of the book they get a little preachy about environmentalism, consumerism, etc ....

Be very wary of anyone who professes to be a "master", "enlightened", or any other label that attributes a spiritual mastery.

It's a paradox - if they say they're "enlightened", then they are not. If they call themselves a "master", then they are not.

The folks who have the most to teach would never use such labels. You will find them - and put your BS detector on "Full" or to '11'.

And don't drink the Kool-Aid!
1207203
Zen.
It's a word that is greatly misunderstood, yet heard all too often in American pop culture.
Jane's Addiction sings about the "Pigs in Zen", and Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainance" is a modern classic. Pirsig, however, named his book after the even more classic "Zen in the Art of Archery."
Now it seems that the "Zen and the Art of" title is a cliche. I have another book on career guidance by Laurence G. Boldt titled "Zen and the Art of Making a Living." But wait, there's more! British rock band "Bush" had us all humming along to their hit "Everything Zen" a few years back, and I've even found a web page called "Zen and the Art of Web Design."
Golf superstar Greg Norman admits to practicing it, the "Star Wars" Jedi stuff was based on it, but what the heck is Zen anyway?
In "The Three Pillars of Zen", author Philip Kapleau succeeds at paring away all of the nonsense and provides the reader with an insight into what, exactly, zen really is: a meditative discipline with the ultimate aim being enlightenment--in the rinzai sect at least.
In its pages one will discover how to meditate (zazen), what really goes on during "sesshin" (a meditative retreat), and the actual experiences of several individuals at varying stages of their development.
To his credit, Kapleau is very careful to not put across any of his own opinions about either Buddhist philosophy or zen practice. Instead of intellectualizing and telling you what he thinks, he allows you to formulate your own opinion based on reading the words from the masters themselves, along with the experiences of other individuals. In this way the Kapleau is more narrator than author.
Personally, I found the section in which the actual "enlightenment" experiences of modern, everyday, people are related to be the most fascinating. These are not ancient sages, but people like you and I. People who have jobs, families, and other commitments. Yet each of them have experienced "kensho", enlightenment, to some degree; after hearing what they have to say, you will find yourself wondering if it's possible that you, too, might have the same experience.
It is important to note that Zen practice, as presented here, is somewhat non-theistic. That is, it doesn't really matter what one's religious backround is when it comes to practicing zen. You will not need to abandon any of your current beliefs about God or your particular religion.
Recommended
1419350
The standard LE version of this car has excellent handling, braking and interior quiet. Five stars!

But seat comfort is terrible, much worse than the previous edition. The fabric is rough, tight and padding is slight. The sidewall of the center console is rock-hard for you to bump your knee into while driving. You need a seat cushion and a sidewall bumper pad to make the front seat comfortable for long road trips, really.

The car is more showy and flashy than previous editions, especially in the grill- to match the imagination of some anonymous design "expert," but not quite obnoxious or pretentious. Camry buyers are not looking for that fluff.

Interior storage, an important, often overlooked part of car design, is good but could be better. Handily enough, the center console has two drink cup holders and a storage cubbin with a retracting door and a USB outlet inside. The flat surface on top of the USB outlet is not quite large enough to rest an iPhone on- it tips over. A small but important detail that was overlooked.

Storage compartments in the doors have round areas at the end but do not provide a way to separate items- smaller items just drop in and disappear. The glove compartment is one big, oddly-shaped cavern with one narrow shelf; it would benefit from two shelf surfaces so items are not just tossed into one messy pile. The two cupholders in the back seat middle armest are convenient.

The "technology" system is too complicated and not "smart." They removed one of the most useful features in a car, a clearly visible clock. It takes four steps to get the time. The backup camera starts with a long, rambling big print warning not to read it; the camera view easily blurs with water, and has poor video quality. Getting center console technology to do anything is more distracting than texting while driving.

There is LOTS of room in the trunk. If you get the right width trunk organizer, it will span across the back area of the trunk and leave plenty of room in the trunk forward for other items.

The gas tank holds more than the stated 17.0 gallons- one can squeeze in another gallon, at least. The fuel gauge stays stuck on "E" for about half an hour, then drops to measure consumption. I like that because on a road trip, with the overfill, one can drive all day, e.g. 550 miles, without having to stop for gas. This car does not get the EPA sticker mileage rating of 25city / 35highway (later revised to 25 /34); highway mileage is more like 30 or 31 mpg, not 34 or 35 mpg.

If the seating was merely equivalent to the 2011 edition this car would be 4.5 rounds to 5 stars.

Increase the mpg and tank size for a genuine 600-mile drive range between fill-ups, improve storage compartment usefulness and make the base version technology simpler and better quality and this would be even better.
972893
I have a great deal of respect for Tibetan Buddhism.  But I also am wary of someone who presents his path as the highest path one.  The author spends much time talking about the defects of other paths like Hinayana.

But I'm concerned that Tibetan Buddhism has backed itself into a corner because it has become a highly mentalized and ritualized form of discipline.  Almost to the point that it has no center.  The images and goal of Buddhism are the Buddha mind through cultivation of Bodhichitta (which in itself is not bad).  I have to agree with the author that Western religions have created large vacuums of being in their approach.  But Buddhism by itself is not a complete answer either.  It is too easy to turn your spiritual growth over to a person and a system with a one size fits all approach.

I kept feeling like I was being sold a system when reading this book. And also the text get's pretty wonky where you are given a load of terminology but it is not woven together in a way that it can really sink in.  A book that does a very good job of transmitting similar, if not better, [yogic] information is&nbsp;<a data-hook="product-link-linked" class="a-link-normal" href="/Kriya-Yoga/dp/8120831411/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8">Kriya Yoga</a>.

The book had great promise if it had stuck to it's title.  We do approach spirituality almost like a set of boyscout badges.  The trip to this or that mystical spot, the seminar with Geshe so and so, Karma yoga for a week here and there, and on it goes.  So while there was much more latitude to dissect what is potentially wrong with this approach, I do not feel that using the opportunity to keep selling his particular form of Buddhism is the best or even an honest antidote.  (You can only talk for so long about the nature of the mind and becoming a Bodhisattva while we are cutting down rainforests and nothing that is any established religion will stop our environmental decline.  And to keep selling your path over and over again gets old.)

Rather than sell his own path the author could have made an impassioned plea about orienting our spiritual practice away from both materialism and dualist forms of abstraction (e.g. Buddhism) and tied our actions directly back into prayers and actions towards the healing both for the planet and ourselves.  Any spiritual 'path' as a thing you do (including just about any religion you can name), and especially any spiritual path you promote as supreme, is a form of grasping.

The author was not able to transcend selling his own path and offer a global vision in it's place to fulfill the promise of the books title.
2514075
The key benefit of this presentation of Zen buddhism is that it presents a very, very low bar for beginning a Zen meditation practice. It breaks through all of the barriers of self-doubt that newbies have when approaching something like Zen that seems 'foreign' to their current skill set. After some of the basics about how to carry out Zen meditation, the book devolves in a rather scattered presentation of Zen in context (comparisons with other religious mindsets) that you may or may not find helpful. Enjoy! -Ryan Mease
1068853
Over all I like the car, however there are few things that really bug me about this car. The on-board Navigation is one of the reason I bought this car and it is terrible! The logic is very poor and I will not buy another Nissan if they have not fix this issue. They have a SD card  for the Nav that looses its connection all of the time.
I had a protable Garmin GPS and it works great and if they use the Garmin logic it would be a great fix.
I also am having a problem with the Air conditioning not working correctly with only 109k. I will be looking at Toyota and Honda for my next car.
3237406
I have used this GPS enough now to understand it's capabilities and shortcomings. I have recently completed a 2100 Mile trip to south Florida.
The GPS works well on some intersections and gives clear directions as to the lane to be in, and if you have a turn approaching. However on some complex interchanges it falls strangely silent offering no guidance as to the lane to be in or the approaching turn. The majority of the issues that I have experienced are on south Florida toll roads.
This problem is severe and can cause you to miss a turn due to being in the incorrect lane.

I think I'm better off having this GPS rater than relying on my smart phone for navigation, however the Garmin needs some serious improvement.
FYI: I updated the maps and software prior to the Florida trip, it was updated  6-28-14.

I hope it will get better in the future.
2581827
I've used the Garmin Nuvi 1350 GPS for a month, including a road trip through the west coast US and Canada.

Pros:
- GPS works well most of the time - I found it easy to follow with clear voice annunciation of upcoming turns. The GPS did "get lost" when in downtown areas with high buildings.

- A cool feature allows you to display the speed limit beside your actual speed. I found this very accurate throughout California, Oregon and Washington states, but doesn't work for Canadian roads.

- Garmin phone support is good and they worked with me to solve several problems with their update software

Cons:
- Updating the unit's maps is a hassle. First, you need to buy a USB-miniUSB cable specifically for data. To get the current maps and device software you must download a proprietary Garmin Communicator Plugin to your computer. The plugin is problematic on Apple Mac computers - I experienced this and Garmin's support rep admitted this fact. After at least an hour on the phone with Garmin support I finally had to revert to Windows XP and go through a cumbersome process to get the updates downloaded, which took another hour.

- The unit works entirely by touch screen, but doesn't respond well to finger touches - often not responding, or responds as though I had touched something else near to where I touched. I found it worked best if I touched the screen only with a hard object like a pen.

- Their search and points-of-interest references are woefully out of date. For example, when searching for fuel stations it listed numerous locations that have been CLOSED FOR OVER A DECADE. I also found their business search database to be very limited, usually showing the "spinning hourglass" for several minutes before I gave up.

- The unit had several intermittent software bugs, like: toggling between full color maps and one color maps at random; mysteriously rebooting itself while driving; and occasionally telling me to take a meandering and time-consuming route when there were much more direct and safer routes available.

- The in-vehicle power cord plug makes a high-pitched squeal. I tried exchanging it twice and they all made the same noise. My car is quiet inside so I found this bothersome.

- Battery life is short (less than three hours) when not plugged into a power source if you want to use it on a bicycle or on foot.

- The display is almost impossible to read in direct sunlight.
2375411
ZEN MIND, BEGINNER'S MIND : Informal talks on Zen Meditation and practice by Shunryu Suzuki.  Edited by Trudy Dixon, with a Preface by Huston Smith and an Introduction by Richard Baker.  138 pp.  New York and Tokyo : Weatherhill, 1970 and Reprinted.
Some years ago I undertook a fairly extensive program of reading in Indian, Chinese, and Japanese Buddhism and in Zen.  Most of my Zen  books have since disappeared.  Only the choicest remain, among which is  Shunryu Suzuki's 'Zen Mind Beginner's Mind.'
Buddhism may be said to have begun with the enlightement of the Buddha. Many centuries later, however, when Buddhism entered China, an incredibly elaborate and complex superstructure of Indian scholastic thought had grown up around the Buddha's original insight.  The  Chinese, with their basically down-to-earth and common sense attitude, had little use for Indian over-elaboration and set about ridding Buddhism of it.
The Chinese, as Lin Yutang says, believe in a reasonable use of  reason, and not in reason's excesses.  The end product of their effort to  rid Buddhist thought of its heavy freight of scholasticism, and to shift the emphasis from theory back to the practical by centering Buddhism once again in the enlightenment experience, became what the Chinese know as Ch'an and the Japanese as Zen.
As Shunryu Suzuki himself pointed out, when freed of unnecessary theory and speculation, Buddhism as Zen becomes something that is basically "quite simple" (page 64).  Its essence was brilliantly captured in the thirty-one verses of Third Patriarch Seng-ts'an's 'Hsin-hsin-ming,' the very first Zen treatise in verse.  This is a beautiful text that  deserves to be far better known, and an easily accessible translation will be found in D. T. Suzuki's 'Manual of Zen Budhism' ('On Believing  in Mind,' pages 76-82).
The first verse of the original Chinese may be read as follows, with oblique marks to indicate line breaks:
"To realize the Way is not difficult / If you'd only stop choosing; / Just let go of all of your hate, and love, / And everything will be brilliantly clear" (my transl).
This statement may gain in meaning if we set it alongside an  observation made by the great Zen Master Dogen (1200-1253), founder of the Japanese Soto sect of Zen Buddhism and one of the most brilliant philosophical minds Buddhism has ever produced, who wrote in 'Genjo Koan,' the third chapter of his 'Shobogenzo' :
"Conveying the self to the myriad things to authenticate them is delusion; the myriad things advancing to authenticate the self is enlightenment" (Tr., F. H. Cook, 'Sounds of Valley Streams,' page 66).
Suzuki Shunryu, who as a member of the Soto school was a direct  spiritual descendant of Dogen, would certainly have understood this.  In fact, so far as I can see, the idea expressed by both Seng-ts'an  and Dogen Zenji is at the very center of his book.
'Zen Mind Beginner's Mind' is a golden book that may be heartily recommended to all open-minded readers.  In it they will find a  Buddhism freed of all scholastic superfluities and unnecessary  elaboration, and one that returns us to what the Buddha was really  about.
4025883
There is a lot of good and a lot of bad to this device. I don't have time to list them all, so I'll try to hit the highlights.

On the good side, the GPS works well, and the live traffic through your cell phone is far better than the old style with the antenna in the power cable.

On the bad side, where do I begin? First, to enter your destination, you have to select Near Me of Whole Map. Well, how near is Near Me? I still haven't figured that out, and if you select the wrong one, you waste a full minute before you realize it. Second, entering the address the way you write it (number, street, city, state) sounds practical, but is very time consuming. The old way in reverse worked FAR better. And the old way recognized your state and gave you options you city options you used in the past, recognized cities and gave street options, recognized streets and gave you the street numbers you used in the past. This was extremely quick. The new method requires typing in almost the entire address before it recognizes anything. And now, about 30-40% of the time, the new software wants a different city name than the actual address. It often expects you to enter a city name that is some obscure name that does not appear an any map--paper or digital. So the new software for entering addresses is an enormous fail.

The live traffic requires a smart phone connection. It is never clear whether you are connected or not until you tap several commands on your phone, which is even further time consuming (and dangerous if you're already driving). And I believe that it uses far more data than they sat, though I can't prove that. TomTom has now come up with some additional feature where my phone demands that I sign in to my TomTom account while I am driving--very dangerous and user-hostile on multiple levels. This new feature title implies that you can enter destinations off-line ahead of time and use addresses already in your phone, which would be really useful, but I'll never know because it only offers it to me while I am driving.

Free lifetime maps is a great thing, but this, too, comes with problems. First, you have to get all of North America. I will never drive in Mexico and probably not in Canada, but they are in my GPS taking up lots of valuable memory. I only have 32 GB free, and if I remember correctly, the capacity is around 600 GB. Before the update I did today it had somewhere around 80 GB free, so I expect the next update to max out the memory. I don't know how it will deal with that. Will it explode? Finally, connecting it for the map updates is very problematic. Today I had to call TomTom support. The first guy knew the product well but couldn't help me and the phone connection cut off. Hmm... I called back and the second guy was more knowledgeable. THIS DEVICE IS INCOMPATINLE WITH MICROSOFT SURFACE PRO. I loaded the software onto a different computer, and three hours later I had my update installed. The acknowledge that their map update system is very inefficient.

I bought this device because my last two TomToms were great before they eventually bit the dust. If I lost this Go500  device tomorrow, there is no way I would buy another.
3462509
This is a fast GPS; the display doesn't jerk or flicker, it just scrolls smoothly as you travel.  It has good, high speed routing features, and the 3D display is usable. It is slim and pretty, easy to mount and unmount (clever magnetic attachment), and can run on its own batteries after charging a bit in the mount. The car icons... waste of time and programming. Too big and clunky. Speech recognition? Well, not my speech, anyway, though it recognizes my lady's voice most of the time. I can't get it to do anything - I have a low tenor voice, more or less, and speak clear east coast English (by which I do *not* mean "new joisey"!) The things that are missing are missing on most GPS's these days, such as satellite constellation display, signal strength displays, solar and lunar positions, various useful status such as that. My older Garmin has all of those things, and I really miss them with this unit. But, in the end, this is a consumer device and I'm probably far in the minority there -- as a get-you-there GPS, this thing is primo, and you can hardly go wrong choosing it.
2065402
I owned a Zen vision M before this one (and loved it) and was looking to upgrade to a newer model. The Zen X-fi was a total rip. It's features make it worthless. It goes into standby mode when shutting down so that it can power up quickly. Standby mode drains the battery almost as fast as having the player powered up. After two days of being "powered off" with a full charge the battery is dead because the thing was in standby mode the entire time. I thaught that I has a bad battery and was going to send it in for warrenty. I found out it was not defective it was just a bad product and sending it in would only cost me more money in shipping charges. The firmeware also is bad it locks up on numerious diffrent occasions and you have to use the reset button. Their support page is full of people whos players crashed or locked up and could not recover usign the reset button. Don't waste your money here.
179081
For the most part, I like this product.  It works well for connecting to your television and stereo while keeping your Zen in an upright position.  The only problem I've found, like many others, is the fact that it's nearly impossible to use this product if you want to keep your Zen protected with a case.  For me, it's worth taking it out of the case because I don't carry it around with me all the time.
4579724
I am generally pleased with the performance and speed, especially at start-up.  It is nearly as fast as it was advertised.  However, there are several downfalls to this product:
(1) Opening the lid is rather difficult due to the very small lip available for finger-lifting.
(2) The touch pad mouse is overly sensitive, requiring a lot of "chasing and erasing" time to correct pop-ups, etc created by an inadvertent touch of the finger.
(3) The battery life - as received fresh from the supplier - was barely 2:30 hrs - not what the adverts said...
(4) The hard drive does make a whooshing sound - not too annoying, but always there in the background none the less.
(5) There was some sort of incompatibility of the installed Windows 7 with the Outlook 2010 I was already using - and when I transferred my Outlook 2010 to this ASUS, Internet Explorer would not work normally, to the point that I was forced to downloading Mozilla Firefox as my default browser.  The Windows 7 and Outlook 2010 (with Explorer) combination worked fine without any problems for over 2 years on my former laptop.
(6) The Intel Core i7 processor is satisfactory and seems to perform as expected.  My former laptop, a Sony VAIO VPCX11S1E had finally failed me because of the single Intel processor it had.
(7) Finally, despite the fact that the order originated from Europe, the product was shipped with a US type plug, requiring a bulky plug-adapter to be used, whenever the laptop is now plugged in.
2649888
This watch has a great feature set and performs as advertised in nearly every respect, but the poor implementation of two key functions hampers its overall performance.

First the good: Great "tactical"-style looks; plenty of useful GPS, timekeeping and other data at hand -- including sunrises; sunsets; moonrises and moonsets -- and tide data. The main timekeeping screen is very well designed with large numbers and other information. A cycling outer ring of notches enables you to track the passage of seconds at a glance, the way you would with an analogue sweep hand. Wears comfortably but it is a very large watch, the kind that can make it difficult to get in and out of your winter coat. I also like that it has a vibrate alarm, which means no need for an electronic chirp if you don't want one.

Now the bad: I wanted a GPS watch to track the routes, times, paces and other data for walks and bike rides. The Tactix does so fine when it finds its satellite signal, but it can take 10 minutes, 15 minutes or longer to actually lock on. This means that if you start the GPS when you walk out the door, the time it spends hunting for a signal means it may not be recording that early portion of your walk or ride. If you want accurate data about your route and pace, which is the whole purpose of spending the money for this kind of watch, that delay in finding a GPS signal undercuts the whole point, and you wind up guesstimating instead of measuring.

Compounding this problem is that the watch's software automatically resumes your last track when you start the GPS. Let's say you went for a walk on Monday, came home, stopped the GPS and recorded your distance and pace, etc. When you start the GPS for your walk on Tuesday, it begins adding your distance and pace to the previous track. You can stop and clear tracks between the times you use the watch, but not everyone will think of that every time. The default mode should clear track data when a user opts to stop the GPS.

The GPS signal lag might not be a big deal if you plan to take this watch on multi-day hikes or you're most interested in its navigation features, which include a compass and the ability to find waypoints or track back to your starting point. But if you're considering using it as an everyday companion for running, for example, another dedicated fitness watch or device would probably work better.
3525990
A very Zen-like presentation about what is really important and what is not. And who to trust and who not to trust. Buyer beware.