Zen and the psychology of transformation

Most Zen masters refuse to discuss the discipline or explain it. Hubert Benoit takes the opposite, and for intellectually-inclined Westerners, the more accessible path, and discusses Zen in exhaustive detail in terms of psychology and philosophy--especially phenomenology and existentialism. Benoit writes at an extremely high level of abstraction (something quite alien to traditional Zen, which deals mainly in parables) but any experienced meditator will concur that practically every word Benoit writes rings with utter truth and fidelity to the workings of consciousness. He is clearly a man who has absorbed the Zen teachings and then examined the workings of his own mind with unfailing rigor and perceptiveness; he has taken those findings and translated them into language with a care and accuracy that nobody else, to my knowledge, has ever matched. The results are utterly profound.