FINDING YOUR BUDDHA SMILE
Order from Sumeru Publications

Support independent booksellers. Purchase from ABA member stores.

Now also available as an e-book from your favorite online bookseller.

Drawing on ancient myth, on Zen koans, on stories, and on his own over fifty years of formal Zen practice and more than ten years of active Zen teaching, Roshi Rafe Martin reveals the life of the Buddha as our own actual life. Using his skills as an award-winning author and storyteller, he organizes the life of the Buddha into five archetypal chapters – Birth, Leaving Home, Enlightenment, Teaching, and Death and reveals how, at every point, the historic/legendary/mythic life of the Buddha is our own lived life. The end result is transformative, helping us to potentially live each day more consciously, skillfully, and gratefully – whatever comes.

"Finding Your Buddha Smile, reveals Zen to be intimate and homelike. With it, Rafe Martin opens his heart and reveals the intricacies of a Way that has nourished many, including me. If you want a taste of that intimate Way, here it is, in this wonderful book.”

—James Ishmael Ford, Roshi, author of Zen at the End of Religion: An Introduction for the Curious, the Skeptical, and the Spiritual but Not Religious.

"This wonderful book should not be read by those who wish to remain blissfully ignorant. Like the old Masters themselves, Roshi Martin uses Zen koans to “knock out the wedges and pull out the stops” (that hold together our illusory small self) enabling readers to become truly intimate with what these stories are really about. Drawing on a deep awareness of literature ranging from the words of the Buddha and Chao-chou to those of Blake, Saint Exupery, Bob Dylan, and Leonard Cohen he breathes new life into the words of ancients. Bows.”

—Taigen Henderson, Roshi, Toronto Zen Centre

• Finding Your Buddha Smile
  Finding Your Buddha Smile
  A Zen Life of Buddha
  A Zen Life of Bodhisattvas
  Awakening to Zen
  Endless Path
  Straight to The Heart of Zen
  Before Buddha Was Buddha

reviews . . .

"In this delightful yet serious book, Roshi Rafe Martin presents us with a treasure trove of Zen. His collection of stories, koans and commentaries gives us an intimate view of true Zen practice, the kind that can only come from someone with his deep experience of training and also—and this is what makes it so delightful—understanding of storytelling. You will want to savor this book. I did, with a Smile." Sunyana Graef Roshi, Dharma Heir of Roshi Philip Kapleau and Abbot of Vermont Zen Center

“These richly textured Dharma talks probing the intimate teaching of the koans are great. (I find that I keep wanting to use the word ‘rich’ repeatedly.) I encourage mature practitioners engaged in koan study to read them.” Hogen Bays, Roshi, Co Abbot, Great Vow Zen Monastery

I thought I’d skim the book and come up with something, but it was impossible. Instead I read every word with great appreciation! So here’s my blurb: “Rafe Martin’s smile pervades this book. Its intimate and loving regard simultaneously embraces the ancient realized teachers of the past 2,500 years and contemporary practitioners of the Way. Rafe’s compassionate insights into the teachings are a salutary corrective to misunderstandings of the Zen Buddhist path as pessimistic, forbidding, or grim. His delightful sense of humor permeates the Zen koans and reveals them to be personal and engaging—pointers for living life amidst one’s challenges and burdens, not apart from them. Emphasizing lived experience, rather than theoretical or conceptual understanding, he invites us to have a cup of tea with Bodhidharma, Tokusan, Joshu, Chosha—and with William Blake, Seamus Heaney, Wallace Stevens, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Peter Matthiessen. No one can read this warm-hearted, illuminating presentation without feeling a smile coming from within and manifesting outwardly—giving it all away.” Shinge Roko Sherry Chayat Roshi, Abbot, Zen Center of Syracuse; Retired Abbot, Zen Studies Society.