Okay, I tried reading this several times in several different ways. At first, I expected it to be a critical study, a scholarly book. That totally didn’t work. Then I tried to read it like I read Thich Nhat Hanh. That totally didn’t work either. Then I tried to read it like I read a book of meditations.

Now I’ve given up. I feel like it would be a better book if it were honestly an anthology of stories, because for every couple of paragraphs of discussion there’s at least one story. But it’s a lot like the stories that priests tell during the sermon. They’re out of context, all mishmash together, like it’s all one great tradition and you can just pull from here and there.