Zen rituals—such as chanting, bowing, lighting incense before
the Buddha statue—are ways of recognizing the sacredness in all
of life. A ritual is simply a deliberate and focused moment that
symbolizes the care with which we should be approaching all of
life, and practicing the Zen liturgy is a way of cultivating
this quality of attention in order to bring it to everything we
do. Here, John Daido Loori demystifies the details of the Zen
rituals and highlights their deeper meaning and purpose. We
humans are all creatures of ritual, he teaches, whether we
recognize it or not. Even if we don’t make ritual part of some
religious observance, we still fall into ritual behavior,
whether it be our daily grooming sequence or the way we have our
morning coffee and paper. We run through our personal rituals
unconsciously most of the time, but there is great value to
introducing meaningful symbolic rituals into our lives and to
performing them deliberately and mindfully—because the way we do
ritual affects the way we liv