This religious/travel book is about the author’s experience of Zen practice and his “failure” to persevere in it. At the age of twenty-one, he began an association with the San Francisco Zen Center which lasted for twenty years. During that time he was ordained as a Zen priest after five years of study with Zentatsu Richard Baker Roshi who was Suzuki’s heir. After that he mainly lived outside the institution.

However, the Zen Master who seems to have meant most to Chadwick was Dainin Katagiri Roshi, who became sort of a Zen Uncle for him. Katagiri, who founded the Minnesota Zen Meditation Center, is often mentioned throughout the whole book. In fact, he emerges as a shining exemplar: a patient yet humble Zen Master who died at a rather early age, perhaps “forty years too soon.”

A second theme revolves around Chadwick’s marriage to Elin in Japan. They managed to rent a house next to a Zen temple—he to practice sitting and she to teach English. From that household they explored much of Japan in a journey that lasted four years before returning to North America.

Commenting on the meditation practice, the author remarks that “sitting zazen for hours a day may seem like a lot of nothing . . . but it is the Buddhist treasure hunt. The treasure is supposedly always right there (in the zendo) waiting for us to find it. Suzuki once said that we find our treasure by watching and waiting!”

As Zen literature, travel description and autobiography, this is a noteworthy book. David Chadwick certainly knows Zen from the inside, even if the “years of experience and training had gone to waste,” as Baker Roshi once said of him. But what a wonderful “failure” and a “happy fault” it presents to the readers! We might learn with the author that “endless failure could add up to a magnificent success.” As a former Abbot once told us, the important point is to avoid making the same mistake twice!