Andi Young has written a very useful guide to bowing in the Korean Zen tradition while also providing important support for her notion that bowing is a common human activity across cultures and religious traditions. Ms. Young begins the book with the story of how she came to Korean Zen bowing practice, beginning each day with 108 full bows, through a trip to Katmandu. She then moves to an accessible explanation of bowing in Buddhism and Zen in particular. In chapters 3 and 4 she opens the topic to include the significance and style of bowing in Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and other Eastern traditions.

Chapter 6, “Three Thousand Bows for a Question: Stories that Inspire,” is truly inspiring. Particularly powerful is the section, “Fourteen Days Around Dragon Mountain: A Contemporary Practice and Pilgrimage,” composed mostly of a letter Ms. Young received from an American monk in the Korean Zen tradition, Myong Haeng Sunim. Myong Haeng Sunim tells of three-month solo practice intensives where he bowed from one to three thousand times each day and of pilgrimage practice to bow around Dragon Mountain that took two weeks, making a full bow every three steps. He writes, “This is an extremely powerful practice, for you must surrender your dignity and humble yourself as you plant your face in the dirt, dead animals, and garbage on the road. Originally these ideas of dirty, clean, high, and low do not exist, and this kind of practice, while difficult at first, allows one to deeply digest this point” (p. 85).

As Ms. Young makes bowing personal, coming back to direct experience throughout, it seems contingent upon me, as a reviewer of her fine book, to do the same.

Frankly, bowing practice for me involved a many-year struggle. I began practicing Zen in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with Japanese Soto Zen monk Dainin Katagiri-roshi. After I received zazen instruction and started showing up to hear Katagiri-roshi’s talks, I ran into the body-blocking barrier of bowing. What was all this bowing about I wondered? Coming to Zen in the mid-70s, I thought of it as something free and irreverent like Jack Kerouac driving drunk and mostly naked across America.

"Bow is like a rock in your heart. You cannot remove it,” said Roshi.

Having been raised Catholic, and having had the aspiration between ages six and ten to be a Catholic priest, bowing made me feel guilty. The commandment, “Thou shalt not put false idols before me” was often before me in bowing. The Buddha statue on the altar fit my idea of an idol. Here I was bowing to it. Roshi would assure me that Buddha was not an idol. “Buddha has no fixed nature. Not outside you. In bowing, Buddha just bows to Buddha,” he said with patience.

Katagiri-roshi talked about bowing quite often. The standing bow was a favorite example of his. He taught the form of bowing as a choreographer. Palms together. Fingers about nose level. Forearms roughly parallel to the floor. Bending from the waist so far, but not too far. Gassho (bowing) was not a swoop. He modeled gassho beautifully with his every entrance and exit from the zendo. Now I imagine Roshi saying, “From a completely different angle, you have to look it."

Gassho was not about getting enlightenment by practicing correctly. “No cookies,” he would say. “When you gassho, just gassho. In the middle of ‘just gassho’ there was no subject and object. No separation.” Yes! I desperately wanted this “no separation."

Gassho was the essence of Katagiri-roshi’s “body practice.” The relationship between a Zen master and a disciple was based, he would say, on the disciple simply following the body of the master. The disciple imitated the master by attending carefully to the details of how the master lived in everyday life. “If you walk in the mist, your cloak gets wet,” was one of Roshi’s favorite adages.

So I tried to “just gassho” because I wanted desperately to be free from separation, from the constant chatter of my disparaging mind that would take turns with my grandiose mind. “To practice gassho is to flow like water,” Roshi said. “Subject and object drop off."

Unfortunately, the more I wanted to get rid of separation and the harder I tried to “just gassho,” the further I got from it. “I” seemed even more distinct and separate. And I felt so stiff. I knew it wasn’t right but hadn’t a clue what to do about it.

I felt even more alone in full bows. Roshi would sometimes tell an old Zen story—one of the dozen or so of the stories he repeated often—that helped. It went like this:

Obaku-zenji was performing a memorial service and doing many full bows. A monk came up and said, “You always say ‘Not seeking Buddha, not seeking Dharma, not seeking Sangha,’ so why do you bow?” Obaku-zenji said, “Not seeking Buddha, not seeking Dharma, not seeking Sangha-I always bow just like this.”

“I always bow just like this,” Roshi would repeat. I was intrigued by the seeming paradox in Obaku-zenji’s fully doing the practice not to get anything. No special favors from the Buddha. No special state of mind. Obaku-zenji did the practice just to do the practice. No cookies.

During one of our monthly meditation retreats (or sesshin, meaning “to gather the heartmind”) in the early ’80s, we did zazen much of the day, as usual. As the sitting came to a close I found myself in a very intensely “present” state. All the senses seemed wide open. The muffled pounding of the bass from a stereo in the house next door stood out distinctly, illuminated by silence. This seemed to blend with the smell of the incense and the pain in my left knee. Self-talk was suddenly almost completely gone. Only an occasional, “Gee, this is neat,” marked the open, intermingling field of the senses.

At the end of the sitting we rose to bow and chant. The floor was cold to the touch of my bare feet. Outside, a frozen Minnesota night was unfolding. The light in the zendo was dim as twenty students and Roshi began the service with three full bows. As I entered the first bow, all of my senses intensified as if to a body-shaking crescendo. Then “I” inexplicably dropped away and there was nothing. “I” returned to witness the mind reconfiguring the sense impressions into “things” as I rose from the bow.

It was distinctly not like being spaced out, not like arriving home from work with no memory of the drive. In returning to separation, I was really happy—and confused. Quiet seemed to filled the zendo. I was home and I didn’t know how I got there. I wanted to get up and bow to everything. Holy! Holy! Holy! The chant leader (doan) began the recitation, “Maka Hannya Haramitta Shingyo . . . oh . . . oh . . . .”

This was the title for The Heart Sutra in Sino-Japanese, an ancient style of chanting. This brief sutra is said to express the essence of Zen, that the nature of suffering is precisely freedom. There is nowhere to go and nothing to get that is apart from right here, right now. “Form is emptiness, emptiness is form,” the sutra says. “The Bodhisattva of Compassion,” the sutra said, “coursing deeply in wisdom beyond wisdom, looked at all things and saw that they were empty of inherent nature.” Of course! Of course! Bowing is also wide open!

The meaning and I danced for the first time. Compassion flows harmoniously with wisdom! Wisdom flows harmoniously with compassion! Tears of relief flowed. The sutra went on, “No eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind.” No fixed bowing. Indeed, I thought, the old buggers, the Buddhas and Ancestors, were not lying.

What had happened? The pivot of nothingness had spun me around. Separation touched no-separation and “I” disappeared for a moment. It was possible to do this practice like water flowing. It seemed in that moment that it was possible for “me” to do it. I swelled with confidence. I felt so separate. I knew that this was still not enlightenment.

Ms. Young’s book is a wonderful introduction this sacred art.