These essays and Dharma talks are meant to guide practitioners of Soto Zen meditation. The author is in the lineage of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, author of "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind," a classic among books of this type. As the enthusiastic blurbs show, Leighton's teaching is widely admired. He is "one of the West's most important Zen scholar-priests and one of our foremost exponents of bringing out into the world the insights we find on the meditation cushion."
The non-practitioner, who comes to the book cold, can read it as illustrating a remarkable cultural and religious event of our times: the Americanization of Buddhism. Though the title contains the name of Dogen, one of the crustiest and most impenetrable of Japanese thinkers, the book is as American as apple pie and Dogen is made to seem entirely at home in this setting. Many other Buddhist topics and personalities are here thoroughly naturalized into the contemporary American cultural matrix.
The central aim of Buddhism, according to Leighton, is "universal liberation": "One of the strongest and most synchronistic American interfaces with Buddhist perspectives is the ideal of freedom, of liberty and justice for all, enshrined in the Declaration of Independence." Dogen's view that all sentient beings without exception have Buddha nature is "a kind of Buddhist declaration of independence." Conversely, Leighton makes Thomas Jefferson sound like a Zen master by rewriting his dictum as follows: "The price of liberation is eternal vigilance."