'Change your body; change your mind; change your life' - Author event at Preston Community Library

By Kazuaki Obazaki; numbered limited edition shikishi card print

From Preston Community Library

 

GUEST AUTHOR EVENT AT PRESTON COMMUNITY LIBRARY

Tuesday 17 September 2019 at 7.30pm

Please join us for an evening with Julian Daizan Skinner Roshi, the first Englishman to go to Japan and become a Zen master in the rigorous Rinzai tradition, and artist and meditator Lazz. They will be talking about and reading from their new book, Rough Waking.

Daizan is also the teacher of Samantha Warrington, Preston Community Library's yoga and meditation teacher.

Rough Waking is a project to raise funds for and awareness of people who are homeless or in prison, and to provide them with yoga and meditation, under the motto:

CHANGE YOUR BODY; CHANGE YOUR MIND; CHANGE YOUR LIFE

Prize-winning photographer and meditator, Lazz, uses words and images and an intimate knowledge of homelessness to illustrate his path through brokenness to creativity.

Inspired by Zen Master Shinzan’s joke that Zen life combines prison and homelessness, “Autumn in the monastery and other poems,” by Julian Daizan Skinner depicts pains and joys arising through his three decades in the Zen world.

Zen artist Kazuaki Okazaki who, after 18 years incarceration on death row was executed last summer, contributes a sequence of images depicting a spiritual journey from lostness and wandering, through the intense confinement of Zen training, and then onwards into a new homelessness – a vastly expanded realm of liberation and service.

The whole book underscores the Zen emphasis on direct confrontation with reality and how for all of us that alone leads to liberation

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