John Tarrant

Books

Bring Me the Rhinoceros

How to do koans. A calling card about koans

Reviews of Bring Me the Rhinoceros And Other Zen Koans To Save Your Life

“John Tarrant is one of the most interesting minds in American Buddhism. He weaves his deep immersion in Buddhist practice, Western psychology, and the arts into a unique yet completely authentic story of the Zen life and its mysteries.”

Melvin McLeod, editor-in-chief, The Shambhala Sun

“You’ve never read a Zen book like this before. Having digested the traditional koan literature, which he has taught for many years, Zen teacher John Tarrant cheerfully goes beyond it. His koan re-tellings read like postmodern short fiction, complete with anti-heroic characters, visible scenery, and attitude. Rather than the usual Zen mystique that treats koans as arcane meditation objects, Tarrant discusses them as open secrets that actually matter for our lives here and now.”

Zoketsu Norman Fischer, poet and Zen priest; author of Sailing Home: Using the Wisdom of Homer’s Odyssey to Navigate Life’s Perils and Pitfalls

“Bring Me the Rhinoceros is one of the best books ever written about Zen.”

Stephen Mitchell, translator of Gilgamesh: A New English Version

“Here’s a book to crack the happiness code if ever there was one. Forget about self-improvement, five-point plans, and inspirational seminars that you can’t remember a word of a week later. Tarrant’s is the fix that fixes nothing because there is nothing to fix. Your life is a koan, a deep question whose answer you are already living—this is the true inspiration, and Tarrant delivers.”

Roger Housden, author of The Ten Poems series

“Every life is full of koans, and yet you can’t learn from a book how to understand them. You need someone to put you in the right frame of mind to see the puzzles and paradoxes of your experience. With intelligence, humor, and steady deep reflection, John Tarrant does this as no one has done it before. This book could take you to a different and important level of experience.”

Thomas Moore, author of Care of the Soul

“John Tarrant’s talent for telling these classic Zen tales transforms them magically into a song in which, as you read, the words disappear as the music continues to echo in your mind and make you happy. Mysteriously, like koans.”

Sylvia Boorstein, author of Pay Attention, For Goodness’ Sake

The Light Inside the Dark

Integrating west and east. Soul and Spirit. Dreams, myths, Zen

Reviews of The Light Inside The Dark

"Simply the best book that I have read in the past ten years. The Light Inside the Dark cuts through the many contemporary illusions about the journey which is a life and offers a compass that can guide us to our true home. I want to give it to everyone I know."

Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., author of Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories that Heal

"An exquisite book which welcomes you in its arms and carries your deepest longings and loves with the lyrical voice of a nightingale. This is one of the best guides yet to the breaking open of the human heart, to vulnerability, eternal spirit, and the mountains dancing."

Jack Kornfield, author of A Path with Heart

"Drawing on his experience as a psychotherapist, poet, and teacher of Zen Buddhism, John Tarrant weaves a rich tapestry of the contradictory and often paradoxical themes of existence. His insights on the soul's journey are unsparingly frank and oddly comforting."

Andrew Weil, M.D.

"John Tarrant offers us a way to gain access to the irrepressible seeds of hope which lie barren, yet ready to bloom, in fallow, and dark times. He does this by stretching the imagination of the Western mind to includefor soul's sakenot only its own stories of Greek gods and goddesses, the great fathers of the Hebrew Bible, and the redemption possible in Jesus's life, but also the great teachings of Zen Buddhist masters and the best spiritual exercises of the East."

Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D., author of Women Who Run with the Wolves, The Gift of Story, and The Faithful Gardener

"This book invites superlatives. It is an exquisite mapping of the Buddhist and totally beyond Buddhist path of liberation, done with the lightest of touches, with perfect grace and clarity and warmth of heart, in a way that makes it so human, and so compelling, that it shows this path, and the work/play of meditation, to be nothing less than life itself, the human condition, offering anyone and everyone the actualities, the shadows, the blossoms, and the boundless, ever-present possibilities of a life lived in awareness, with nothing holding."

Jon Kabat-Zinn, author of Wherever You Go, There You Are; co-author of Everyday Blessings: The Inner Work of Mindful Parenting