Being Upright

This author does a fine job of describing how ancient lessons can be applied to the lives we lead today. Two passages, one describing temple politics and another about finding a gun, seem a bit self-indulgent at first, but in the end are recognized as tools to make the reader ponder and question the lessons. There are certainly other books that do deeper dives into Buddhism's precepts, but this book is an excellent starting place for those curious how to embody the Middle Way.

First, the good. It's mostly pretty clearly written, with only occasional excursions into obscurantism. Furthermore, a focus on the precepts makes for a more usefully-practical book than one that is more centred around the practice of zazen. Where I struggled with the book, though, was in the sense that Anderson is so stuck within the framework of traditional Zen, that he can't see beyond it to criticize it. The chapter on Right Speech seems particularly weak in this regard.