A Path With Heart

A Path With Heart: A guide through the perils and promises of spiritual life by Jack Kornfield.

I picked this up because Daniel Ingram made positive mention of it in his interesting Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha.  I'm on a kick to read a wide variety of buddhist and meditation literature recently, and since Kornfield is one of the pillars of Western Buddhism and co-founders of IMS, I figured I should give this one a shot.

The right adjective to describe this book is undoubtedly "wise".  For some reason that has become a bit of a strange term in our culture.  Smart. Efficient. Creative. Powerful. Maybe even Mindful, these days.  These are terms we seem more comfortable with.  But Wisdom?  The depth of experience and nuanced integration of many perspectives for which there is no substitute and no shortcut?  Dude, come on, I've got a 10am here.  Wisdom sounds to us like some cockamamie Greek idea.  Something from the vapid hippy past of the self-help genre, from before it was colonized by the 7 most highly effective colored parachutes you need to find your cheese.

Kornfield is unapologetically wise though, which does make this book read like a self-help manual.  It's filled with poems and aphorisms and stories drawn from his own life and the lives of other spiritual voyagers from many traditions (noumenauts?).  It aims to inspire you to start down a spiritual path, or to continue ever-deeper down one you've already embarked on.  Generally, I quite enjoyed all these inspirational aspects, though they do serve to make the book a bit long and sometimes repetitive.  I guess it just feels means to edit wisdom with ruthless red ink.

This means that the book is not really a good introductory guide to meditation per se.  He's not really focused on teaching you to meditate.  He does provide a number of different meditations that deal with loving-kindness, forgiveness, the separate compartments we create in our lives, etc ...  But these are really just meant to be food for thought to get us to reflect more deeply on these topics.  He basically presumes either that you already meditate or that his words will inspire you to go to a class and get some basic instruction.

Kornfield is really more focused on why we meditate than how.  What is it that we're looking to get out of mindfulness?  How do we integrate what we learn by sitting with our eyes closed into our daily lives?  How can we make sure that our technical development as meditators leads us down a path with heart, one that connects us to the world with a sense of sacredness.  All of his 'spiritual perils' crop up when our path (inevitably, in his view, but hopefully temporarily) loses this heartfelt orientation.  In fact, one of the nicest aspects of the book is the glimpse we get of the bumps along his own meditative path.  Jack Kornfield has lost his way many times on the path towards wisdom.  He speaks convincingly of the many cycles of deepening self-examination that constitute his vision of the spiritual life.  At its core, the book can be judged right from its cover; it is dedicated to admiring that great flower of the self-help genre -- walking the path is the destination