What We’re Reading

6 Myths We Live By and How to Overcome Them
by Karuna Cayton
Wisdom Publications, 2025, 200 pp., $19.95, paper

In 6 Myths We Live By, Buddhist psychotherapist and educator Karuna Cayton identifies the unconscious beliefs that bind us to dukkha, or suffering. Drawing on Western psychology, decades of clinical experience, and Buddhist practice, he shows how myths about control, happiness, and identity fuel our dissatisfaction with life and the world. With wit and clarity, Cayton offers methods for dismantling unhelpful mental habits and cultivating personal well-being. This book bridges Buddhist insight and modern psychology in an accessible way for contemporary readers.

Korean Temple Cooking: Lessons on Life and Buddhism, with Recipes, the Life and Work of Jeongkwan Snim
by Hoo Nam Seelmann, photography by Véronique Hoegger
Hardie Publishing, 2025, 448 pp., $45.00, hardcover

Journalist and author Hoo Nam Seelmann follows South Korean Seon nun and cook Jeongkwan to her small mountain temple, where food, landscape, and practice are inseparable. Scenes of picking bitter oranges, tending gardens, and feeding visitors from around the world show how temple cuisine grows from fermentation, patience, and attention to nature. Lyrical descriptions reveal Korean temple food as a form of meditation that links body, community, and the Buddhist path. “Food moves people,” she writes, “it changes them.”

Borobudur: Masterpiece in Stone
by John N. Miksic, photographs by Marcello and Anita Tranchini
Tuttle Publishing, 2025, 176 pp., $24.99, paper

For anyone curious about the 9th-century ruins of Borobudur—the world’s largest Buddhist monument—John N. Miksic’s Borobudur: Masterpiece in Stone is the most comprehensive guide available. A leading archaeologist of Southeast Asia, Miksic provides a straightforward and grounded historical narrative with extraordinary visual documentation. The volume’s maps, architectural illustrations, and photographs trace the monument’s design, symbolism, and restoration in detail. A visual study and an introduction to Javanese Buddhist culture, this book brings Borobudur to life before your eyes.

SCHOLAR’S CORNER

The Secret World of Shugendō: Sacred Mountains and the Search for Meaning in Post-Disaster Japan
by Shayne A. P. Dahl
University of North Carolina Press, 2025, 268 pp., $34.95, paper

Shayne Dahl, an assistant professor at the University of Calgary, offers a glimpse into Japan’s esoteric mountain tradition of ascetic practice and ritual power in The Secret World of Shugendō. Utilizing rare textual sources and applying years of fieldwork, Dahl traces how Shugendō practitioners (Jp.: yamabushi) combine Buddhist, Shinto, and Daoist elements into their spiritual quest. The book also explores secret initiations, weekend mountain pilgrimages, Buddhist mummies, and the veneration of spirits through ritual performances that bridge worlds. This book positions Shugendō in its central place in the history of Japanese religion and ritual practice.

WHAT WE’RE REREADING

The Empty Mirror: Experiences in a Japanese Zen Monastery
by Janwillem van de Wetering

First published in 1973, The Empty Mirror is an often-forgotten classic of Zen literature. Describing his time in a Kyoto monastery in the late 1950s, Janwillem van de Wetering (1931–2008) captures the rigor and ridiculousness of novice training and the bewildering beauty of cross-cultural encounter. Though not a strictly factual memoir—he later admitted shaping events to spin a good yarn—the book remains an honest reflection of confronting ego, habits, discipline, and silence. Van de Wetering helped introduce Zen to a generation of readers, reminding us, as his teacher says early on, that “enlightenment is a joke,” and that absurdity can be a gateway to awakening. Free versions are available online.