Quick Answer
The first book in English that told you how to sit, what would happen if you did, and what the teacher would say when you told him. A Nuremberg court reporter went to Japan, trained for thirteen years, and came back with a Japanese master's lectures, ten private interviews, eight enlightenment accounts and a medieval sermon, and the whole of American Zen practice grew from it. It is intense, confident, and certain that enlightenment is real and near. Sixty years on, the confidence needs qualifying and the instructions still work.
Key Takeaways
- Practice, not theory. The book's whole point and its historical importance.
- Yasutani's lectures are still the clearest beginner's instruction in zazen.
- The private interviews show what a Zen teacher actually does.
- Kensho is presented as attainable, which inspired a generation and worried the next.
- Bassui's sermon is the best thing in the book and the least read.
17 min read
What This Book Is
The Three Pillars of Zen: Teaching, Practice, and Enlightenment was published in 1965, compiled, edited and largely translated by Philip Kapleau, then twelve years into his training in Japan. A twenty-fifth anniversary edition in 1989 and a thirty-fifth in 2000 added material and a new afterword.
It is in three parts, matching the title. Teaching: the introductory lectures on zazen given by Yasutani Roshi to new students, and a selection of his commentary on the koan Mu. Practice: transcripts of Yasutani's private interviews with ten Western students, and the sermon and letters of the fourteenth-century master Bassui. Enlightenment: eight first-person accounts of kensho, from Japanese and Western practitioners, and a closing set of Zen texts.
Nothing like it had appeared in English. The Zen of D.T. Suzuki and Alan Watts was a philosophy and an aesthetic. This was a manual, with a living teacher's voice in it and the claim that the reader could do what the people in the last section had done.
The editions. The anniversary editions are the ones to buy. They add a preface on the book's reception, a section on the practice of Zen in daily life, and Kapleau's later reflections. The 1965 text was already the book the tradition remembers, and the later additions do not change it, but they place it.
Who Philip Kapleau Was
Philip Kapleau was born in New Haven in 1912, trained as a court reporter, and served as chief reporter at the Nuremberg trials in 1945 and 1946 and then at the Tokyo war crimes tribunal. What he heard in those courtrooms, by his own account, left him unable to make sense of the world, and in Tokyo he began attending D.T. Suzuki's lectures.
Suzuki's Zen was intellectual and did not help. In 1953 Kapleau returned to Japan to practise, first with Soen Nakagawa at Ryutakuji, then with Harada Sogaku at Hosshinji, then for years with Yasutani Hakuun, under whom he had his kensho in 1958. He was ordained and authorised to teach, and in 1966 founded the Rochester Zen Center in upstate New York, which he led until 1986.
He died in 2004. His other books, Zen: Dawn in the West and The Zen of Living and Dying, extended the work of this one, but this is the book that made him and made a movement.
Yasutani Roshi and the Lineage
The teacher whose voice dominates the book.
Hakuun Yasutani, 1885 to 1973, was ordained in the Soto school as a child, worked as a schoolteacher, and in his forties trained under Harada Sogaku, a Soto abbot who had studied Rinzai koan practice and combined the two. Yasutani received Harada's transmission in 1943, founded his own organisation, the Sanbo Kyodan, in 1954, and devoted himself to lay students, Japanese and foreign, in a way traditional monastic Zen did not.
The Harada-Yasutani line is the source of much of Western Zen. Kapleau, Robert Aitken, Taizan Maezumi and, through them, hundreds of teachers in America and Europe trace their practice to it. Its distinctive features, the combination of Soto sitting and Rinzai koans, the intensive sesshin, the expectation that lay students can and should attain kensho, are the features of this book.
The Three Pillars
The structure, and the claim it embodies.
Teaching, practice and enlightenment: Kapleau's title asserts that Zen has three inseparable elements, that one cannot have the third without the first two, and that the third is real. The book's order follows the order of a student's experience. First the teacher explains what to do. Then the student does it and brings the difficulties to the teacher. Then, if the student persists, something happens, and the third section shows what.
The structure was itself an argument against the Zen the West had received, which had teaching without practice and treated enlightenment as a literary idea. Kapleau's book insisted that the middle term was the whole point and that the third was its consequence.
The Introductory Lectures
The first section, and the part most readers use.
Yasutani gave a series of lectures to beginners at the start of each training period, and Kapleau translated them. They explain what Zen is and is not, what zazen does to the mind, the difference between the five kinds of Zen, the psychology of the practice in terms of the three aims, concentration, awakening and the realisation of the Way in daily life, and then the specifics: how to sit, how to breathe, what to do with the eyes and the hands, what to expect, and what to do about pain, drowsiness, distraction and the various illusory experiences called makyo.
The lectures are plain, warm and practical, and they remain among the clearest beginner's instructions in print. A reader who has never sat can begin from them. A reader who has sat for years will find that most of what they were taught came, at one or two removes, from here.
Posture, Breath and Counting
The technical core, given in detail.
Yasutani prescribes the full or half lotus if possible, alternatives if not, the spine straight, the chin drawn in, the hands in the cosmic mudra, the eyes lowered and open, the tongue at the palate. He explains why: the posture is not a preliminary to the practice but the practice itself, since a body settled in this way settles the mind that inhabits it.
He then gives the first exercise, counting the breath, from one to ten and back, out-breaths only, then in and out, then following the breath without counting. He is precise about what counts as losing the count and what to do when it happens, which is to start again without comment.
The instruction is the same one given in Zen centres across the world today, and this book is a large part of why.
The Koan Mu
The practice the book is most associated with.
A monk asked Zhaozhou whether a dog has Buddha nature. Zhaozhou said Mu. That is the first koan of the Gateless Gate, and Yasutani, following Harada, assigned it to students as their first and central practice: to sit with Mu, to become Mu, to hold the question with the whole body until the mind can go no further and breaks through.
Yasutani's commentary on Mu is included, and it is fierce. The student is to work on it with the intensity of a person whose head is on fire, to reject every intellectual answer, to bring it to every interview until the teacher accepts. The section on Mu is where the book's Rinzai inheritance shows and where its promise of kensho is most direct.
Shikantaza
The other practice, and the Soto inheritance.
Shikantaza, just sitting, is the practice of Dogen's school: sitting with no object, no koan, no counting, in alert and open attention, on the understanding that the sitting is itself enlightenment and not a means to it. Yasutani teaches it as the practice for those whose faith in their own Buddha nature is already firm, and as the practice to which koan work eventually leads.
His instructions are brief and his description of the state, a mind like a taut bowstring, is memorable. Readers from the Soto tradition have objected that shikantaza is not an advanced practice for those who have finished with koans but the whole of Zen from the first day, and that the book's ordering is Rinzai wearing Soto robes. The objection is fair and the book does not answer it.
The Private Interviews
The second section, and the book's most original contribution.
Dokusan is the private meeting between student and teacher, in which the student presents their practice and the teacher responds. It is traditionally secret. Yasutani, with the students' permission, allowed Kapleau to record and translate a series of interviews with ten Westerners, men and women, beginners and experienced, over the course of their training.
The transcripts show a teacher at work: adjusting posture, correcting misunderstandings, encouraging, refusing, redirecting, telling a student their experience is makyo and not kensho, telling another that they are close, dealing with a student's fear, a student's pride, a student's tears. The voice is direct and kind and it does not flatter.
Nothing like this had been published in English and very little has since. For a reader who wants to know what happens in the room, it is the only window.
One exchange from the interviews stays with most readers. A student reports a vivid experience, light, joy, a sense of unity, and asks whether it was kensho. Yasutani says it was not, that it was makyo, an illusory state produced by concentration, and that the student should note it and return to Mu. The student is deflated. Yasutani says that the experience is a sign of good practice and means nothing, and that the student should be neither pleased nor discouraged. That distinction, between a real opening and a beautiful side effect, and the teacher's flat refusal to let the student settle for the second, is what the interviews are for and what a book cannot otherwise teach.
Bassui
The second half of the practice section, and the book's hidden treasure.
Bassui Tokusho, 1327 to 1387, was a Rinzai master of intense practice and plain speech, and Kapleau translated his Dharma talk and a series of his letters to lay students. Bassui's method is a single question: Who is it that hears? Not the ear, not the mind, but the one who hears. He directs every student, a nun, a dying man, a samurai, a lay woman, to that question and refuses every other, and his letters are among the most direct instructions in the Zen literature.
The Bassui material is the part of the book least tied to the Harada-Yasutani lineage and least dated. Readers who find Yasutani's intensity too much and the enlightenment accounts too confident often find that Bassui is the master they were looking for.
The Enlightenment Accounts
The third section, and the reason the book was famous.
Eight people, Japanese and American, describe their kensho: what led to it, what happened, what followed. A Japanese executive. An American ex-businessman. A Japanese housewife. Kapleau himself, in a diary of his years of training. The accounts are specific, personal and various, and they share the shape the lectures predicted: intense sitting, mounting pressure, a breakthrough, and a teacher's confirmation.
The section did two things. It persuaded a generation of Western readers that enlightenment was not a metaphor and that ordinary people could reach it. And it set an expectation, of a dramatic and datable event, that later teachers have spent decades qualifying.
The Kensho Question
The book's central claim and the point where the tradition has moved.
Yasutani and Kapleau present kensho as the goal of practice, as attainable within a reasonable time by a committed lay student, as verifiable by a teacher, and as the beginning of real Zen rather than its end. The book is built to produce it.
Later Western Zen has grown wary. Teachers have seen students chase experiences, mistake side effects for openings, and treat kensho as an achievement rather than a beginning. The Soto tradition has always held that the sitting is the enlightenment and that seeking a breakthrough is the obstacle. And the accounts in the book, moving as they are, describe a particular lineage's expectation as if it were Zen itself.
The fair reading is that Kapleau was right that enlightenment is real and available, and that the book's confidence about its shape and timing belongs to its lineage and its moment.
The Sesshin
The intensive retreat, which the book describes and which it made standard.
A sesshin is a period of five to seven days of continuous zazen, from before dawn to late evening, with private interviews, formal meals, work periods and the teacher's talks, in silence. The book describes its structure, its psychology and its purpose, which is to build the pressure that ordinary daily sitting cannot.
Kapleau's Rochester sesshins, run on the model described here, set the pattern for Zen retreats across America, and a reader who has sat one anywhere will recognise the schedule.
What It Started
The book's afterlife, which is larger than the book.
It sold in the hundreds of thousands and has never gone out of print. It sent a generation of readers to Japan or to the handful of Zen centres then in America. It made the Harada-Yasutani line the dominant strand of Western Zen. It established the sesshin, the koan Mu, the dokusan and the expectation of kensho as the shape of practice for tens of thousands. And it set the template for the practice book, in which a living teacher's instructions and students' experiences replace the philosophy of an earlier generation.
Every Zen manual since has been written in its shadow, including the ones that disagree with it.
The Yasutani Controversy
A matter the book does not address and a reader should know.
In 1997 Brian Victoria's Zen at War documented the support that Japanese Zen institutions and teachers gave to Japanese militarism, and among the teachers was Yasutani, whose wartime writings included strident nationalism and, in a 1943 book, antisemitism. The revelations shocked the Western communities descended from him. The Sanbo Kyodan issued an apology; his American heirs published statements of acknowledgement and repudiation.
The Three Pillars was written thirty years before the revelations and does not mention them. The practice instructions are unaffected. The question of what it means that a teacher who could speak as Yasutani speaks in these pages could also write what he wrote in 1943 is a real one, and the tradition has not finished with it. A reader should hold the book and the history together, as the tradition now does.
Beside Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind
The comparison every reader makes, since Shunryu Suzuki's book, published five years later, is the other founding text of American Zen.
Kapleau's book is a manual: precise, intense, goal-directed, built to produce kensho. Suzuki's is a set of talks: gentle, paradoxical, Soto to the core, insisting that there is nothing to attain and that beginner's mind is the goal. Kapleau's Zen is a mountain to climb; Suzuki's is a place you are already standing.
Most practitioners eventually need both. Kapleau tells you how to sit and why it is worth the effort; Suzuki tells you what the effort was for. A reader who has only one will have half a picture, and the halves are different enough that the tradition has argued about which is Zen for sixty years.
The Objections
Four, and they are the ones the tradition itself has raised.
One lineage as Zen. The Harada-Yasutani method is presented as the practice, and its particular combination of koan and shikantaza, its intensity and its expectations, are not universal.
The kensho emphasis. The book's confidence about enlightenment as a datable event has produced as much seeking as awakening.
Yasutani. The teacher's wartime record is not in the book and sits uneasily beside it.
The tone. The certainty that made it inspiring in 1965 can read as pressure now, and gentler books have taken some of its place.
Who Should Read It
Read it if you want to sit and have only read about sitting. The lectures will get you onto the cushion correctly.
Read it if you practise in any Western Zen lineage and want to know where your form came from.
Read it for the interviews and for Bassui, which are the parts nothing else supplies.
Read Suzuki beside it, and hold the enlightenment accounts lightly, as one lineage's report rather than the whole of what practice is.
The book's lasting achievement is a change of category. Before it, Zen in the West was something to understand; after it, Zen was something to do, and the doing had a posture, a breath, a schedule and a teacher. Kapleau's insistence on the middle pillar, practice, over the first and third, was the correction the West needed, and it took a court reporter who had heard too much talk to make it. Whether or not one accepts his lineage's confidence about the third pillar, the second stands, and every reader who has sat because of this book has tested it.
The book that taught the West to sit: lectures, private interviews, enlightenment accounts and Bassui.
Affiliate disclosure: Thalira earns a small commission on purchases made through the link above, at no additional cost to you. Our comments on the kensho emphasis and the Yasutani controversy are set out above and were not softened for the link.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is The Three Pillars of Zen about?
The practice of Zen as taught in the Harada-Yasutani lineage: the three pillars are teaching, practice and enlightenment. The book gives Yasutani Roshi's introductory lectures on zazen, transcripts of his private interviews with students, and first-person accounts of kensho.
Who was Philip Kapleau?
An American court reporter, 1912 to 2004, who covered the Nuremberg and Tokyo war crimes trials, went to Japan in 1953 to train in Zen, spent thirteen years there, and returned to found the Rochester Zen Center in 1966, one of the first Zen training centres in America.
Who was Yasutani Roshi?
Hakuun Yasutani, 1885 to 1973, a Soto priest who trained under Harada Sogaku in a lineage combining Soto and Rinzai methods, taught lay students intensively, and through his American disciples shaped much of Western Zen. His wartime nationalism was later documented and is discussed below.
What does it teach about zazen?
Posture, breathing, the counting and following of the breath, shikantaza or just sitting, and koan practice, especially the koan Mu, with detailed instruction on each and on the sesshin, the intensive retreat.
What is kensho?
Seeing into one's own nature, the first glimpse of enlightenment. The book treats it as a real, attainable and verifiable event, and its third section consists of accounts by people who had it, which was the book's most controversial feature.
Why was it so influential?
Because before it, Western books on Zen were about Zen. This was the first that told a reader how to practise, in detail, from a living master, and that insisted enlightenment was available to anyone willing to sit.
What are the dokusan transcripts?
Records of private interviews between Yasutani and ten Western students, translated by Kapleau, showing how a teacher works with individual difficulties. Nothing like them had been published before and little has since.
Is it a Soto or Rinzai book?
Both. The Harada-Yasutani line is Soto in ordination but uses Rinzai koan training, and the book presents shikantaza and koan work as complementary. Purists in both schools have objected.
What about Yasutani's politics?
Brian Victoria's Zen at War documented Yasutani's militarist and antisemitic writings during the Pacific war. His lineage acknowledged and apologised for them. The book predates the revelations and does not address them.
Does it include Bassui?
Yes. The second section contains Kapleau's translation of the sermon and letters of Bassui, a fourteenth-century Japanese master, on the question Who is hearing, which many readers regard as the best thing in the book.
Is it still the best introduction?
It is still the best practical one. Its intensity, its emphasis on kensho and its lineage-specific claims are less universally accepted than they were, and readers should pair it with something calmer such as Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind.
Who should read it?
Anyone who wants to actually sit rather than read about sitting, practitioners curious about the sources of American Zen, and readers who want to see what a teacher says to students in private.
Sit before you decide
The book's argument cannot be evaluated from a chair. Take Yasutani's first lecture, set up the posture as he describes it, and count ten breaths. Lose the count, start again, and do it for twenty minutes. Whatever you conclude about kensho, lineages and the third pillar, you will have done the thing the book exists to get you to do, and you will know something about the second pillar that no review can tell you. That is Kapleau's whole case, and it was a good one.
Sources & References
- Kapleau, Philip, ed. The Three Pillars of Zen: Teaching, Practice, and Enlightenment, 35th anniversary edition, Anchor.
- Kapleau, Philip. Zen: Dawn in the West and Awakening to Zen: The Teachings of Roshi Philip Kapleau.
- Victoria, Brian. Zen at War, 2nd ed., on Yasutani's wartime writings.
- Sharf, Robert. "Sanbokyodan: Zen and the Way of the New Religions", Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, 1995.
- Suzuki, Shunryu. Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, for the comparison.
- Bassui Tokusho. Mud and Water: The Collected Teachings of Zen Master Bassui, trans. Arthur Braverman, for the fuller Bassui.