Quick Answer
The small book most Western readers met Zen through, and the source of nearly every Zen story anyone can quote from memory. A wandering American poet and an obscure Japanese monk in Los Angeles put together 101 stories, the forty-eight koans of the Gateless Gate, the ten ox-herding pictures and a Sanskrit tantra of meditation instructions, and the collection has not been out of print since 1957. It teaches no practice, explains nothing, and has probably sent more people to a cushion than any manual. Read it for the stories, then read something that tells you what to do.
Key Takeaways
- Four texts in one: stories, koans, pictures and a tantra.
- The stories are the common vocabulary of Western Zen, and this is where they came from.
- Senzaki is the hidden author, and his story is better than most in the book.
- Centering is not Zen, and Reps included it to make a point.
- No instruction, no doctrine: it is flesh and bones, not marrow.
16 min read
What This Book Is
Zen Flesh, Zen Bones: A Collection of Zen and Pre-Zen Writings was published by Charles E. Tuttle in 1957 and by Doubleday Anchor in 1961, compiled by Paul Reps. It gathers four earlier publications that Reps and Nyogen Senzaki had issued separately in small editions in the 1930s, with a fourth text Reps added.
The first is 101 Zen Stories, short anecdotes of masters and students, from 1939. The second is The Gateless Gate, the Mumonkan koan collection, from 1934. The third is 10 Bulls, the ox-herding pictures with verses, from 1935, illustrated with woodcuts by Tomikichiro Tokuriki. The fourth is Centering, Reps's rendering of a Kashmir Shaiva text of 112 meditation instructions, which he obtained in 1955.
The whole is under two hundred pages. It has been reprinted more times than anyone has counted and has sold, by the publisher's estimate, well over a million copies.
What kind of book it is. It is an anthology, with almost no framing: a short preface, a few lines before each section, and then the texts. There is no explanation of Zen, no history, no instruction in sitting, and no commentary on the koans beyond Wumen's own. Reps trusted the material to do its work. Whether it can, without a teacher, is a question the book leaves open and the tradition answers with a no.
Who Paul Reps Was
Paul Reps was born in Iowa in 1895 and spent most of his life travelling. He went to Japan in the 1920s, met Senzaki in California, and over the following decades wandered through India, Japan, Norway and elsewhere, painting, writing small books of picture-poems, and studying with whoever he found. He was not a monk and not a teacher in any lineage, and he made no claims to realisation.
His other books, Zen Telegrams, Gold and Fish Signatures, Square Sun, Square Moon, are slight, playful things of brushwork and haiku-like lines. He was a poet of the small gesture, and the anthology's spareness is his temperament.
He died in 1990. He had, by then, introduced more people to Zen than any roshi, and had done it by getting out of the way.
Nyogen Senzaki
The person without whom the book would not exist, and whose name is on the cover in smaller type.
Senzaki was born in Siberia in 1876, orphaned, raised by a Japanese monk, and trained in Rinzai Zen under Soyen Shaku, the master who had represented Zen at the 1893 World's Parliament of Religions. In 1905 Shaku brought him to San Francisco and, by Senzaki's account, told him not to teach for seventeen years and to see what America was. He worked as a houseboy, a hotel porter, a language teacher. In 1922 he began holding meetings in rented halls, which he called the floating zendo, and eventually settled in Los Angeles, where he taught small groups until his death in 1958. He was interned with other Japanese Americans during the war and taught in the camp.
Reps met him in the early 1930s and the two worked together on the translations of the koans and stories. Senzaki supplied the Zen; Reps supplied the English. The stories of Senzaki's own life, his poverty, his refusal of any title, his humour, are as good as anything in the book, and readers who want them should find Eido Shimano's collection of his writings.
The Title
It comes from the last story in the first section.
Bodhidharma, about to return to India, asked his four disciples what they had attained. The first gave an answer and was told: you have my skin. The second answered and was told: you have my flesh. The third: you have my bones. The fourth bowed and said nothing, and was told: you have my marrow.
Reps's title claims the flesh and the bones for the book and leaves the marrow to the reader. It is a modest claim, made with some wit, and the book keeps to it. What it offers is the body of the tradition, the stories and forms; what it cannot offer is the silence the fourth disciple had.
101 Zen Stories
The first section, and the one the book is known for.
The stories come mostly from the Shaseki-shu, Collection of Stone and Sand, a thirteenth-century Japanese anthology by the monk Muju, and from anecdotes of Japanese teachers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that Senzaki knew from his training. Each is a paragraph or a page. Most turn on a single exchange: a student asks, a master answers in a way that is not an answer, and the student, or the reader, is left holding something.
They are not koans in the formal sense and are not meant to be worked on. They are illustrations, in the old sense, of how a certain kind of mind meets the world, and they have been so widely reproduced that many readers know a dozen without knowing where they came from.
A Cup of Tea and the Others
A few of the stories, since they are what the book is.
Nan-in receives a professor who has come to inquire about Zen, and pours tea into his cup until it overflows and keeps pouring. The professor protests. Nan-in says: like this cup, you are full of your own opinions and speculations; how can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?
Ryokan, living in a hut, returns to find a thief who has found nothing to steal. He gives the thief his clothes. The thief leaves. Ryokan sits naked watching the moon and thinks: poor fellow, I wish I could have given him this beautiful moon.
Tanzan and Ekido, two monks, come to a muddy road where a girl in a silk kimono cannot cross. Tanzan picks her up and carries her over. Hours later Ekido bursts out: we monks do not go near women, why did you do that? Tanzan says: I left the girl there. Are you still carrying her?
There are ninety-eight more, and the reader who has met none of them is in for an afternoon they will remember.
The stories work by refusing to explain themselves, and the book's decision to print them without commentary is what made them portable. A reader who is told what the muddy road means has been given an idea; a reader who is left with Tanzan's question has been given a question, and questions travel. That is why these stories turn up in boardrooms and sermons and self-help books that have nothing to do with Zen. Reps and Senzaki understood that the form was the teaching, and left the form alone.
The Gateless Gate
The second section, and the book's most serious text.
The Mumonkan was compiled in 1228 by the Chinese master Wumen Huikai: forty-eight koans, each with Wumen's prose comment and a four-line verse. It is, with the Blue Cliff Record, one of the two central koan collections of the Rinzai tradition, and it is the one beginners are given first.
Reps and Senzaki's translation was among the earliest complete English versions and remains the most read, though it is neither the most accurate nor the most annotated. It gives the koan, the comment and the verse, and nothing else. A reader working with a teacher will need a fuller edition; a reader who wants to meet the forty-eight cases in their briefest form will find them here.
Joshu's Dog and the Koan Form
The first case, and what it shows about the collection.
A monk asked Joshu whether a dog has Buddha nature. Joshu said Mu. Wumen's comment explains that this Mu is the gateless gate of Zen, that to pass through it the student must concentrate their whole being on it, day and night, until the mind is one great doubt, and that when it breaks the student will meet the patriarchs face to face.
The comment is the only practical instruction in the entire book, and it is the instruction the whole Rinzai tradition gives. Reps prints it without emphasis, and many readers pass over it. It is the point where the anthology touches the practice that it otherwise leaves out, and a reader who wants to know what the koans are for should read Wumen on Mu twice.
The Ten Bulls
The third section, and the most visual.
The ox-herding pictures are a sequence of ten images with verses, composed in twelfth-century China by the master Kuoan, in which a herdsman searches for an ox, finds its tracks, glimpses it, catches it, tames it, rides it home, forgets it, forgets himself, returns to the source, and finally enters the marketplace with helping hands. The ox is the mind, or Buddha nature, or the self, and the sequence is the path of practice from the first search to the return.
Reps reproduces the woodcuts of Tomikichiro Tokuriki, made in the twentieth century in the traditional style, and translates Kuoan's verses and the prose comments. The pictures have become the standard Western image of the Zen path, and the book is where most people saw them first.
Returning to the Marketplace
The tenth picture, and the sequence's teaching.
After the eighth picture, an empty circle, in which both ox and herdsman have vanished, and the ninth, a return to the source in which the world appears as it is, the tenth shows a fat, laughing figure entering the town with a wine gourd, mixing with fishmongers and innkeepers, and bringing them, in the verse, to bloom like withered trees.
The point the sequence makes, and that the book makes by ending the section there, is that the path does not end in emptiness or withdrawal. It ends in the market, among ordinary people, with the realised person indistinguishable from anyone else except in what happens around them. Readers who know only the empty circle have half the sequence.
Centering
The fourth section, and the book's oddity.
In 1955 Reps visited Kashmir and met Lakshman Joo, the last great master of the Kashmir Shaiva tradition, who showed him the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra, a text of 112 short instructions for meditation: attend to the breath at the point where it turns; imagine the body as empty; at the moment of sneezing, or fear, or intense pleasure, attend to what is there. Reps rendered the instructions into free English in the form of a poem and titled it Centering.
He included it, as his preface says, as evidence of a teaching older than Zen that Zen's methods resemble: a pre-Zen text, in the subtitle's phrase, showing that the attention Zen trains was known in India four thousand years earlier, on his dating, which is far too early. The section has sent generations of readers to Kashmir Shaivism, and it is where Tantra entered the Western spiritual vocabulary in a form that had nothing to do with sex.
A Tantra in a Zen Book
Why it matters that Centering is there.
Reps's inclusion of a Hindu tantra in a Zen anthology was a claim: that the heart of Zen is a quality of attention, which any tradition can develop and which owes nothing to Buddhist doctrine or Japanese form, and that the 112 instructions are that quality stated directly. Zen teachers have been divided about the claim. Some regard the Centering section as the most useful practical material in the book, since it gives actual instructions where the rest gives stories; others regard it as a category error that encouraged a shallow, tradition-hopping reading of Zen.
Osho built a multi-volume commentary on it. Lakshman Joo's own students produced a more accurate translation. And Reps's version remains the one most people have read, because it is short, and beautiful, and in this book.
The Style
Why the book has lasted where more accurate ones have not.
Reps wrote plain, short sentences, with no ornament and no explanation, and he cut everything that did not carry the story. The result reads as if the anecdotes had always been in English. Senzaki's Zen and Reps's ear together produced a voice that later, more scholarly translators have not matched for memorability, and the stories as Reps told them are the versions that got retold.
The style has a cost, which is that it makes Zen sound simpler than it is. The stories read as if the point were always obvious to someone. In the tradition, it is not, and the obviousness is the reader's illusion.
Accuracy and Its Limits
A fair accounting.
The 101 stories are retellings, sometimes compressed, sometimes altered, of sources that are themselves anecdotal. The Gateless Gate translation is serviceable and has been superseded by several that are more precise and far better annotated. The Ten Bulls verses are freely rendered. Centering is a paraphrase, and Reps's dating of the tantra to four thousand years ago is wrong by roughly three thousand.
None of this much matters for what the book is. It was never a scholarly edition and it does not pretend to be. It matters only if a reader takes it for one, and a fair number have.
What It Did
The book's place in the story of Zen in the West.
It appeared at the moment when D.T. Suzuki's essays and Alan Watts's The Way of Zen had made Zen fashionable, and it gave that fashion its stories. The Beats read it. The counterculture read it. It went into the pockets of people who would never sit and the backpacks of people who went to Japan to sit, and it supplied the anecdotes that every later book on Zen, every sermon, every management seminar has borrowed.
It also fixed, for better and worse, the Western image of Zen as a tradition of paradox and sudden insight rather than of long discipline. The stories are the sudden part. The discipline is what the book leaves out.
What It Does Not Do
Stated plainly, since the book does not state it.
It does not tell you how to sit. It does not explain what a koan is for or how to work with one. It does not describe the sesshin, the teacher, the interview, the years. It does not say that Zen is a monastic tradition of hard training and that the masters in the stories had spent decades on cushions before saying anything witty.
Readers who take the book as the whole of Zen get a collection of paradoxes and a feeling. Readers who take it as the door, and go through to Kapleau or Suzuki or a teacher, get what the book was for. Reps himself never claimed more.
The Objections
Three, and the tradition has made all of them.
No practice. A Zen book that never mentions sitting has left out the thing that makes it Zen.
The paradox problem. The stories, read without context, taught a generation that Zen was a style of being clever, and the tradition has spent decades undoing that.
The tantra. Centering is a different tradition with a different metaphysics, and putting it in a Zen anthology under a pre-Zen label confused both.
Who Should Read It
Read it if you have not, since the stories are part of the common inheritance and it takes an afternoon.
Read it if you want the Gateless Gate and the ox-herding pictures together in a book that fits in a coat pocket.
Read it if you are interested in how Zen reached the West and want to see the form it arrived in.
Then read something that tells you what to do, because this book, by design, will not.
The stories share a shape. Someone arrives full, of opinions, of rules, of grief, of the girl they carried across the road, and someone else, with a gesture or a sentence, shows them the weight they did not know they were holding. The teaching is never a doctrine. It is the moment of noticing the load. Reps and Senzaki understood that this moment could be transmitted in a paragraph, without any of the apparatus, and that a reader who had it once would know what to look for. That is the flesh and bones. The marrow is putting the load down, and no book does that for you.
The stories, the koans, the ox-herding pictures and the tantra that introduced the West to Zen.
Affiliate disclosure: Thalira earns a small commission on purchases made through the link above, at no additional cost to you. Our comments on the book's lack of practical instruction and the looseness of its translations are set out above and were not softened for the link.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Zen Flesh, Zen Bones?
A 1957 anthology compiled by Paul Reps with Nyogen Senzaki, gathering four texts: 101 Zen Stories, the Gateless Gate koan collection, the Ten Bulls ox-herding pictures, and Centering, a translation of the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra. It has been in print continuously since.
Who was Paul Reps?
An American poet, artist and traveller, 1895 to 1990, who wandered Asia for decades, studied with Senzaki and others, painted calligraphic picture-poems, and wrote a handful of small books of which this was by far the most read.
Who was Nyogen Senzaki?
A Japanese Rinzai monk, 1876 to 1958, who came to California in 1905, lived in obscurity for years, and taught small groups in his floating zendo in Los Angeles. He was among the first Zen teachers in America and translated the stories and koans with Reps.
What are the 101 Zen Stories?
Short anecdotes of Zen masters and students, mostly from the Japanese collection Shaseki-shu and from stories of nineteenth and twentieth century teachers, first published by Reps and Senzaki in 1939. They include the cup of tea, the moon that cannot be stolen, and the muddy road.
What is the Gateless Gate?
The Mumonkan, a thirteenth-century Chinese collection of forty-eight koans with commentary and verse by the master Wumen. Reps and Senzaki's translation, from 1934, was one of the first complete English versions.
What are the Ten Bulls?
The ox-herding pictures, a twelfth-century Chinese sequence of ten images and verses tracing the search for and taming of the ox as the stages of Zen practice, from the search to the return to the marketplace. The book reproduces Tomikichiro Tokuriki's woodblock versions.
What is Centering?
Reps's free rendering of the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra, a Kashmir Shaiva text of 112 meditation instructions, which he obtained from Lakshman Joo and presented as evidence that Zen's methods were older than Zen.
Is it a good introduction?
It has been the most common one for sixty years, and its stories and koans are the ones most people know. It gives no instruction in practice and no explanation of doctrine, which is either its virtue or its limit depending on what the reader wants.
Are the translations accurate?
Serviceable and spare rather than scholarly. Later translations of the Gateless Gate are more precise; the stories are retellings; Centering is a loose paraphrase. The book's style, not its accuracy, is why it lasted.
What is the most famous story?
Probably A Cup of Tea, in which the master Nan-in keeps pouring tea into a professor's overflowing cup and tells him he cannot be shown Zen until he empties his cup of opinions. It has been retold in every context from management training to sermons.
Why the title?
From the story of Bodhidharma's four disciples, in which he tells one that he has his skin, one his flesh, one his bones and the last his marrow. Reps meant the book to offer the flesh and bones and to leave the marrow to the reader.
Who should read it?
Anyone who has not read it, since its stories are part of the common vocabulary; readers who want the koans and ox-herding pictures in one small volume; and anyone who wants to see what Zen looked like to the West before it became a practice.
Find the one you are still carrying
Tanzan carried the girl across the road and put her down. Ekido carried her for the rest of the day. The book is full of people carrying things they set down hours ago, and the stories work because the reader recognises the weight before the story names it. Read the muddy road, close the book, and ask what you picked up this week that you have not put down. You will not need the other hundred stories to know the answer. That is why the book is so short.
Sources & References
- Reps, Paul and Nyogen Senzaki, comps. Zen Flesh, Zen Bones: A Collection of Zen and Pre-Zen Writings, Tuttle.
- Senzaki, Nyogen. Eloquent Silence: Nyogen Senzaki's Gateless Gate and Other Previously Unpublished Teachings, ed. Roko Sherry Chayat.
- Shimano, Eido, ed. Like a Dream, Like a Fantasy: The Zen Teachings and Translations of Nyogen Senzaki.
- Aitken, Robert. The Gateless Barrier, for a fuller annotated Mumonkan.
- Singh, Jaideva, trans. Vijnanabhairava, or Divine Consciousness, for the scholarly tantra.
- Fields, Rick. How the Swans Came to the Lake: A Narrative History of Buddhism in America, on Senzaki and Reps.