Bearing Witness · A Zen Master's Lessons in Making Peace

From the co-author (with Academy award-winning actor Jeff Bridges) of the New York Times bestseller The Dude and the Zen Master.

Bearing Witness is a book rich with practical and spiritual wisdom for making peace in our hearts and in the world. Bernie Glassman tells how and why he was moved to start the Zen Peacemaker Order and offers powerful teaching stories that illustrate ways of making peace one moment at a time, no matter how difficult things appear to be. Each chapter focuses on an event or person and demonstrates how a particular peacemaker vow is put into practice. In his practice of engaged spirituality, Glassman takes people into situations where they can experience problems first-hand, into circumstances so overwhelming—such as living on the streets of New York City or meditating on the crime of the century at Auschwitz—that they are forced to relinquish the comfort of their familiar view of the world. Out of these actions have come the three tenets of the order: letting go of fixed ideas, healing ourselves and others, and bearing witness to whatever is taking place within us and right before our eyes.