China Root: Taoism, Ch’an, and Original Zen

This is an amazingly bad book (one star) that I'm not sorry to have read (so another star for that).

It barely advances its central thesis, that Zen/Ch'an are more Taoism that Buddhism, I was hoping for a good exploration of that. Each plausible bit of evidence is surrounded by mountains and rivers of twaddle, so even the things not obviously false would have to be confirmed somewhere else before you should believe them. Nothing is supported with any references, and many things are presented as “it is obvious that (ridiculous thing)”. Did you know that because Chinese is not phonetic, but originally vaguely pictographic, that its words are more connected to the thing they represent than a phonetic alphabet? My wife - who is both a philosophy major and Chinese - made a snorting noise when presented with that gem.

It combines a few intriguing translations with willfully difficult translations - for example every teacher's name is rendered completely into English, rather than the Japanese you might be familiar with or the Chinese that is more accurate. Yes, their names were taken to mean something, that could be laid out the first time you see each master and then left in the Chinese so you could cross reference them with other readings. Similarly some terms are rendered into English so tortured (“existence-tissue”) that the original would be much less pretentious.

Buried in this compost heap are a few notions worth the dig, so I'm not sorry to have bought this book and spent time with it. But I can't really recommend it to anyone else.