David Rynick. (Photo by Lisa Aciukewicz)
David Rynick may be a certified Zen Master, but as he discovered when he set out to write his first book, he’s not exactly a self-help guru.
“I realized I didn’t believe in a step-by-step process for life,” he said. “There are all of these wonderful formulations, and they’re all true and we’ve heard them all before. I began to see the real issue isn’t that we don’t know these wonderful perennial truths, but the problem is how we practice it in our lives.”
So, after three years of work, Rynick’s step-by-step manual became, instead, a “Zen memoir,” a series of vignettes, drawn from Rynick’s own life and Zen practice, arranged to follow the cycle of the seasons. The book, “This Truth Never Fails,” Rynick said, is about being human.
“It’s not a religious book by any means,” he said, “but it’s about the wonder of ordinary life.”
The wonder, and also the challenges, large and small.
“I write about stuff that everybody knows about,” he said. “I write about being constipated. I write about not wanting to get up in the morning, because that’s part of our lives.”
Rynick will be reading and signing books at the Harvard Unitarian Universalist Church on Monday, June 18, from 7 to 9 p.m.
Rynick is a life coach and abbot of Boundless Way Temple in Worcester, where he and his wife live. He’s been studying and practicing Zen for more than 30 years and is formally recognized as a Zen Master in Korean and Japanese traditions.
The son of a Presbyterian minister, Rynick discovered Zen after a search triggered by what he describes as a mystical experience he had while a student at Wesleyan University.
“I had an opening, a sense of the presence of God’s love. I knew for certain that we are never separated from this great love of the universe,” he said. “…After that experience, I went and spoke to several ministers and priests, and nobody knew what I was talking about.”
After giving up on religion for a little while, Rynick said, his spiritual search was reenergized when he heard a talk by a Zen teacher.
“I knew that he knew what I knew, and I knew that he had an experience of this non-dual state,” Rynick said.
Zen, a branch of Buddhism that emphasizes awareness through meditation, originated in ancient China. In the introduction to his book, Rynick writes, “the path of Zen is not about leaving the world behind or getting something we don’t already have.”
“This path of awakening ‘simply’ requires stopping our incessant busyness and our fervent searching long enough to be able to receive what is already abundantly here,” he writes. “Easier said than done, of course, and so this is where formal meditation practice comes in.”
Rynick maintains that Zen practice can benefit everyone, including followers of other faiths. He is himself a member and past president of the First Unitarian Church of Worcester. He is a consultant for the Episcopal House of Bishops and a lead trainer of their peer-coaching program.
“The Episcopalians, especially, have a reverence for mystery, and when I speak of this mystery, they understand it,” he said. “…I blame my father for my involvement in Zen. He thought that God was someone quite immediate, and that’s the essence of Zen: the holy and spiritual is not somewhere else.”
“This Truth Never Fails” is published by Wisdom Publications, Somerville. For more information about David Rynick and Boundless Way Temple, visit davidrynick.com or worcesterzen.org.
