BOOK BRIEFS

Shozan Jack Haubner’s (Shambhala 2017) is self-deprecating, blunt, humorous, and profoundly troubling. Haubner was a close disciple of the Zen teacher Joshu Sasaki, whose reputation crumbled when his long history of sexually abusing female students made headlines. He begins with a set of autobiographical vignettes before offering a sustained reflection both on the sex scandal that consumed his community and on his teacher’s last days. His introductory notes on death are powerful—“A nurse once told me that patients always die exactly as they lived”—while a story about him waking up and stepping in a bucket of his own urine before kicking it through his paper shoji screen is hilarious and worthy of a sitcomto- be. Yet Haubner’s