Henry Shukman

Henry Shukman (born 1962) is a British-American poet, novelist, and Zen teacher whose memoir One Blade of Grass: Finding the Old Road of the Heart (2019) is one of the most honest and phenomenologically detailed accounts of Zen awakening written in English. Shukman is a principal teacher at Mountain Cloud Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and a dharma heir in two Zen lineages. His background is unusually rich: he has published prize-winning poetry and fiction, worked as a journalist and travel writer, and approached Zen not as someone raised in a contemplative tradition but as someone who, by his own account, found a path without knowing he was looking for one.

Biographical Context

Shukman was born in Oxford and grew up in a secular, intellectual English environment. As a young man, he developed a severe skin condition (eczema) and significant psychological distress — a combination of anxiety, a sense of not belonging, and what he later recognized as a kind of existential wound that preceded his search for practice.

He encountered Zen in his thirties, initially through reading and then through formal sitting practice. His memoir traces two decades of practice with multiple teachers across different lineages, including John Gaynor, George Bowman, Joan Rieck, and ultimately John Tarrant, with whom he completed koan training. The book describes multiple kensho experiences with unusual candor — including the social awkwardness, the impermanence, the risk of spiritual pride, and the gradual integration that occurs over years.

He continues to teach through Mountain Cloud Zen Center and through an online platform (Ten Percent Happier), making Zen practice accessible to students with no formal Zen background.

Core Ideas

Awakening as Healing: The Two Are Inseparable

From the memoir’s opening pages, Shukman frames his Zen journey as simultaneously a spiritual journey and a healing journey:

“This is a story not only of awakening but of healing. Perhaps the two can’t, or shouldn’t, be separated. No healing without a wound.” — Shukman, One Blade of Grass

This framing distinguishes Shukman from many Zen accounts that present awakening in purely philosophical or metaphysical terms. His is an embodied account — the eczema, the anxiety, the social alienation were not obstacles to be overcome before practice could begin; they were the wound that created the necessary opening.

The Phenomenology of Kensho

Shukman provides the most detailed first-person phenomenological account of kensho in this entire library. Multiple experiences are described — each distinct in quality, each pointing to the same fundamental recognition:

“There was no me. The very center of my being, the core of my life, vanished. I vanished… Where I used to be, there was just a broad openness. All things were happening just as before, nothing had really changed, yet everything had changed, because there was no me to whom everything was happening.” — Shukman, One Blade of Grass

What is notable about this account is its specificity about what does not change: the knee pain is still there, the sound of the wind is still there. Kensho is not a removal of experience but a fundamental shift in its relationship to a center that turns out not to exist.

Koans: Paradox as Tool for Non-Conceptual Knowing

Shukman’s account of koan practice is the most detailed treatment of this distinctively Zen technology in this library:

“The koans are verbal formulations that the student ponders while meditating, said to be impossible to penetrate with the mind: ‘dark to the mind, radiant to the heart,’ they say. The only hope is to give up trying to understand the koan and instead let it reveal itself to us.” — Shukman, One Blade of Grass

The koan, correctly understood, is not a riddle with a hidden answer but a device for exhausting the conceptual mind — forcing the practitioner into a mode of direct, non-conceptual engagement with the present moment that the habitual mind’s search for answers prevents.

No-Self as Identity, Not as Loss

The dissolution of the localized self-sense in kensho is, in Shukman’s account, not loss but discovery:

“In my case, since my teens I’d been picking up the scent of a trail that might lead to this shift, alternately following then balking at it. Finally I was ready, and fell in with good guides, and with their help stumbled to the brink of an abyss, to a point of no return where there was only one way to go.” — Shukman, One Blade of Grass

And post-awakening:

“No need to achieve: all was achieved already. The great project of this life had been to realize that. Dogen said, ‘The great Way is intrinsically accomplished; the principle of Zen is complete freedom.‘” — Shukman, One Blade of Grass

Zen as Radical Engagement with the World

Against any interpretation of Zen as withdrawal:

“Zen is the opposite of withdrawal from the world. It’s a radical acceptance of life, the pain and suffering no less than the beauty of the dawn skies… Unless a path leads us back into the world — reincarnates us, as it were — it’s not a complete path.” — Shukman, One Blade of Grass

“Making a cup of tea, fetching milk from the fridge, standing outside on the front step, watching the remains of a storm drift across the dawn sky, and hearing the drip-drip of rainwater into a puddle from a roof are miracles.” — Shukman, One Blade of Grass

The Importance of Community and Teacher

Shukman is unusually explicit about the role of interpersonal structures in spiritual development:

“A few things had to be in place: a steady daily practice, a life sufficiently in order not to create constant demands on our nerves, a reasonably stable psychology… and two final pieces: a community of practitioners and a guide.” — Shukman, One Blade of Grass

“Zen wasn’t — had never been — about individual revelation. That was all very well, but the core of Zen was sharing.” — Shukman, One Blade of Grass

Key Works in This Library

One Blade of Grass: Finding the Old Road of the Heart, a Zen Memoir (2019): A two-decade account of Zen practice, teaching, and awakening told with the precision of a poet and the honesty of someone who has spent years examining his own experience without flinching. Unusual for its integration of psychological insight, literary sensibility, and rigorous phenomenological description.

Connections to Other Authors in This Library

• Thich Nhat Hanh practices in the same Vietnamese Zen (Thien) lineage that Shukman’s Japanese Rinzai Zen developed from; both are branches of the same Buddhist trunk adapted to different cultural soils
• Paramhansa Yogananda’s descriptions of cosmic consciousness — the dissolution of bodily identification and the expansion of awareness — are phenomenologically equivalent to what Shukman describes in kensho, approached through a different tradition
• Anthony de Mello’s “waking up” and “self-observation” parallel Shukman’s Zen awakening in their practical emphasis on seeing through the constructed self rather than improving it
• Michael Singer’s witness consciousness as the “seat of the Self” is the Vedantic framework for what Shukman describes from within the Zen phenomenology of no-self
• Lao Tzu’s Tao is the philosophical background of Zen — the tradition was formed through the encounter of Indian Buddhism with Chinese Taoism, and the Tao Te Ching’s language resonates throughout Shukman’s descriptions of the open, effortless quality of post-kensho experience