Poet Jane Hirshfield says,

"Entering the Monastery renders the moment-by-moment, undisguised experience of Zen practice in America with unsurpassable immediacy, sincerity, the warmth of full human presence, and down to the ground detail.

It should become a classic."

The Author says:

When I began sewing my first rakusu – the biblike garment that we wear to mark ourselves as followers of The Buddha – I began writing about it online. This was in 1995, before there was a point and click interface, before blogs, even before Facebook and Google

But there was The Well. That early social networking site is where I turned for the next 12 years to talk about my life in San Francisco Zen Center. This book contains those postings. The responses of others have been removed, and I’ve edited my own words lightly. Reading them now, in 2014, six years after leaving Zen Center, I offer them as a record of how it can be for a worldly person to be grabbed by the scruff of the neck and thrown into the world of dharma in America.