Charlotte Joko Beck is a Zen teacher in the United States and the author of the books Everyday Zen: Love and Work and Nothing Special: Living Zen. Born in New Jersey in 1917, she studied music at Oberlin College and worked for some time as a pianist and piano teacher. Having received Dharma Transmission From Taizan Maezumi Roshi, she founded the Ordinary MInd School of Zen and opened the San Diego Zen Center in 1983 and served as its head teacher until July of 2006. She now lives in Precott, Arizona, where she teaches part time. Zen is a form of Mahayana Buddhism that places great importance on moment-by-moment awareness and seeing deeply into the nature of things by direct experience. ... A grand piano, with the lid up. ...
Books
Everyday Zen: Love and Work (1989) ISBN 0-06-060734-3
Nothing Special: Living Zen (1993) ISBN 0-06-251117-3
References
An account of Joko Beck's unique role and influence on the development of Zen in America can be found in "Zen Master Who?" by James Ishmael Ford, Wisdom Publications, Boston 2006.
This is not to say that they reject the unnexplainable and mysterious, but their stance that things such as apparitions or prophecies are both as unreal and unnecessary as science and materialism in considering a spiritual life, simply because they do not exist in the unbending reality of the present moment.
I have read both of Joko's books now and conclude that for someone who has read quite widely about Buddhist meditation, she is the source of the most painfully honest, blunt and beautiful teachings I have yet to come accross.
Joko - as she's known - is a little granny look-alike, in her sixties I guess, and once an ordinary white American housewife and mother - now an extremely powerful Zen teacher.
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