Nishioka, the temple carpenter

Azby Brown, a friend in Japan offered the following comment after reading through most of my new book. 

"What I get from your book is that creative craft work gives us the opportunity to live a life worth living, and to become better than we are. This really resonates with something I’ve been thinking about and sharing with people lately. 

"The temple carpenter Nishioka was Buddhist to his bones. He didn’t talk a lot about it necessarily, unless you asked him, in which case he revealed himself as an erudite scholar. More importantly he lived it and it shaped everything he did. 

"In his tradition, the best thing a master carpenter can do is help provide a path to enlightenment for his apprentices, through devoted and meaningful work in which they can become selfless. But they never say directly that that's what they’re doing. I think the reason is connected to something you alluded to, about “spiritual competitiveness,” which is just another kind of attachment. 

"Better to just live the work."

Azby is the author of "Just Enough: Lessons from Japan for Sustainable Living, Architecture and Design" 

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