Bookworms: The Dude and The Zen Master (2013) Bridges & Glassman

I love Jeff Bridges’ work. I guess the first movie I saw him in was Tron. It quickly became one of my favorite movies as a kid. I’m sure I saw other movies with him in the interim, but when I saw the movie The Vanishing years later, I realized how good an actor he can be. Fast forward a few years to The Big Lebowski, and again I found myself loving Bridges’ work. That movie has become one of my go-to movies when I don’t know what to watch, and one that I love very much.

It should come as no surprise then that when I learned that there was a book coming out exploring the zen of The Dude, I was excited. The Dude and The Zen Master is described as a conversation between Jeff Bridges and Bernie Glassman, his spiritual guru. That is pretty much what it is.

Glassman had been trying for a long time to make the practice of Zen more accessible. He approached Jeff about using The Dude, and himself, as the vehicle for this endeavor, and an idea was born. The two spent five days at Bridges’ ranch in Montana, recording and documenting their conversations which find The Dude poking his head in to provide his own sort of wisdom from time to time.

The section and chapter headings are all quotes taken from The Big Lebowski, so any fan of the movie should get a chuckle out of these. They serve as a loose topic description, and for the most part they work well in this context. The chapters themselves often drift well away from the Dude theme however. This is one place where I feel the book missed a great opportunity.

While they did use the character of The Dude very well in the opening of the book and towards the end, there are only passing mentions in the middle. I was really hoping for a lot more discussion on the character and how he seems to flow through this world with a seeming calm and acceptance of things around him. I wanted more Dude.

Jeff Bridges and Bernie Glassman are both probably very wonderful individuals, and judging by the conversational glimpse we get into their thoughts, they are very compassionate as well. Throughout the book Bernie seems much more focused on teaching the art of Zen while Bridges is much more inquisitive and talks more about his own life. This leads to some pretty unnatural turns in the conversation which can be fun sometimes, but can also be somewhat distracting when the other person makes a very abrupt change. Many times in the book it feels like the responses were cut and pasted from two different points in time, and they likely were.

It goes further than that though. Some of the sections are uncomfortably worded and sort of break the flow of the conversation. Many times Jeff will explain things that don’t seem like they should need to be explained to someone that has been studying and teaching Zen Buddhism for quite some time. While I may not know what the Heart Sutra is, saying to Bernie, “Didn’t you mention that the Heart Sutra, which is a famous sutra in Mahayana Buddhism…” feels very forced. Why would you describe something to someone that clearly knows what it is? This happens several times throughout the book, and really broke the conversational feel to me because suddenly they are sort of unnecessarily pandering to the reader, when the gist of it was apparent through the context of what was said.

The book also repeats itself a good bit.  I understand that there is certain to be some repetition as they come to subjects that apply to something that was referenced earlier, but it happens so often, and so in depth that sometimes it feels like you are just covering the same ground again. For example, in the introduction, Bridges uses an analogy of a snake shedding its skin to describe movies. As we get towards the end of the book, in the middle of one of the chapters it is pretty much a repeat of that same introduction.

With all that said, the book does have some redeeming qualities. There are some good lessons in it. The first chapter, entitled “Just Throw The Fu**ing Ball Man”, was interesting. It uses a story of how The Dude approaches bowling, to illustrate how sometimes in life we just need to throw the dang ball instead of standing there holding it while we think it over and try to develop technique. It talks about how our expectations of a situation and the situation itself are often different, and sometimes we need to stop worrying about what we think we know about something and just take it for what it is, and act on that instead of our expectations. It was an interesting discussion, and one that I know I can certainly work on in my life.

Some of the other bright spots are when Jeff Bridges relates stories about his life, family, and his work. These stories are often very short, but are refreshing glimpses into a life well lived. I just wish they had been longer.

This book was much more about the actual practice of Zen than I had expected from the blurbs on sites such as Barnes & Noble and Amazon. It was sold as a much more reflective and organic conversation between friends. That may be great for some people. However, to me the transition from conversation to book, and the strong focus on actual Zen outside of the context of the movie made it sometimes feel much more forced than natural. There was something slightly uncomfortable about it in parts, like it didn’t really fit properly between the pages at times.

At the end of the day, it was just OK. The book was rather short, but had enough interesting parts in it to keep me reading. It just fell a little short. I hate to say it, but it even felt a little pompous at times to me. I can’t say it was bad. I can see how some people would like it. I’ll just say that it didn’t meet my expectations.