Finding Your Buddha Smile
Finding Your Buddha Smile: Coming Home (To What Zen Is Really All About), by Rafe Martin
ISBN 9781998248117 / 148 pages / 5.83" x 8.27" (A5)
Publication Date: December 8, 2025
With Finding Your Buddha Smile: Coming Home (To What Zen is Really All About) lay Zen teacher and award-winning author, Rafe Jnan Martin, reveals Zen to be a thoroughly radical, yet completely accessible and practical way of realizing what the Buddha himself realized 2,500, years ago. As Roshi Martin makes clear, koan-based Zen is neither esoteric, nor reserved for the special few. Its whole point is to help us walk the Buddha Way and realize happiness and peace of mind while living full and satisfying lives in a complex and challenging world.
Excerpts from the Introduction (with edits) to Finding Your Buddha Smile
There are lots of ways to be happy, some selfish, some naive, some fleeting, some more lasting. The kind I have in mind is of the more lasting sort, the kind that can only come after troubles, after experiencing and suffering the fundamental difficulties of an ordinary human life. Namely, after we get bit in the butt by the realization that we are only here temporarily, and that in our all-too-brief lifetime, painful things, sometimes pointlessly unjust things are going to happen. How can we be happy when climate change, misogyny, racism, and violence shake us on planet Earth? How can we be happy knowing, as we do, that children starve, animals are mistreated, life-giving old growth trees are on fire, rivers and oceans poisoned, tons of bombs continue to fall? It’s a fundamental question, a real one; a dilemma. How happy can we be, given what we know? Sigh. Is happiness—a limited sort, at that—only possible if we shut ourselves down, closing eyes, ears, and hearts? What, leads to real happiness? According to legend the historic Buddha, 2,500 years ago, ran into this fundamental problem at the age of twenty-nine. His great enlightenment (of which there are endless degrees and which koans help us start opening) was transformative. The previously traumatized ex-prince, Siddhartha Gautama, through deepest realization, found the essence of happiness. And his face blossomed—into a smile.
The book opens with a traditional Buddhist jataka tale (a past-life tale of the Buddha) and a commentary on it, followed by nine koans (traditional Zen encounter/story dialogs) and commentaries on them, showing the Buddha’s path of Awakening as it unfolds and is expressed in life. Taken together, these ten chapters present a vision of Zen Buddhism—which I’ve formally practiced now for over fifty years, and have been teaching for well over a dozen—as a practical way of helping us move from a condition of isolation and ignorance (of our own nature and the nature of all things), to something more satisfying, intimate, home-like, and happy.
Koans, are not clever or tricky intellectual puzzles. They are not tools designed to smash logic or break attachments. Rather they are rich expressions of the essence of the non-dual Bodhisattva Way of wisdom and compassion. They open a path of coming home to the realization, as Zen Master Hakuin (January 19, 1689 – January 18, 1769) puts it in his Song in Praise of Zazen (Zazen Wasan) a brief text recited at Zen temples and monasteries typically before teisho (Dharma talk by the roshi), “The place where we stand is the pure lotus land, and this very body, the body of Buddha.” The issue the Buddha faced when, as a young man, he left his entitled palace to find an answer to his deeply troubling—make that terrifying— encounter with the injustice of aging, sickness, and death, is the same one we face today: “How can I be at home, at peace, and happy in an impermanent world of challenge and change?” The core experience of our journey as maturing human beings, Zen calls enlightenment, realization, or intimacy. Kensho, the Japanese term for this means, “seeing self-nature” signifies a glimpse, a beginning. But where does it lead?
What’s the deal with the Buddha’s smile? In this book we’ll see how two of the most central Western Zen teachers, both of whom were my own teachers — Philip Kapleau Roshi and Robert Aitken Roshi — very different people in many ways — each opened a gateless gate to that classic smile.
How do we, living in our own deeply troubled times, find that same joy, that same totally natural, unforced, archaic smile? My hope is that this book may offer a glimpse. A personal anecdote to accompany that hope: I once asked Robert Aitken Roshi, founder of the Diamond angha, why, given the challenges of Zen practice, we kept at it? He answered, saying that if the condition of our world and its—and our own—impermanence has bitten us deeply, so that we have no real peace, then Zen can show us the way to happiness. (You’ll find a full account of this conversation in Chapter Six of this book: “The Oak Tree in the Front Garden.”). In short, Zen mapped a way to the Buddha’s smile.
The most current research on happiness says that the more connected we feel with others, the happier we are. Through Zen practice, when our isolating, unconscious habit of self-centered-ness subsides, the world in its glorious variety steps in, and we find actual connection, not thoughts or ideas about connection, but actual connection with animals, rivers, forests, seas, and mountains; with stars, worms, and cellphone towers; with all that is living and non-living. As an old song so wisely says, we find that “… happiness lies, right under our eyes, back in our own backyard.”
Link to audio recording of Roshi Martin’s teisho — Chapter 6 of Finding Your Buddha Smile: “The Oak Tree in the Front Garden.”
Praise for Finding Your Buddha Smile
“A rich and textured series of Dharma talks probing the intimate teaching of the koans. The talks are great. (I find that I keep wanting to use the word ‘rich’ repeatedly.) I encourage mature practitioners engaged in koan study to read them. Hogen Bays, Roshi, Co-Abbot, Great Vow Zen Monastery
“This wonderful book ‘knocks out the wedges and pull out the stops’ enabling us to realize what Zen is really about. Bows, indeed!” Taigen Henderson Roshi, Zen Centre of Toronto
“Rafe Martin reveals the intricacies of a Way that has nourished many, including me. If you want a taste of that intimate Way, here it is, in this wonderful book.” James Ishmael Ford, Roshi, author of Zen at the End of Religion: An Introduction for the Curious, the Skeptical, and the Spiritual but Not Religious.
“A salutary corrective to misunderstandings of the Zen Buddhist path as pessimistic, forbidding, or grim, Rafe’s sense of humor permeates the koans and reveals them to be personal and engaging—pointers for living life amidst one’s challenges and burdens, not apart from them. Emphasizing lived experience, rather than theoretical or conceptual understanding, no one can read this warm-hearted, illuminating presentation without feeling a smile coming from within.” Shinge Roko Sherry Chayat Roshi, Abbot, Zen Center of Syracuse; Retired Abbot, Zen Studies Society.
ALSO FROM RAFE MARTIN
A Zen Life of Buddha
“Don't miss this treasure!” Chris Fortin, Shunryu Suzuki Roshi lineage; priest and teacher Everyday Zen Foundation, and Dharma Heart Zen “This elegant book is a complete teaching, worth taking the time to savor each page.” Hozan Alan Senauke, Abbot, Berkeley Zen Center
"Should be required for all Zen students.” Sunyana Graef Roshi, Founding Teacher and Abbot, Vermont Zen Center
“Struck through with deep confidence in the Dharma, this elegant book is a complete teaching. Drawing freely from myth and story and verse across time and tradition, it is worth taking the time to savor each page." Hozan Alan Senauke, Abbot, Berkeley Zen Center
“Rescues the Buddha from the prison of unapproachable myth, revealing him to be utterly human, utterly you, utterly me. Short and eminently readable, it is the fruit of Martin Roshi’s half-century deep dive into Zen practice
A Zen Life of Bodhisattvas
“Challenges us to recognize the Bodhisattvas in our lives and our call to function as Bodhisattvas in the lives of others. A delight." Rick McDaniel, author of Zen Conversations and Further Zen Conversations.
“A gifted Zen teacher offers us this gem, which belongs in everyone’s library, to be read and inspired by over and over again!" Mitra Bishop, Roshi, author of Deepening Zen: the Long Maturation
“This is a wonderful and a very, very good book!” James Ford Roshi, author of The Intimate Way of Zen
“This wonderful book which I highly recommend, looks at the nature of the Buddha’s Vow and the nature and role of bodhisattvas, the greatly wise and compassionate beings at the intimate core of daily Zen practice." Jay Rinsen Weik Roshi, Abbot, Zen Temple of Toledo.
“An important book that is both profound and engrossingly readable." Berry Crawford, Simplicity Zen Podcast
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rafe Jnan Martin, founding teacher of Endless Path Zendo, Rochester, New York, is a lay Zen priest and teacher in the Harada-Yasutani koan line. A personal disciple of Roshi Philip Kapleau, (The Three Pillars of Zen) and editor of his final books, he also trained with Robert Aitken Roshi (Diamond Sangha) receiving inka and Dharma transmission from Danan Henry Roshi, a Kapleau Roshi Dharma heir and a Diamond Sangha master. His writing has appeared in Tricycle, Lion's Roar, Buddhadharma, Zen Bow, Parabola, Inquiring Mind, and The Sun, as well as other noted journals of religion and myth. His books have been cited in Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, and USA Today. He is a recipient of the prestigious Empire State Award. www.endlesspathzendo.org
