"Among the Zen handbooks or primers out there, none fit your hand so simply as these sixty-four poetry-like chapters of Hoag Holmgren's No Better Place. Like the sixty-four hexagrams of the I Ching, each widens into a far-off state of mind. Turn them over in your thoughts though, and they prove to be guides to where you are standing. Ten in particular, which refer to the 12th century Chinese Oxherding Pictures, point North American Zen back to a mythic...