There are many books on Buddhism that are really transcripts of dialogues... it's usually a monk giving a talk or occasionally transcripts from a panel. These books read in a very distinct way -- they sometimes have chunks of brilliance that spontaneously appear as the speaker and audience realize something together.

This book is in the spirit of the above, and does indeed have some of these spontaneously profound moments. And I think the intended audience is people who are coming in from a 'pop' version of Zen (ie, the vibe from Jeff Bridges's character in The Big Lebowski) and want to take it to the next level of depth from there.

But, if you've read such books before, this comes across as pretty light reading. ( )

A little Zen Buddhism, a little Jeff Bridges, a lot of Dude quotes from the movie The Big Lebowski . . . What's not to like? Reading this book is like listening in on a long, rambling, but pretty interesting conversation. Jeff is not The Dude, but he strives in some ways to be more Dude-like, and listening to both him and the Zen Master Bernie Glassman reflect on the challenges of trying to be in the moment and live authentically makes for some good reading. I did kind of lose interest and put this aside for quite awhile, but when I picked it back up was glad that I did. ( )

Zen Master Bernie Glassman compares Jeff Bridges’s iconic role in The Big Lebowski to a Lamed-Vavnik: one of the men in Jewish mysticism who are “simple and unassuming,” and “so good that on account of them God lets the world go on.” Jeff puts it another way. “The wonderful thing about the Dude is that he’d always rather hug it out than slug it out.”

For more than a decade, Academy Award-winning actor Jeff Bridges and his Buddhist teacher, renowned Roshi Bernie Glassman, have been close friends. Inspiring and often hilarious, The Dude and the Zen Master captures their freewheeling dialogue and remarkable humanism in a book that reminds us of the importance of doing good in a difficult world.

Disappointing...even more so as I like Jeff Bridges and The Dude. Two guys talking about many different things and mostly senseless drivel. Zen is a crock of manure anyway (anything that advocates thinking about nothing is an abrogation of the evolutionary imperative to think), and Bernie Glassman spouts the lion's share of the nonsense in this book, but Bridges is surprisingly misinformed about a lot of what he says that's outside the acting world. Now, his revelations about his movie experiences were interesting, but they do little to offset the mind suck of the rest of the book.

Little intellectual substance here, but it was worth a shot. ( )

If there is one actor I'd like to know, it's Jeff Bridges. Buddhist, musician, artist, husband, human being.