"The inspiration that guided monks and nuns in ancient times is our own deepest incentive as we establish our practice in a world that desperately needs new forms of kinship and love."
-Robert Aitken

Encouraging Words is a collection of short talks and brief essays that Aitken Rashi has offered his students at meditation retreats during the past two decades. They are arranged according to themes central to all spiritual seekers-attention, emptiness, coming and going, diligence, death and the afterlife, the sacred self, and the moral path. Aitken provides guidance on pursuing religious practice in a lay context, "re-casting the Dharma to include women, jobs, and family." He also charts his own quest to develop a set of moral codes in keeping with Buddhism's basic precepts and honoring the enormous ethical challenges faced in the twentieth century.

Encouraging Words was nominated for the Tricycle Prize for Outstanding Contribution to Buddhism in America.

ROBERT AITKEN (1917-2010) was first introduced to Zen in a Japanese internment camp during World War II. R. H. Blyth, author of Zen in English Literature, was imprisoned in the same camp, and in this setting Aitken began the first of several apprenticeships. After the war, Aitken often returned to Japan to study. He became friends with Daisetz T. Suzuki and studied with Nakagawa Suen Roshi and Yasutani Haku'un Roshi. In 1959 he and his wife, Anne, established the Diamond Sangha, a Zen Buddhist society with headquarters in Hawaii. Aitken was given the title Roshi and was authorized to teach by Yamada Koun Roshi in 1974; he received full transmission from Yamada Rushi in 1985.