Bücher entstehen gewöhnlich aus guten Gründen. Diese hier nicht immer. Manchmal beginnt alles mit einem Foto, einem Hund, einer Kuh, einem Koan – oder mit der Frage, warum ein Ratgeber eigentlich unbedingt Rat geben muss.
Hier finden sich Bücher zwischen Erinnerung, Fotografie, Zen und gepflegtem Unsinn: ernst genug, um nicht belanglos zu sein, und schräg genug, um nicht vernünftig zu werden. Ein Blick hinein ist ausdrücklich erlaubt. Erkenntnis kann dabei auftreten, muss aber nicht.
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Books are usually written for good reasons. These are not always among them. Sometimes it begins with a photograph, a dog, a cow, a koan – or the question of why a guidebook must insist on giving advice.
Here you will find books somewhere between memory, photography, Zen and carefully cultivated nonsense: serious enough not to be trivial, and odd enough not to become sensible. Looking inside is expressly permitted. Enlightenment may occur, but it is not compulsory.
THE COW SAYS MU!
By Hinsley Forth
Not a self-help book. Not a guide. No advice. Just Nothing.
Have you ever wondered what the meaning of life is?
Have you spent hours searching for inner peace, enlightenment or at least a reasonably comfortable meditation cushion?
Have you ever considered asking a cow?
Perhaps you should.
Although you probably won’t like the answer.
Welcome to THE COW SAYS MU!
A delightfully absurd exploration of Zen, philosophy, mindfulness and the increasingly expensive business of doing absolutely nothing.
Meet Roshi, a Zen master whose spiritual achievements are occasionally indistinguishable from falling asleep. His wife, a woman blessed with considerably more common sense than patience, has her own ideas about enlightenment – most of which involve getting something useful done.
Then there’s Kenji, a devoted disciple struggling to understand teachings that become increasingly confusing the more carefully he listens.
And somewhere in the background lurks a pink elephant.
Wearing a hat.
Please don’t think about him.
Too late.
Presiding over this philosophical confusion is a cow.
She doesn’t meditate. She doesn’t attend retreats. She has never purchased a mindfulness subscription or considered becoming a better version of herself.
She simply says Mu.
Which may be the most sensible contribution anyone makes.
Across twelve chapters of philosophical misadventure, Hinsley Forth takes a thoroughly irreverent look at the search for enlightenment, the modern obsession with self-improvement and our remarkable ability to turn even the simplest things into complicated problems.
Beneath the absurdity, however, lies an inconvenient possibility:
What if the answers we spend our lives searching for aren’t particularly important?
What if doing nothing occasionally makes more sense than doing something?
And what if the cow has understood all this without understanding anything at all?
Written with dry British humour, philosophical mischief and a healthy distrust of anyone claiming to possess the secret of happiness, THE COW SAYS MU! is for readers who enjoy absurd comedy, unconventional philosophy and the occasional existential crisis.
It won’t teach you how to become enlightened.
It won’t transform your life in seven easy steps.
It may not improve anything whatsoever.
But it might make you laugh at the questions.
And sometimes, that’s quite enough.
The cow, naturally, couldn’t care less.
Mu.