Psychological Studies in Zen Thought 
 
Hubert Benoit. 
 
Pantheon: 1955. First edition. Hardcover in a jacket. Octavo. There are tears on the top and bottom of the front cover's jacket fold. On the cover a slice runs from top to the bottom, paralleling the lines that margin the text. On the spine there is a hole near the crown and smaller tears on the heel. The back cover's fold has a deep tear but it is intact. An old bookstore's plate is on the bottom of that fold. Book is a little cocked and has slight soiling on the top-edge. Endpapers, half-title, and the last page of the index have soiling. The rest of the leaves are tanned and clean. 248 pages. Very good. 
 
Remains one of the essential books for Westerners who want not just to understand Zen but to experience its healing and liberating possibilities. Benoit was that rare breed we sorely miss: a practicing psychologist reading rigorously in a search for the cures to all the anxieties that ail us. Sample the intro by Huxley if you are still unconvinced. 
 
"Zen attaches no importance to theory as such, to the angle from which it studies the volume of Reality. It is this Reality alone which interests it, and it experiences no embarassment in moving round this complex object in order to obtain every sort of information from which an informal synthesis may result in our mind."