More than a thousand years ago a Chinese Zen master wrote: Magical power, marvelous action! Chopping wood, carrying water... The message is as true today as it was then: the greatest lessons and the profoundest heights of the spiritual path can be found in our everyday life. It is the great challenge for people living in contemporary society to find the spiritual aspects of working in an office, store, or factory; balancing a checkbook; raising a family; or making a relationship work. How can we make all these daily activities a part of the path.' How can we apply the insights of the great spiritual traditions, and of our own experience, to the way in which we live and develop? This book is a guide -- a handbook filled with information, advice, hints, stories, inspiration, encouragement, connections, warnings, and cautions for the inner journey as we live it throughout our lives. Chop Wood, Carry Water contains much ancient wisdom, but the emphasis is on contemporary perceptions. Many of our guides have been known to humanity for millennia: they are the world's great spiritual teachers -- Christ, the Buddha, Lao Tse, Confucius. Others are contemporary teachers and healers, widely recognized and respected. All offer ways to integrate the events of modern living -- our work and play, our efforts at health and learning, our focus on relationships and family, our struggle with technology, money, politics, and more -- into the quest for spiritual fulfillment. Rick Fields is the author of How the Swans Came to the Lake: A Narrative History of Buddhism in America; Peggy Taylor teaches classes in self-healing and the Bates Method of vision correction and is a founder of New Age Journal; Rex Weyler is active in the ecological movement and is a founder of the Greenpeace organization; Rick Ingrasci, M.D., is a founder of Interface, an adult holistic center with a national reputation, All are editors of New Age Journal.