Ending the Pursuit of Happiness: A Zen Guide

As I’ve said, my old teacher Joko Beck used to say that it took many, many years for students to finally discover what practice really meant, and when they did, most of them quit. That’s because the end of suffering that we realize we can achieve through practice turns out to be an end of separation from suffering.

We are all by now familiar with Rinzai’s old saying “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” That saying, once startling, is in danger of becoming a cliché, preventing us from experiencing the full force of the words. We need to “kill” any idea we have of the buddhahood being “out there,” or down the road or in any way outside ourselves.

Yet how many people continue to practice with the implicit goal of someday meeting Buddha? We may imagine we will meet him in the guise of an enlightened master—a qualitatively different order of being than ourselves—or that we will one day, after years and years of hard practice, finally become whatever it is we imagine we want to turn into.

Aristotle warned that every virtue, if taken to extremes, becomes a vice. So just as courage can turn into foolhardiness, punctuality can degenerate into compulsivity. Likes and dislikes can become rigid demands and entitlements; accepting everything can be the mask worn by resignation or fearful passivity.

That’s both the good news and the bad news: this is it. When we really see that’s true, we cannot help but laugh at our old pretensions, our old sense of specialness, our old certainty about the wonders we were going to find at the end of the rainbow. We’ve spent years facing the wall so that…well, so that we could spend years facing a wall. We hav

The verse says a teacher is always at hand—that sounds like good news. The bad news is that the teacher is life-as-it-is and that is the only teacher. Life as it is means the stream itself. It is always there to remind us that time’s arrow flies in one direction only. Our self-centeredness is, at bottom, our desire to stop time in its tracks, to ma

There is no one true way to practice, no single tradition that has exclusive possession of truth, no one teacher who is the unique, authentic embodiment of the Way. When I hear of students or even teachers claiming that theirs is the one authentic way that everyone should follow, I feel as if I were meeting a musician who was telling me that everyo

Questions ramify in endless directions; answers bring an end to possibility.

Rinzai’s radical use of buji tells us that Zen is no “thing” whatsoever. In his talk, he tries to cut off any notion we may have of what there is to do or what there is to accomplish. He spells out all the traps that his monks are likely to fall into—his way of flushing out their “secret practices.” Today, Rinzai is famous for answering questions w

Suffering ceases to exist when it is no longer something we experience as impinging on our life, as an unnecessary, avoidable intrusion that we finally learn to exclude from our lives once and for all.