we can become attached to our own sense of heroic renunciation. This involves the ego making a show of its own sacrifice, and laying the foundation for a new brand of self-centeredness. Extremes of asceticism, or an impulsive desire to become, or become known as, saintly or selfless may be self-centered parodies of the truly religious life.

in the Heart Sutra that says that there is “no path, no wisdom, and no gain.” I remember when I first realized that these lines seemed to directly contradict the message of the Four Noble Truths, which I had been taught was the basic formulation of the Buddha’s teaching. The line immediately preceding this one says that there is “no suffering, and

First, meditation practices that aim at cultivating samadhi, or states of clear, thought-free concentration, all too often end up fostering emotional dissociation and avoidance. Thus, rather than engage and work through the manifestations of fear, anxiety, anger, and self-centeredness as they emerge, meditation can create an oasis or bubble of

For most people, just the thought of being ordinary is a like a cross to a vampire; it’s the thing they fear the most. We want to be unique and special, not ordinary, and we turn to books on Zen, perhaps, to help turn us into the kind of special person we want to be.

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

We are not practicing to induce some special extraordinary state of consciousness in ourselves. It’s not something we can make happen. However, sometimes the only way to prove that to ourselves is to try our hardest to make it happen. Only when our best efforts fail, when one answer to our life’s koans after another is rejected, will we genuinely

One good student of skepticism is said to have come upon his elderly teacher stuck in ditch and unable to pull himself out. Having learned his lessons well, he knew there could be no conclusive argument for preferring being out of a ditch to being stuck in one, so he just walked on by, ignoring the old man’s calls for help! This story is no doubt

How often are we preoccupied in our sitting with judging thoughts? How often does one part of us say to another: “Be Quiet!” How often are we preoccupied with some version or another of the question, “How am I doing?” or “Why is my mind not becoming calm or quiet; why am I still feeling anger or anxiety?” We watch these same preoccupations

In the traditional Zen literature, we read of the Absolute and the Relative. Here, the Absolute refers to the experience of no separation between ourselves and this moment just as it is, of no separation and therefore no sense of a separate “self” and instead just the oneness of the whole universe. The Relative refers to our ordinary world of