Ending the Pursuit of Happiness: A Zen Guide

It may seem that these two basic insights, the psychological and the spiritual, are two sides of a single coin. Yet, in my experience, we do not automatically have one when we have the other. No insight is so total, no experience so thoroughly once-and-for-all, that there are not residues of our old fantasies and organizing principles left behind.

That star is me, everything is me! And like the star, everything is in its own way clear, bright, and perfect.

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

Sawaki retorted, “Absolutely not! Zazen is useless!” That “uselessness” is grounded in the realization that fundamentally there is nothing to gain and nothing needs fixing.

We all come to practice as clay buddhas. We want to escape something we believe is wrong with who we are, to escape whatever lays us open to suffering. We don’t realize that the attempt at escape is itself an engine of our suffering. But gradually our practice may allow us to come to terms with who and what we are, and we may suddenly realize that

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.

A clay buddha cannot pass through water. A golden buddha cannot pass through a furnace. A wooden buddha cannot pass through fire.

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

We may have had the ideal that practice will make us compassionate, and so we end up trying to do away with our self-centeredness or even do away with our desires—but in doing so we set up one part of the self in opposition to another part. We may say we want to dissolve the dualism of subject and object, but it’s the dualism of self-hate that we r