Ending the Pursuit of Happiness: A Zen Guide

A curative fantasy is a personal myth that we use to explain what we think is wrong with us and our lives and what we imagine is going to make it all better.

It is inevitably true that life is suffering. But the reverse is also true: suffering is life. It is in the midst of suffering that we get to exercise so many of the virtues that make us human. Our sense of courage, justice, compassion, wisdom; all these things manifest and operate in and because of the reality of suffering. All those aspects of ou

Sitting still amid a certain amount of pain or restlessness is a very valuable form of discipline, but the point of Zen practice is not to train people to hold out under torture. Students can sit still and straight in chairs if sitting cross-legged is unbearable and people need to learn for themselves what amount of difficulty is useful for them to

We have to kill off any notion we have that there is something to attain, something to hold on to, something special we can become once and for all. Enlightenment is not a “thing” we “get” from practice. Anything we think we’ve gotten—even if it’s made of gold—can only get in the way. Only when there is nothing and nobody left to obstruct it will t

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.

When I give newcomers meditation instruction, I usually tell them to sit down and face the wall as if they were facing a mirror. I tell them that as they sit, their mind will automatically appear and display itself. When we sit in front of a mirror, our face automatically appears. We can’t do it right or wrong; the mirror is doing all the work. Whe

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.

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.

We are not like a rock in the river that is immovable as experience happens to it and around it. The “I” or the “self” is neither an unchanging observer nor the subject of experience. Everything, myself—or if you prefer, my “self”—included, is empty, or lacking an unchanging essence.

We have to dig down and find a way to make consciously explicit to ourselves those vague, half-formulated ways of shaping experience that are rubbing up against some inconvenient bit of reality and setting off that emotional reaction. Once we can make them explicit, they become simply one more thought that we can become aware of as it passes throug