Rinzai Roku (a celebrated Zen text of the T’ang dynasty) and the teachings of Bankei, the seventeenth-century Japanese master who, for me, represents Zen at its best.

But enlightenment, as the monk says, isn’t a point where everything stops and you’ve made it, forever surrounded by a halo of bliss. No, it is something alive, something that pushes you on every day, that calls you to return, whether you are a Daigyoman Ajari on Mount Hiei or a data-management assistant in an office in Hounslow