The clouds, the rains, the springs and aquifers, the storms and water tables, the brooks and torrents, the ponds and lakes—they are all one water system. Every part of this life is fully irrigated, fully alive with the loving energy of the ocean. Nothing is apart from the ocean. The water reaches everywhere.

And weirdly, nothing could be better. The one who sought, the one who wanted—they are gone. And all is well. In getting it, they lost themselves. And nothing could be better. Love consumed them.

if you can just get it, or at least a glimpse of it, through a retreat, a course, or perhaps a dose—if it’s really that easy to get, just the way you want, then isn’t there something somehow wrong with this picture? If it’s a genuine yearning, a longing, yet it can truly be easily satisfied simply by signing up for a course, then can you really be

In one koan, Yunmen Wenyan (864–949 CE) is asked, “How do you go beyond awakening?” He answers, “Rice cake.” That’s the end of the koan.

What is the sound of one hand? A nonsense question. Yet if we refrain from going into problem-solving mode, and don’t try to unravel it like a puzzle, then we can allow the strange question to hover in our minds, like a full moon rising in the evening sky as sunset is darkening into night. There the hazy moon is, floating low in the sky. So the koa

As a reader, you sense the tender devotion that they bring to each of these tasks and the deep affection they have for one another. You can feel the quiet holiness of their lives and their gentle, loving engagement with their home and with one another. They are at peace, even as they contemplate the eternal rest that awaits them, not too far off do

There is an old map of the process of spiritual awakening known as the Ten Oxherding Pictures. It comes out of ninth-century Chinese Buddhism, but can be applied more broadly, to the long arc of any spiritual life, as we come to inhabit our true place in the world more fully. In the first oxherding picture, “Seeking the Ox,” an oxherder realizes th

Our dreams, desires, and ambitions were in part a beguiling smoke screen, it turns out, and as long as we believed in them, we couldn’t see the truth. Perhaps they weren’t in fact as good as we had thought. Being too focused on getting the things we wanted may actually have been one of the things holding us back from a larger life.

To parse out emptiness further: on this level, we can see either that our sense of self is a self-conjured illusion or that the world through which we move is a kind of illusion—or both at once. The world is the complex of solids, gases, and liquids that we take it to be, yet at the same time, our actual experience of it is “gone,” as some Buddhist