Sublime

So the terms wabi and sabi both find their roots in the nihilist Zen cosmic view, and between them convey the interplay between youth and old age, beauty and ugliness, life and death—the rhythms of nature.

I had never had wife and children, so there were no close ties that were difficult to break. I had no rank and salary to forgo. What was there to hold me to the world? I made my bed among the clouds of Ōhara’s mountains,35 and there I passed five fruitless years.

like the great nineteenth-century Ri-me master Paltrül Rinpoche, sleeping in ditches or hollows at night.

Khotanese monk’s name was Shikshananda,

The innocence of the first inquiry—what am I?—is needed throughout Zen practice.

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.

It was Prince Shotoku, second son of the emperor Yomei, whose work in founding monasteries has made his name synonymous with the founding of Buddhism in Japan, although it was to be many years before the Zen Buddhist movement gathered any real momentum.

One old koan tells the story of a student who asks his teacher for permission to leave the monastery. “Where do you want to go?” the teacher asks. “Around on pilgrimage,” replies the student. The teacher presses him, “What is the purpose of a pilgrimage?” After all, doesn’t practice teach us that everything we’re looking for is already right here?

If you think Zen is something lofty and esoteric, the master will give you a shout or slap for an answer. If you think it is abstract, you’ll be told it’s three pounds of flax or the oak tree in the garden. If you think it is beyond words and abstractions, the master may quote the sutras or a poem by Han Shan. If you think Zen is nothing but our ev