Sublime

—Alan Watts, The Way of Zen

There is an old koan about a monk who went to his master and said, “I’m a very angry person, and I want you to help me.” The master said, “Show me your anger.” The monk said, “Well, right now I’m not angry. I can’t show it to you.” And the master said, “Then obviously it’s not you, since sometimes it’s not even there.” Who we are has many faces,

Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche

Shunryu Suzuki

Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk who has been called the “world’s calmest man,” has spent a lifetime exploring how to live in kairos, albeit by a different name. He has taught it as mindfulness or maintaining “beginner’s mind.” He has written: “Mindfulness helps you go home to the present. And every time you go there and recognize

—Toni Packer

thought of the American Buddhist nun and bestselling author Pema Chödrön, who wrote, “The problem is that the desire to change yourself is fundamentally a form of aggression toward yourself.”

Rinzai’s radical use of buji tells us that Zen is no “thing” whatsoever. In his talk, he tries to cut off any notion we may have of what there is to do or what there is to accomplish. He spells out all the traps that his monks are likely to fall into—his way of flushing out their “secret practices.” Today, Rinzai is famous for answering questions