Sublime

Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche

Bodhidharma’s Vast Emptiness

This meditation didn’t seem to be a new direction but perhaps it was a condition for a new direction. She found a little more space between her thoughts, the trees began to step near again, and she calmed down for a while.

In Japan we have the phrase shoshin, which means “beginner’s mind.” The goal of practice is always to keep our beginner’s mind.

The Buddha’s advice in the Lankavatara is for us to drink that cup of tea and not to concern ourselves with where that experience fits into some previously constructed matrix of the mind.

To hear sounds with the whole body and mind, to see forms with the whole body and mind, one understands them intimately. —Dogen

When Soto Zen founder Dogen said, “A Zen master’s life is one continuous mistake,” he was pointing out how mistakes and openhearted learning from them are central to spiritual life.

Again, the ocean and its waves come to mind.

In the words of Dogen, the thirteenth-century Zen master, “when we forget the self, we can remember the 10,000 things.”