Sublime

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

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.

Everybody knows it, but almost everybody is deluded into thinking there’s something more to learn, something hidden and esoteric that is revealed only to a special few. Only after years of searching do we find that there’s nothing more to find. Will we be relieved or disappointed? What is there to gain from practice, after all? We realize that our

And, unlike many Buddhists, he has not made a pretend Buddhist world to live in. He likes and dislikes this world with its physical pains and its pungent salami and the low, midday sun warming the window. He doesn’t yearn toward another world than this one.

“A roshi is a person who has actualized that perfect freedom which is the potentiality for all human beings. He exists freely in the fullness of his whole being. The flow of his consciousness is not the fixed repetitive patterns of our usual self-centered consciousness, but rather arises spontaneously and naturally from the actual circumstances of

Shunryu Suzuki addressed the assembly, “Each one of you is perfect the way you are and you can use a little improvement.”