Sublime

The koan’s been working on me, and I on it. For a while, I’ve been working on the idea that the koan itself is a container, like this: “I don’t need to work on anything else, just these words of the koan; I don’t need to fall apart if I’m having a bad day.” The big negative emotions aren’t scaring me. I like to see how they feel in my body rather

and finally Tung-shan, whose Dharma heir be became. His comments are quoted by Hung-lien. Ma-tsu(709-788), aka Tao-yi. Disciple of Huai-jang and proponent of the teachings that “the everyday mind is the Way” and “this mind is the Buddha.” Among his students were Nan-ch’uan, Pai-chang, and Ta-mei. His comments are quoted by Hung-lien. Madhyamaka.

This koan resists the totalitarian impulse in spiritual paths.

Koans will change your idea of who you are, and this will require courage.

This is a true sentence. People who know me very, very well, upon hearing this sentence, will nod. It's a  good fit,  retrospectively, for the data.

However, if you are attempting to give someone a sense of me up-front, saying "Duncan Sabien is a teacher and a writer" is an unusually bad start.

Before I’d had the feeling that when you see the thusness of things it is because you have become something special, but I could see now that it was just how things really are. The world came forward to me and it wasn’t me going out to the world.

Surya Das, who looks 110 percent Jewish,

The Buddha once spent a night in a potter’s shed. In the same shed there was a young recluse who had arrived there earlier.1 They did not know each other. The Buddha observed the recluse, and thought to himself: ‘Pleasant are the ways of this young man. It would be good if I should ask about him’. So the Buddha asked him: ‘O bhikkhu,2 in whose name

But in the moment when Buddhism, when philosophy or religion, becomes another way of clinging to oneself through seeking a spiritual security, the two thorns become one–and how is it to be taken out? This, as Bankei said, is “wiping off blood with blood.” Therefore in Zen there is neither self nor Buddha to which one can cling, no good to gain and