Sublime

The retreat was to be under the direction of the Very Venerable Thrangu Rinpoche, a close dharma brother of Trungpa Rinpoche and one of the foremost teachers in the Kagyü lineage.

Shen-hsiu and Hui-neng, the two contenders to become the Fifth Patriarch’s successor, had written their competing poems on the monastery wall previously scheduled for scenes from the Lanka that the patriarchship and the future direction of Zen was decided.

Subhuti has just witnessed the compassion and detachment with which the Buddha performed his daily round of giving and receiving offerings,

As Zen poet Basho reminds us, The temple bell stops But the sound keeps coming out of the flowers.

it is clear that he and the early patriarchs of Zen preferred Gunabhadra’s version.

The calligraphy on the front of the binding reads nyorai in Japanese or tathagata in Sanskrit. This is a name for Buddha which means “he who has followed the path, who has returned from suchness, or is suchness, thus-ness, is-ness, emptiness, the fully completed one.”

One mark of a mature Zen student is a sense of groundedness.

Bankei (1622–1693) was a contemporary of Hakuin and for some time roshi at the Myoshinji monastery in Kyoto. Translations of his informal talks on Zen, directed especially to lay people, may be found in D. T. Suzuki’s Living by Zen (Pasadena, Calif.: P. D. and Ione Perkins, 1949), and in Lucien Stryk, ed., World of the Buddha (New York: Doubleday &

moment is enough.