Sublime

“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

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.

Ajahn Amaro

Debra Chamberlin-Taylor,

Sometimes I think my role as a Zen teacher comes down to being the one person in the room who says, “I don’t know,” when everyone else is sure they know what to do—or more often than not, sure they know what somebody else should be doing.

Jack Kornfield tells the story of a particular evening when Hob was giving a Buddhist dharma talk. One evening, however, he found himself standing before a meditation group having forgotten who he was and why he was there. So he simply began to mindfully acknowledge out loud his experiences: “blank mind … curiosity, nervousness, calming, blank mind

A. T. Ariyaratane, a Buddhist elder, who is considered to be the Gandhi of Sri Lanka.