Sublime

constancy, enlightenment, peace, and long life.

I had many teachers, but the most central were two of the wisest Theravada teachers of the past century: one in Thailand, Ajahn Chah, and one in Burma, Mahasi Sayadaw.

The three volumes of Suzuki’s Essays in Zen Buddhism are an unsystematic collection of scholarly papers on various aspects of the subject, enormously useful for the advanced student but quite baffling to the general reader without an understanding of the general principles. His delightful Introduction to Zen Buddhism is rather narrow and

What is the sound of one hand? Stop the sound of the distant bell. Make Mount Fuji take three steps.

From the standpoint of Zen, this experience is the essential content of Buddhism, and the verbal doctrine is quite secondary to the wordless transmission of the experience itself from generation to generation. For seven years Gautama had struggled by the traditional means of yoga and tapas, contemplation and ascesis, to penetrate the cause of man’s

He started, “One, two, three . . .” He enjoyed the counting. There was nothing down to earth about it. The vastness of the galaxy was in each star. There were too many stars to count, and yet the count went on like a prayer. The next day he kept repeating to himself, “Count the stars in the sky.” As he drove and ate and talked to his family, he

THE NINTH GYALWANG KARMAPA, Mahāmudrā: The Ocean of Definitive Meaning, translated by Elizabeth M. Callahan

Teishin,