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

Yet how many people continue to practice with the implicit goal of someday meeting Buddha? We may imagine we will meet him in the guise of an enlightened master—a qualitatively different order of being than ourselves—or that we will one day, after years and years of hard practice, finally become whatever it is we imagine we want to turn into.

Only the person who has renounced obsessive thoughts is a true monk.”

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?

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.