Sublime

the knowing, the silent witness, the watcher. This awareness does not deny the pain and yet is beyond it. It allows the pain to be and yet transmutes it at the same time. It accepts everything and transforms everything. A door would have opened up for her through which she could easily join him in that space.

Torah, like koan study, often reveals itself to us precisely when we come to the limits of our own powers, our capacity to coerce an answer from it by dint of our rationality. This insight had seemed to come upon me from the outside, first as a glimmer of light from the Torah and then as an explosion of it.

that is the great and beautiful work of the path. Insight meditation, indeed perhaps even the whole of the Dharma, could be conceived, very broadly, as the cultivation of ways of looking that lessen dukkha, that liberate.

Although making sense of it has been challenging, I am surprised how straightforward it became once I found the two threads that held this sutra together. Basically, the teaching of the Lankavatara is similar to the approach used by later Zen masters who offered their disciples a cup of tea, then asked them to taste the tea. The cup of tea in this

The goal of Zen is to awaken to life as it is, rather than stay in the comparative dream world of our ideas about it.

Nirvana is a negative capability. In letting go of—“negating”—reactivity, one discovers a greater capacity—“capability”—to respond to life. To experience nirvana is to experience freedom from those attachments and opinions that prevent your own imaginative response to the situations you face in life. Nirvana is not the end point of the path but its

The Tathagata says that all beings have the buddha nature. This is the view of a true self. And he says that all beings possess wisdom uncontaminated by passion and a nature that is already complete. This is the view of a soul. He says that all beings are themselves already free of affliction. This is the view of a being. And he says that the natur