I gave this talk at our Full Moon Zen Thursday evening sit tonight. A recording follows the text.
This is Case 19 in the Blue Cliff Record:
Whenever anything was asked, Master Chu Ti would just raise one finger.
I’m going to break something of a taboo in Zen by speaking about metaphysics—the branch of philosophy that considers the fundamental nature of reality. Shakyamuni Buddha himself is said to have avoided metaphysical speculation. In Zen, talk about metaphysics in practice environments like this is bound to draw a finger—a finger held to the lips to say, “Shhh,” or perhaps the middle finger.
But Chu Ti in our koan likely would just hold his index finger up a foot or so in front of his chest, like this, responding very genuinely to whatever he had been asked. There’s nothing admonishing or flippant about his response. He’s responding directly and straightforwardly.
From one perspective, Zen frowns on metaphysical speculation—or at least lots of loopity-loop chatter about the basic structure of reality. From another perspective, we’re talking about it all the time. We can’t help it. It’s unavoidable. We are talking about it plainly and boldly, saying this is it. Nothing mysterious; nothing hidden.
The koan literature is full of cases in which a student asks a teacher some version of the question, “What’s the nature of reality?” “What’s it all about?” In Buddhist lingo, that’s expressed with words like, “What is Buddha?” “What is mind?”
Notice that “Buddha” and “mind” in these questions are isolated as something separate. The question already has thing-ified them. The question itself is constructed on an assumption that a foundational feature of reality as the questioner imagines it can be isolated, objectified, essentialized. In this construction, words like “Buddha,” “Buddha nature,” “mind, ” or the “Way” are doing the same sort of work the word “God” is doing in many versions of theism.
You can imagine how disappointed—or how suddenly illuminated!—many Zen students throughout the ages have been when an earnest question like, “What is Buddha?” drew a response like, “dried shit stick” or “three pounds of flax.”
Like Chu Ti, those teachers are offering a straightforward response from a Zen perspective. They’re not being flip. This is it, they’re saying. Just this.
And yet, and yet.
On the one hand, what they’re saying is simple and direct. Declarative. Decisive.
On the other, there is subtlety, nuance, paradox.
In the language of metaphysics, we might ask if Zen is pantheistic. Pantheism is the view that God—or whatever word one uses for the ultimate—is the dried shit or flax.
The Zen perspective arguably is closer to pan-en-theism, or God-in-everything.
A classic Zen metaphor for this perspective is the ocean and its waves. Our conscious awareness is usually trapped in, and only noticing and observing from, our experience of being the particular wave we are. But the wave emerges from and rests upon and is not separate from the ocean’s dark and quiet depths. The wave and the depths are all water.
This is a slight shift in perspective that maintains a sort of vitalizing, paradoxical tension. We are the ocean—we are not separate or separable from it in this instant of being-time—and yet it can’t be reduced to us or perhaps even to the sum of its parts.
Kensho experiences have this quality of recognizing our waveness as reaching to the full depth and breadth of the ocean. I recognize myself as a feature of something boundless and uncontainable. We somehow exist in and as that boundlessness.
It’s like Kabayashi Issa’s little verse in our Sutra Book:
The world of dew
is indeed a world of dew
and yet . . .
and yet . . .
There’s a Shroedinger’s Cat aspect to Zen metaphors about the nature of this.
But let’s not get too entangled in ideas and words. Big cosmic concepts like this, and our wrestling with them, can be useful to the extent they nudge our activity in the world, our experience, in a better direction or help us make sense of our experience through the rearview mirror.
Zen practice is fundamentally about our experience—including our mental experience, the thoughts rambling about in our skull, but its ultimate concern is the quality of our activity, individually and collectively. Our manifest, lived experience.
In Zen, metaphysics has implications for ethics. If the perspective I’m talking about becomes your intuition about reality, and increasingly your experience of it, it gets increasingly, personally uncomfortable to act in ways that treat someone or something as if it can be separated, objectified, and essentialized as ultimately good or bad. Qualified or disqualified to exist.
Noticing one’s impulse to make those distinctions—to tell stories like that—begins to weigh on one’s conscience. As Bodhidharma said, “There is nothing worth begrudging.”Ethics is a realm in which our stories about the nature of reality matter. Zen’s Bodhisattva Precepts are understood and, ideally, actualized from the perspective I’m talking about.
Whenever anything was asked, Master Chu Ti would just raise one finger.
This finger is connected to my hand, to my arm, to my body, to the Great Buddha body itself. Your finger, too.
It’s all as plain as the finger on your hand. The nose on your face.
It is the nose on your face.
The secret Zen adepts through the ages have been seeking is hidden in plain sight.
I gave this talk at our Full Moon Zen sesshin on April 18, 2026. A recording follows the text.
Here is the prose poem “This Moment is the Koan,” by Keizan Jokin:
Although we speak of practice, this is not a practice you can do.
Don’t try to fabricate Buddha; and don’t be concerned with how well or how poorly you think you’re doing.
Just understand that time is as precious as if you were putting out a fire in your hair.
Shatter obstacles and become intimate with awakening awareness. Arising from stillness, carry out activities without hesitation.
This moment is the koan. When practice and realization are without complexity, the koan is this present moment.
That which is before any trace arises and the scenery on the other side of time’s destruction, the activity of all Buddhas and awakened Ancestors, is just this one thing.
Just rest and cease; be cooled; pass numberless years as this moment. This is like coming home and sitting at ease.
“Tap your heels together three times and repeat, ‘There’s no place like home,’” Glinda the Good Witch tells Dorothy near the end of The Wizard of Oz. This incantation transports Dorothy back to the family farm in Kansas. Home had become a strange and dangerous place for her in late adolescence—but nowhere near as strange and dangerous, and ultimately wonder-filled and transformative, as the journey that began when she left.
Dorothy needs to escape home as the story begins. As it ends, she has a different perspective on home. Now she knows home is where her heart is, and she longs to return.
I think The Wizard of Oz is an underappreciated spiritual classic—perhaps not quite up there with Dōgen’s teachings, but close. 🙂
Dorothy doesn’t feel quite at home in her life, and then discovers her life as home. The scarecrow can’t think straight and then finds clarity. The tin man feels heartless and discovers love and compassion. The lion feels timid—separated from his nature—and regains his courage.
Ignorance and delusions replaced by clarity and wisdom. Heartlessness transformed into big, open-hearted love and compassion. Fear of life transformed into courage to meet it. Separateness transformed into connection. Restless, anxious wandering resolved into a sense of place wherever we are.
Well, that’s a pretty good summation of the arc of long practice; the arc of our journey. We arrive with a sense of lack and separation and discover wholeness. We come home.
Keizan offers a Zen coda to this story. He reframes it in the language and spirit of Zen.
We only imagine we are wandering from home when we take up practice, he says. In reality, we can’t leave home.
There is no ultimate doing well because there is no ultimate doing poorly. There is no ultimate difference between realization and practice. There is no becoming more Buddha than we are right now.
No homecoming because there is no going away. No departure; no return.
Just this. This precious moment. This moment is home.
What is home as this moment?
The word and idea of home likely evokes something different for each of us, depending upon our past and present experience. For some, home signals safety, warmth, comfort, contentment. For others, less so, or maybe not at all.
Keizan is pointing to a deeper meaning of home that is sensory but not sentimental. Home as a sense of intimacy, comfort, and ease wherever we are. Being home in this vast universe. Being home in our own skin. Not separating from this skin-bag here and now, as Shitou encourages us not to do—as if we could.
Whatever our associations with home life may have been as a child, and whatever they are as an adult, the message and gift of Zen is that we can discover a sense of okayness and ease here and now, in this moment. A sense of home amid whatever arises. A sense of home that isn’t dependent on our outward circumstances. A sense of home that abides. Abiding abode. Home that emerges continually.
Home-leaving is a huge theme in Buddhism historically, and it still is today in other parts of the world. It’s not just a metaphor. For millennia, people have been leaving their families, shaving their heads, and entering monasteries. For millennia, and still today in most forms of Buddhism, in most parts of the world, living as a monk is considered the most authentic, elevated form of spiritual life. The word “sangha” is reserved for the community of monastics in most corners of the Buddhist world.
Fortunately, those ideas are beginning to be contested and to dissolve, especially here in the West. Monastic life can be beautiful for those who are called to it. We should be grateful for the teachings and forms that evolved from monastic life, which are available to us householders as inspiration and potential raw material for use in our lives.
And we need more people to discover home at home, so to speak. Our families, workplaces, local communities, and nations need to come home at home. We home-stayers must claim and develop our own contemplative birthright and ways of life that honor and fully express it.
I’m not advocating for more corporate and school-based McMindfulness programs. I’m talking about reshaping and recentering our lives to realize—to experience and manifest—at-one-ment moment to moment.
Meditation is a one of our key practices, but there are others—our liturgy, bowing and chanting, study of the sutras, koan work, how we eat, work, and play, the Precepts, our many forms—all of it. And the spirit and practice of meticulousness we bring to it all. Reverence, which is to say loving attention. Loving attending. The practice and experience of presence. Pure presence.
Meditation, the core practice for which Zen is known and after which it is named, is not about efficiency gains on the job or even self-help. Our self gets the help it most needs when it discovers itself at home—by which I mean not separate from—this vast robe of liberation that is, quite literally, everything. All us. No one and nothing separate.
We know we’re home when that realization and experience overcomes us; when it becomes familiar. Steady. Trustable. Ordinary.
That is the ripest fruit of our practice. And it might just help us fall toward and find our ground in and as relationship, in and as our work, in our homes and the other places we inhabit. And sweeten our experiences there.
So bow three times and repeat, “There’s no place like home.” Know you’re already here, always have been, and always will be, in the bowing and repeating.
Here in this moment. In and as the scenery that has arisen, fleetingly, on this side of time’s destruction.
I gave this talk at our Full Moon Zen sit tonight. A recording follows the text.
Earlier this week Nick asked that Fran or I speak about war, peace, and Zen. I volunteered.
My first instinct for most talks is to reach for a koan or another teaching that speaks to a theme and then to build on it.
Quickly I realized this topic is so woven into the causes and conditions of my life, my past and my present, that I had to take a different approach. This talk will be more autobiographical than some, but hopefully I’ll manage to speak to Nick’s topic to his satisfaction and yours.
I don’t exactly come from a multi-generational military family but I did grow up aware of my dad’s service in the Air Force. He was stationed in the Middle East between the Korean and Vietnam Wars before I was born.
I also was aware of an uncle’s service in the Marines. He was a top sergeant during WWII, a decorated soldier who saw a lot of combat. He was wounded in a battle in the Pacific as he ran into fire to save members of his troop who’d been shot. He was at Pearl Harbor when it was bombed. He met my aunt, my dad’s sister, in a military hospital where she was a nurse. He was a lovely, gentle, humble man. He worked as an electrician after the war. He was into shortwave radio and model trains, hobbies that fascinated me and all my cousins. I couldn’t articulate it as a child, but somehow this juxtaposition of his bravery and competence as a soldier and his gentleness made a deep and lasting impression on me.
He had a nervous breakdown later in life. The things he experienced in combat finally overwhelmed him. He never talked about it with his kids and many nephews and nieces, but one of his grandkids eventually got him to agree to an interview for a school project. He spoke openly about his experiences for the first time. This grandson went on to become a Top Gun pilot, and eventually a Top Gun commander. The real Tom Cruise. He was the, or one of the, senior officers leading air operations in the Gulf War.
As a young kid, our classes and schoolyard play sometimes were interrupted by “civil defense drills.” Others here likely remember that. Whenever we heard the deafening sound of an air raid siren we took cover under our desks, as if they could protect us from a Russian atomic bomb blast and its radioactive fallout.
Neighbors had an encyclopedia set. I used to sit in their living room for hours reading about military history. I was fascinated by the uniforms, flags, and insignia. By the sense of honor and virtue that seemed to permeate it all. By the notion that people would risk and give their lives for a cause. Something they believed in. Something that seemed to be operating at levels even deeper than belief.
I went to high school in a small, hardscrabble town deep and high in the Colorado Rockies. One year the Army chose our town and the surrounding mountains as the location for its war game. I somehow was recruited to be one side’s secret civilian collaborator. I recruited a small group of friends to the cause. We snuck out of our houses after midnight as the game began and went deep in the mountains to meet paratroopers dropping from the sky. We helped coordinate covert actions for our side for the next two weeks. The game ended when we captured the other side’s commander at Pizza Hut, one of the few chain restaurants in town. I was there. I played some minor role in that operation I can’t recall.
Going to college wasn’t a given. Most of the 100 or so students in my class didn’t. A good friend resolved to attend West Point and I resolved to attend Annapolis (the Naval Academy) to become a Seal commander. We were both accepted and sent to the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs for our matriculation physicals. I failed the color vision test, so my acceptance was withdrawn. There were prior hints I was colorblind, but we didn’t really know until that moment. I was crushed.
I didn’t know what to do. My Catholic parents (who didn’t go to college themselves) told me to “go to the Jesuits,” so I enrolled in the nearest Jesuit school, which is in Denver. There my perspective began to shift. Reagan reinstated the draft. Compelled service bothered me at the time. (It still does, but I now see how voluntary service gives socially and economically privileged young people a pass.) I wrote “conscientious objector” all over my draft registration card. I explored pacifism in some of my classes. I began to study the art and science of dialogue.
Years later I spent considerable time in Berlin before the Wall fell. I moved there for a couple of years after it fell.
I studied and began practicing law before moving to Berlin. In truth, those couple of years in Berlin were my way of coping, or not coping, with my inability to reconcile what I’ll call the hard and soft sides of myself. At the time, law (like the part of me that had wanted to be a Navy Seal) was the hard side. The soft side had begun to express itself through contemplative spirituality—the Christian mystical tradition and Zen. Thich Nhat Hahn’s book Being Peace made a big impression on me during this time. It was my first acquaintance with the connection between contemplative spirituality and notions of peace. I began reading others who speak to this connection. Thomas Merton. Krishnamurti.
Tortured by my inability to reconcile hard and soft at that stage of life, I left law practice for Harvard Divinity School, where I planned to study the intersection of Christian mysticism and Zen.
But I had a crisis soon after I arrived. The hard side of myself missed the realm of practice; of change-making activity in the world. Around then the New York Times published an article about the massacre in Srebrenica at the end of the war in the former Yugoslavia. A picture of a Muslim woman who hung herself to avoid being slaughtered moved me to tears. I resolved then and there to understand how religion, and our beliefs and values more generally, get tangled up in conflict and how to untangle them.
I pivoted hard to studying negotiation and conflict resolution. I was fortunate to find mentors like Herb Kelman, a social psychologist who became the first and most longstanding backchannel mediator among Israelis and Palestinians, and Roger Fisher, an international law professor who is one of the founders of the negotiation field and who also became a mediator in armed conflicts. They helped pioneer the field of negotiation and conflict resolution because of their own painful experiences of war. Herb escaped the Holocaust as a child. Roger was a naval aviator in WWII who lost many friends in that war.
Today, as many of you know, I teach in this area and am involved in that sort of work myself.
What does all this have to do with war and peace and Zen? There’s war and peace and Zen in my personal story, but how does that all hang together and respond to Nick’s request?
Honor. Virtue. Belonging. These are deep-rooted human sentiments.
Buddha, Dharma, Sangha
Buddha: Oneness can become an ideal
Dharma: Individuals
Sangha: Individuals in community bound by an ideal
We can relate to each of these things—an ideal of oneness, ourselves, and others—narrowly, rigidly, and jingoistically. Sometimes Buddhists have. Think of the many Zen Buddhists in Japan during WWII who were warmongers. Think of some Buddhists in Burma today.
Or we can relate to them broadly, loosely, and inclusive of strangers and outsiders.
That’s better, but let’s not kid ourselves. We can’t deny our twin nature. However tolerant, accepting, and pacific one may be, we are hard-and-soft. We are open-and-closed. We favor those for whom we feel an affinity. Likely we always will. Perhaps that’s natural and good, to a point. A point we too often cross.
Perhaps the best we can aim for, perhaps good enough, is captured in the lovely lines of the hymn Finlandia:
Here is a photo following our Jukai ceremony last November during a sesshin at Providence Zen Center. I’ve included a few other photos from that retreat, including one of the altar memorial card for my mom, who had passed away just a few weeks earlier.
I gave this talk at Full Moon Zen’s Zazenkai on January 31, 2026. A recording follows the text.
A phrase from our Oryoki meal chant popped into my head the other day: “This meal of ten benefits nourishes us in our practice. Its rewards are boundless, filling us with ease and joy.” I chuckled as I thought about my experience of Oryoki practice during my first many sesshins. That line always stung. I was feeling anything but ease and joy as I tried to observe all our minute meal forms while my knees, ankles, and back ached and my mind was racing.
Dōgen repeats this phrase at the end of his short essay “Rules for Zazen.” He tells us zazen “is the great dharma gate of ease and joy.” I can hear his novice monks groaning, “Yeah, right.”
Some of us have been dealing with some pretty tough stuff lately, myself included. Even those of us who haven’t lost a loved one, separated from a partner, had surgery, or dealt recently with some other major challenge may be feeling there isn’t much ease and joy going around generally these days. Many of us are feeling the weight of the world. There are immigration raids and shootings, an affordability crisis, wars and threats of new ones.
So what’s all this talk of the Zen path being about “ease and joy”? Where is the ease and joy? Where do we find it? How does a path that includes sitting uncomfortably for hours on end and eating in silence while performing tedious rituals help us find it?
I don’t intend to “Zen out” by pretending this path is all bliss all the time, or that it leads to blissful feelings all the time. Life is hard. In some ways, Zen confronts us with and amplifies this reality.
The notion of ease in Zen isn’t about reaching a place where life is without difficulty. It’s not really about external circumstances, or what we can’t control. It’s about our own perspective and disposition. A better perspective and disposition certainly can help improve our circumstances, but not entirely or mechanistically. There are causes and conditions beyond our immediate influence.
Ease is about how we meet things. About our capacity to be present to challenging circumstances with openness and curiosity. Without being reactive and making them worse. This tends to be harder to pull off in contexts that feel stressful. For some of us, that means speaking or other activities when we’re being observed by others. For some, it’s the realm of intimate relationship. For some, it’s moments that limit our agency, like having to keep a commitment we made earlier but don’t want to keep now.
Zen can help us experience more ease in this sense. We become better a coping with the small challenges practice presents, and so we become better at coping with other challenges. We relax our grip on our sense of self—which, in case you hadn’t noticed, is the central character in all our dramas. We learn to be nakedly present to what is; what’s arising moment by moment. Less anxious, or less reactive as anxiety arises.
Joy in Zen isn’t an amped-up, exuberant state. Zen has nothing against exuberance, but a constant, elevated mood is not the goal. We might even say that happiness as we tend to talk about it in the West is not the goal of Zen practice. Again, Zen has nothing against feeling very happy. But, honestly, who among us is in an elevated mood all the time, never frustrated or upset? That’s not a realistic goal, nor would a constantly elevated mood be a mark of maturity, of an integrated self. Psychologists see that sort of presentation as a defense mechanism against less pleasant feelings, like anger or shame, one might have a harder time integrating.
A better synonym for joy in the Zen sense might be contentment, which is really about an abiding sense of appreciation for our life as a whole and each thing in it. Even the difficult things. If we look closely and are honest, there often are past, present, and possible future blessings mixed into challenging experiences. We need to allow ourselves to feel the hard stuff: sadness, grief, and the like. Let it move through us. But let’s not miss the diamonds in the rough either. A baseline experience of joy is about noticing small things and diamonds in the rough.
Zen practice can help us experience more joy in this sense. Our friend Bob Waldinger had his first, big opening during Oryoki practice deep into a sesshin. He’d been experiencing all the discomfort and hardship most of us experience in the early days of Zen practice, and even beyond the early days. At one point during the meal he became totally aware of and present to a single grain of rice in his bowl. Bob, the grain of rice, and all things merged in that instant. Total presence. Total appreciation. Total joy.
So perhaps when we hear that our simple meal and fussy, difficult way of eating, or our long hours sitting still are dharma gates of ease and joy, we can recalibrate a bit. We can think of Zen as a path of presence to and contentment with what is; as an invitation and opportunity to meet what is differently than we otherwise might.
We are confronted with what is here, now, whether we like it or not. We have no choice in the matter presently. Our only choice is about how we receive and respond to it.
I gave this talk on January 15, 2026. A recording follows the text.
This is Case 27 in The Blue Cliff Record:
A monk asked Yun Men, “How is it when the tree withers and the leaves fall?”
Yun Men said, “Body exposed in the golden wind.”
I had a mysterious dream thirty-five years ago. I didn’t understand it until earlier this week. It’s hung about me all these years like a koan.
I was living in Berlin, Germany. I had traveled south to the Black Forest in Bavaria to attend a retreat with Sogyal Rinpoche, a Tibetan Buddhist teacher.
One night there I dreamt of an important friend meditating serenely. She and I had been very close years earlier. I hesitate to add this detail, because it was not an erotic dream, but my friend was not fully dressed. (For the record and for what it’s worth, I had never seen her like this.) Now I understand that both our close friendship and her naturally exposed state in this dream are important details.
A strange word accompanied this image of my friend meditating: Bekommweg.
That was the whole dream. The image of my friend meditating and this word.
Bekommweg is not a real German word. It’s a mashup of two other words. Bekommen means “to receive.” “Weg” means way and also “away.” “Wegwerfen” means to throw away. This sense of throwing away, or casting away, was how I understood the “weg” in “bekommweg” when I woke from my dream.
It’s this strange word that has hovered like a koan all these years. What did it mean?
It finally came to me a few days ago. I was ready to receive its meaning.
It means receiving by letting go. Translated literally, bekommweg would be something like receive-away. We also could translate it as the receiving way, or the path of receiving, but receiving by letting go best captures the sense of the message encoded in my dream.
This is the only way we can receive. Receiving by letting go is what our Zen practice and teachings are all about.
This is zazen. We sit openly, receiving everything, holding nothing. We sit intimately, deeply connected to ourselves and all else. We sit completely exposed.
This is non-attachment, which is the only sensible and sustainable orientation to experience in a world of constant change; an existence marked by impermanence.
Non-attachment is not indifference or distance. It’s total presence. It’s non-separation. It’s meeting everything and everyone as subject, as the center of the universe—a universe of which we also are center. Non-attachment is the antithesis of meeting another as an object to which we conceivably could attach.
This is the only path of true intimacy in relationship. We can’t genuinely be intimate with someone we objectify. Someone we try to possess or control, however subtly and whether we experience ourselves as needing to control from above or from below. Nor can we genuinely be intimate if we’re trying to be too possessed or in control of ourselves in the relationship; if we’re too bounded. Intimacy requires vulnerability, exposure, relinquishment of control, real peer-to-peer engagement. No above or below. Boundaries, but not impenetrable boundaries through which nothing truly affecting can come or go.
We must let go to experience intimacy, to receive it.
Sometimes what we must let go of is entirely intangible. A belief, a desire, a feeling, or a personal tendency that no longer serves us or others we care about. We must change in place, so to speak. We let go of something inside us to make way for the uncontainable—what’s truly alive, what’s real—rather than the golden calf or piece of shit conjured by our imagination.
Sometimes we must let go of something tangible, maybe even before we have fully let go of our beliefs, desires, or feelings about it. Maybe we must let go of an object we cherished, money we’ve lost, an opportunity, a role, a loved one who has passed, a child who has left the nest or should, a relationship.
We must learn to let go of both the tangible and the intangible. Letting go means truly letting go. Accepting what comes. Even if it’s a parting.
Life is a continuous parting. Letting go of what was to make way for what’s actually here or what’s arriving. The only way truly to be here, receiving all life has to offer, is to reconcile ourselves to letting go.
It’s the only way to be intimate with life.
Time passes swiftly, even when we wish it didn’t. Imagine if we could grab onto time as it’s passing, like grabbing a rope being dragged over the ground by a wild horse on the run. We latch onto the rope at some moment in time to try to obtain or freeze-frame some state or situation we favor, and then we find ourselves being dragged across the ground, in agony but holding on for dear life, afraid to let go.
Holding onto experience is impossible. We only make ourselves and others miserable if we try to contain or control the uncontainable. If we try to make anything or anyone conform to our self-serving, idealized notion of it or them.
The tree withers. It doesn’t resist its withering. It lets go of its leaves. Releases them to the golden wind that’s bending its branches and peeling its bark.
This all may sound a bit stoic, but we simply can’t receive by holding on. We can’t receive if our hands are full or clenched into fists.
We can’t receive if we won’t let go of our complaints, grudges, and fixed views about others. If we keep them imprisoned on the other side of a stone wall as they grow and change beyond the barriers we erect, which limit our field of vision. We might need to change ourselves. We must at least step out from behind our wall; be present to perceive and receive them.
Our bodies are forever changing, circumstances are changing, those around us are changing, our relationships with others are changing. We can’t hold onto what was, nor what never was that we have imagined or wished for. We can only ever welcome what is and what’s to come.
Whatever may come, we must let go to receive it.
I’ll close by rereading the poem “Lucky” by the Buddhist nun Bhadra that we chanted during our liturgy:
You always considered yourself lucky
because things seemed to work out
the way you wanted.
Now luck has a different meaning.
Lucky to be walking a Path that finds peace—in the arising and passing
I gave this talk at our Full Moon Zen Sunrise Sit today. A recording follows the talk.
This morning let’s return to a koan I’ve focused us on twice recently. Here are the first few lines of Case 19 in The Gateless Gate:
Chao-chou asked Nan-ch’üan, “What is the Tao?”
Nan-ch’üan said, “Ordinary Mind is the Tao.”
Chao-chou asked, “Should I try to direct myself toward it?”
Nan-ch’üan said, “If you try to direct yourself you betray your own practice.”
What is this ordinary mind we bring to practice? This mind that both seeks and is the Way?
Well, for Chao-chou at this pivotal moment in his journey, as for many of us, it’s a mind that wills itself to seek the Way, not believing it is the Way, despite Nan-ch’üan’s assurances.
It’s a mind that wills itself to seek itself through practice. To meditate. To sit with koans. To seek guidance from teachers.
Chao-chou asks if he should will his mind to move toward his mind, whatever the heck that could mean. The dog chases its tail.
We find Zen teachers through the ages doggedly insisting this is it. Just this. Ordinary mind is the Way. The Great Way is not difficult. Just avoid picking and choosing, including not choosing against our picking-and-choosing mind.
This all seems quite paradoxical from the perspective of the Way-seeking mind. We tend to come to Zen practice both enamored with and imprisoned by our will; both seeking to amplify it in some sense and yet wanting to be released from its grip and to transcend it. We make an effort to practice Zen but are told it’s ultimately about no effort.
There really isn’t a word used in Japanese Zen that precisely equates to our Western concept of will. But there are three other words used in Zen that are very interesting for our purposes.
There’s Daifunshi, which gets translated as Great Determination in the Three Great Essentials, the Three Pillars of Zen: Great Doubt, Great Faith, and Great Determination. Daifunshi connotes fierceness, heat and energy, urgency, almost indignation. This is the spirit, the drive with which many of us take up practice. It’s seen as a virtue, particularly early on when Zen practice can be rough sledding, as we say in Colorado.
Then there’s kokorozashi. Kokoro means heart-mind; our whole being. Zashi means intention or aspiration. Kokorozashi is the personal intention to commit our whole being to practice. It doesn’t convey that sense of fierceness and urgency. It’s not merely intellectual or emotional either. It’s about orienting of our whole self toward practice.
And then there’s gan. This is a very interesting word. It’s the word that gets translated as “vow,” as in The Four Great Vows. “Beings are numberless, I vow to save them” and so on. But something definitely is lost in this translation. The spirit of gan is transpersonal. It’s about participation in something that transcends us individually and even transcends humanity. Gan is about recognizing and expressing our alignment with—our non-separation from—the universe, the Absolute, Oneness, Interbeing.
The experiential arc of Zen practice is a progression from daifunshi to kokorozashi to gan. Progressively feeling each of these aspirations in our bones—being them.
We ultimately exercise our will to discover it as permeable to, permeating, and subdued by and in something larger than our personal will as we once experienced it. But that mind and the will and willfulness we bring to practice along the way are it, too, we also discover. Nothing is excluded.
“The ego wants to be present at its own funeral,” the Tibetan teacher Chogyam Trungpa was fond of saying. That’s amusing, and poignant, and characteristically quotable, but I’m not sure it’s quite right.
The ego doesn’t die exactly. As our sense of self is pacified, it discovers it can slip through the bars of its prison cell; that the door is unlocked.
To mix metaphors, and koans, and to bring us full circle, we also discover our buffalo tail still gets stuck in those bars. We come to accept that; progressively take things more lightly; even chuckle at how our will gets in the way, as the Way—a way that becomes progressively less fraught and easier to walk as we travel it.
I gave this talk at our Full Moon Zen evening talk on December 18, 2025. A recording follows the text.
Tonight, I want to talk about different modes and styles of Zen practice and teaching. I’ll give you the conclusion up front. The point I want to make is that there are different ways we can practice and different strengths students and teachers may have. And it’s all good. The many ways are the Way.
I want to use two koans from the collection Entangling Vines to illustrate this point. I’ll read them and then I’ll say a bit more.
This is Case 78, Mazu’s Moon Viewing:
Once Baizhang Huaihai, Xitang Zhizang, and Nanquan Puyuan were attending Mazu as they viewed the autumn moon. Mazu asked them what they thought of the occasion.
Xitang said, “It’s ideal for a ceremony.”
Baizhang said, “It’s ideal for training.”
Nanquan shook his sleeves and walked away.
Mazu said, “Zhizang has gained the teachings, Huaihai has gained the practice, but Puyuan alone has gone beyond all things.”
This is Case 123, Comparing Three Students of Linji:
In the “Zen Master Huiran of Sansheng Temple” chapter of the Treasury of Bright Light, Juzhou Baotan says:
The disciples Baoshou Zhao, Sansheng Huiran, and Xinghua Cunjiang under Linji were much like the disciples Baizhang Huaihai, Guizong Zhichang, and Nanquan Puyuan under Mazu.
Baizhang resembled Mazu in his strength of character; Guizong resembled Mazu in his depth of talent; and Nanquan resembled Mazu in his greatness of mind. In the same way, Baoshou resembled Linji in his sincerity, Sansheng resembled Linji in his keenness, and Xinghua resembled Linji in his subtlety and depth.
The sincerity of Baoshou is seen in how he applied the staff to the clear blue sky, and in how he struck Rivet-and-Shears Hu. The keenness of Sansheng is seen in his exchange with Yangshan Huiji, and also in the way he struck Xiangyan, pushed over Deshan, and extinguished Linji’s True Dharma Eye. The subtlety and depth of Xinghua is seen in his scattering of pearls in the purple-curtained room, and in the way he waved his hand two times in front of the monk’s face. Though they each gained but a single of the master’s qualities, still Linji’s Zen has lasted a hundred generations. If all his qualities were grasped, how could Linji’s Zen fail to flourish for a thousand or ten thousand generations?
What always troubles me is that if the stick and shout are not applied to the present generation, Linji’s Dharma will decline. Why should there be anything that later generations cannot do if they but make the effort? The problem is that their teachers have not yet fully penetrated Linji’s Dharma. It is like drinking water and knowing for oneself whether it is cold or warm. Xinghua’s stick of incense—this was gained through hardship and effort. Therefore Linji’s Dharma flourishes.
Ceremony and text, meditation and koan practice, and just living one’s life without fussing too much about such things. Going beyond as Puyuan did.
We’re here practicing Zen altogether in part because another religious tradition has similar wisdom around the idea that there are many different modes of practice, and it’s all good. I’m speaking here about contemplative Christianity and the Trappist monastic order specifically. Many of you have met my teacher, Kevin Hunt, who is 91 or so. He’s been a monastic, a Trappist, since his late teens. And, lucky for us, he joined the Trappist order, which is the strictest and most austere monastic order in the world, certainly within a Catholicism, which has most of the monastic orders existing in the world under its roof.
The reason we’re lucky is the Trappists have this interesting idea about prayer. Prayer can be anything, and as a Trappist, you have complete freedom to pray as you pray. So if the way you seek the divine, if prayer for you is basketball, then during prayer time you play basketball. That’s not what most people do. But, within reason, however you’re called to the One, to unity, to prayer, it’s respected.
Kevin took up Zen practice early in his journey as his form of prayer. There’s a story there. He was called to silent contemplation, but he kept nodding off in the pew when he’d tried to sit silently to prayer. He’s fall asleep. He stumbled across a book on Zen, saw people sitting cross legged, and figured he’d give that a try. It worked! That was how his initial interest in Zen was sparked. The story goes on, of course.
We might all be doing Zen practice if the Trappist order didn’t have such a permissive tradition or didn’t honor diversity in that way. But we might not be doing it all here together. I may never have become a Zen teacher. In our first koan, Mazu seems to be saying that going beyond his words is better than ritual, better than studying the teachings, better than meditation, better than koan practice. But I don’t really think that’s his point. I think he’s pointing to discovery of the fullness of emptiness, which Puyuan represents, as the ultimate purpose of all of our practices: ritual, studying texts and teachings, introspection practice, and everyday life is practice. Some of us gravitate more towards one dimension of practice than others, but it’s all practice and it’s all good. We can and hopefully will come to know it all as expressions of the fullness of emptiness.
The second koan illustrates, for me, how different people, different students and teachers, have different temperaments and different positive qualities. Different strengths. And that’s okay.
Mazu embodied strength of character, depth of talent, and greatness of mind. Linji embodied some different qualities: keenness, sincerity, subtlety and depth. Each of three students of each of these teachers embodied one of their three qualities. There are rare personalities like Mazu and Linji who have many positive traits rolled up into one. But most of us don’t have multiple superpowers. Each of these students that only had one of superpower went on to become an important teacher in his own right, transmitting the Dharma. The point of the koan is that the Dharma continues and hopefully flourishes through the ages if each of us develops and shares our strengths with others, and if others make themselves receptive to what each of us has to share.
Taken together, these two koans illustrate the reality that it takes a village to practice. They illustrate how we’re all part of and co-constructing that village. Each of us needs different things. We resonate on somewhat different frequencies. None of us can be all things to all people all the time. We need to look to different sources of wisdom and teaching. It takes different types of contributions to make a community. I really encourage all of us to deeply realize this about teachers, in particular. In the Zen tradition, individuals and communities and teachers themselves can get into a lot of trouble if they idolize teachers too much.
Each of us has our strengths and weaknesses; things we’re good at and things we’re less good at; different temperaments. And it’s all good. Together our frequencies can mix in ways that make music or that make that annoying scratchy static sound. It all depends on knowing and accepting and coordinating and appreciating what each of us, and what each of the various forms and elements of practice that make up our tradition, have to offer.
Together we make sangha: community. That’s a really important idea across all the world’s ancient wisdom traditions. Islam has the notion of the Umma, which is kind of our idea of sangha. The Christian tradition talks about the church this way, or the Body of Christ as sangha. In our tradition, we see deeply, we go beyond, by realizing the unity of the three wheels: giver, receiver, and gift.
I gave this talk on November 25, 2025, at our Full Moon Zen Sunrise Sit. A recording follows the text.
This is case 14 in The Gateless Gate, Nanquan Kills the Cat. Eric, cover your ears. For those of you who haven’t heard this koan, be forewarned. There’s one gruesome bit, particularly if you’re a cat lover like Eric.
Nan-ch’üan found monks of the eastern and western halls arguing about a cat. He held up the cat and said, “Everyone! If you can say something, I will spare this cat. If you can’t say anything, I will cut off its head.” No one could say a word, so Nan-ch’üan cut the cat into two.
That evening, Chao-chou returned from the outside and Nan-ch’üan told him what happened. Chao-chou removed a sandal from his foot, put it on his head and walked out.
Nan-ch’üan said, “If you had been there, the cat would have been spared.”
You’ll be glad to know most subsequent Zen teachers through time maintain that Nanquan just mimicked killing the cat. I guess we’ll never know.
What were the monks of the eastern and western halls arguing about? Something speculative was dividing them, no doubt. Does the cat have Buddha nature or not?
But I want to talk about our internal divisions. About ambivalence. Sometimes we have quarreling eastern and western halls within ourselves. Two impulses or perspectives, each of which seems to have worth, which tug at us, and we experience them as incompatible. Our heart and mind is divided.
From a Zen perspective, it’s the reification, the concretization of this dividedness—our captivation by it, our captivity to it—that kills the cat, not Nanquan’s blade. Nonquan’s cut is an expression of oneness in response to divideness. His blade mends rather than separates.
We find a range of perspectives on ambivalence across cultural, religious, and philosophical traditions. Ambivalence about ambivalence, it seems.
Our English word ambivalence is a mashup of Latin words meaning “both” and “value.” It was invented by a psychologist who treated schizophrenia to describe one characteristic of that condition. But psychology has since cataloged pros and cons of what we might call garden variety ambivalence. In our youth, it can help us maintain emotional distance from a caregiver who isn’t trustworthy or discover our agency and develop independence if and as we become ambivalent about (no longer fused with) a trustworthy caregiver. But it also can cause decision paralysis and inhibit action, keeping us stuck.
Christianity’s perspective on ambivalence isn’t so spacious and balanced. It generally takes a dim view of ambivalence. The Gospel of Matthew (6:24) tells us, “No one can serve two masters.” Elsewhere (James 1:8) we read that “a double-minded man is unstable in all his ways.” There’s certainly truth in that. Each of us probably knows someone captive to ambivalence who is unstable in all their ways. Maybe you’ve been there yourself.
In philosophy and literature we get a range of perspectives, but mainly a lot of sympathy for this common human experience and recognition that it often produces tragedy or pathos. Think of Hamlet’s question: “To be or not to be.” His character is ambivalent about so much, including existence itself.
The Zen perspective is something different altogether. From a Zen perspective, there’s no fundamental division, ever. People, cats, objects, perspectives, feelings—each of the 10,000 dharmas—is distinct, but there’s no sense in which anything is separate. There is a fundamental oneness to everything, always, including any of us when our heart and mind feels divided. There’s no place to go when we try to hide, metaphorically anyway. We can’t hide from ourselves; from any part of us. The problem is our mental habit of separating, which generates the constructs that divide and paralyze us. We disintegrate, decompose, not realizing the wholeness we are right now, however we are.
Many of our dilemmas and debates won’t be resolved by more thinking and arguing. Zen prizes activity. Doing. Living into and through obscurity toward daylight. We are form. Emptiness manifest. Doing is form. Doing transforms.
If loving someone or something half-heartedly is all you can manage now, love half-heartedly with all your heart. Will you resist the impulse to say or do something kind, and can you truly be one with kindness, in that moment, as you say or do it, not objectifying that kindness as it comes forth, but opening to it, letting it work on you even as you are the vehicle, the embodied expression of kindness? Something good might be returned to you, and your heart might begin to mend if you are willing to receive it. Or, if you know in your heart of hearts that your heart must break, let it break.
When you are stuck, be fully stuck. Don’t force quick fixes to your stuckness. You probably won’t think your way out of it. Each of us is in a call and response relationship with the other 9,999 Things in this vast robe of liberation—the Universe. We’re the Universe calling to itself. Watch and listen for how the Universe is bidding you to respond. As Carl Jung said, using the language of theism, “Bidden or not bidden, God is present.” Trust your instincts. Respond. Be responsive. Be a part (not be apart). Take part. Participate.
Putting one’s sandal on one’s head was a sign of mourning in ancient China. Chao-chou wasn’t morning the cat. He was mourning his fellow monks’ loss of life. Zen practice came so they could have life, and have it more fully. They didn’t get it.
I gave this talk on November 13, 2025, at our Full Moon Zen sesshin at Providence Zen Center. We had a Jukai ceremony the previous night, during which eight of our sangha members received Zen’s sixteen Bodhisattva Precepts. A recording follows the text.
It is wonderful to be here with you. I’m so happy. This feels like something of a reunion. I think we’ve all, if I’m not mistaken, come from out of state. Even Cheryl, who used to live a stone’s throw away. Some of us just traversed one state to get here, but others traversed several, and some even got on the plane. I’m just so happy that we’ve all made an effort to be here together in this beautiful place. I’m always awestruck sitting here and looking out of the windows, whatever the weather’s doing. It’s beautiful. I’m tempted to say we can’t make it any better with our words. But words are it, too.
Our theme for this sesshin is being a Buddha, and I want to explore the practice of living by vow as being Buddha. In our Jukai ceremony last night we said the precepts are not rigid commandments to be blindly followed but instead are a bridge—a bridge between the Buddha nature, the truth at the heart of our existence as we sense it wants to express itself, on the one hand, and the manifestation of its expression in our daily lives, on the other hand.
I know from conversations with each of you, including a couple conversations last night, that some of us grew up in a Christian tradition with the notion of sin. And, if you did, maybe your tradition’s notion of sin; and its ethical principles, like the Ten Commandments designed to discourage sin; and the way people talked about and related to those things, did feel like rigid commandments. Maybe.
But what does this word sin mean, really? It has linguistic roots and it also has a theological gloss or interpretation.
What are the linguistic roots? In both Old English and in precursor languages to German, it’s straightforward. Sin is moral wrongdoing, which was understood in terms of deviation from divine law. It meant deviation from God’s law in this early European context in which the notion of sin began to take shape. The word also conveyed a sense of “being” or “true existence,” suggesting that sin is deviation from truth or being itself. So, linguistically, etymologically, sin also suggests deviation from that which is true; deviating from being or existence itself—or, in Zen terms, we might say not being Buddha, not being oneself, not being one’s highest self.
When the Christian Bible was translated from Greek into Old English, the Greek word that was translated as sin is an archery term that means “missing the mark.” I kind of like that because I used to practice Kyudo, which is Zen archery. The archery reference is lovely, I think. Linguistically, and in theistic terms, sin is deviating from godliness or from ultimate truth. It’s missing the mark.
In our non-theistic Zen idiom, we could think of God as oneness or the Absolute, which all relative things like you and me manifest and express. Missing the mark is thinking speaking or acting in some way that denies or obscures this reality of oneness.
When we speak about the Three Treasures, Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha—which are the first three of our sixteen precepts—we sometimes translate Buddha as oneness. To be Buddha—which we can’t help but be, but which is a reality that we’re not always awake to, and which we can awaken to—means to know and to feel this oneness as ourselves, as others, and to live it. It’s to know that we’re distinct, but in no sense separate.
I said earlier that, in the Christian tradition, there’s a linguistic root to the notion of sin, but there’s also theologizing about it. Sin is sometimes theologized about in terms of separation; separation from what is ultimately true and real. And here we find a tight connection to Zen. If I had to pick just one word to sum up the Zen Way, it might well be non-separation. Or, to state it positively: oneness, wholeness, integration. Thich Nhat Hanh’s word for this was interbeing.
Bernie Glassman, our Dharma great grandfather, in his book about the precepts, really summed it all up by saying that the precepts and all the teachings are about realizing that all is Buddha. Oneness. It’s no surprise that Nancy Mujo Baker titles her book on the precepts, which is the main text for our precepts study group, “Opening to Oneness.”
I’m a big fan of a contemporary philosopher whose name is Terry Warner. He taught at BYU. His “secular” philosophical work is deeply informed by his Christian faith. In one of his big philosophical themes, which lies at the intersection of philosophy and psychology, is self-deception. He says we almost always know when we are about to miss the mark, to separate. He says we very often have a flash of clear insight before we transgress or miss the mark, and that we betray the reality of oneness when we act in a way that’s contrary to that higher standard, to hitting the mark. We separate from our Buddha nature. We separate from others. We separate from truth itself or reality in that moment.
Warner is very influenced by Martin Buber, the Jewish philosopher and mystic, who distinguished between what he called I-Thou and I-You modes of relating. I-Thou seeing the divinity, or we might call Buddha Nature, in others and in all things. When we’re in an I-You mode, we’re objectifying and instrumentalizing others; making ourselves separate from them. And you know what? We’re also objectifying ourselves when we do this, which is to say separating from our own true nature.
With all that as background, I thought we might just walk through each of the ten Grave Precepts, briefly, one by one, and look at how they encourage us to aim towards wholeness or interbeing; not to separate. Really, all 16 precepts are about non-separation. Each of the three treasure—Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha—is a different way of saying that all is Buddha. They are different angles on the reality of oneness, and we have a context, a community, in which we discover it and make it real. The Three Pure Precepts—ceasing from evil, doing good, and helping others—begin to make that reality of oneness more concrete. They help us think about it more concretely. And the ten Grave Precepts guide us on how to make the reality of Oneness concretely manifest in our daily lives.
Recognizing that I am not separate from all that is, I vow to take up the way of non-killing.
There you have it. In classic Zen fashion, we get right to the heart of the matter. Have you ever wished that someone or something would just go away? Even die. That is the pretense of separateness in the extreme. That is the most forceful desire to separate imaginable. Dogen’s version of this first precept on non-killing, which I just read, appropriately opens with the statement, “Recognizing that I am not separate from all that is . . .”.
Being satisfied with what I have, I vow to take up the way of not stealing.
Me, my, mine. My need, my thing. Being unsatisfied with what I have is separation. Appreciating what I have, working to satisfy my reasonable wants and my true needs such that others’ reasonable wants and true needs are respected and satisfied alongside mine: This is appreciating what I have; non-stealing. Getting what I want and need in a way that doesn’t separate myself from others, or me from the recognition of what’s sufficient, is to take up the way of non-stealing.
Honoring mutuality and respect and commitment, I vow to take up the way of not misusing sex.
Sex, needless to say, is a domain in which we see people instrumentalizing others, objectifying others, and so objectifying myself. What a shame; such a squandered opportunity to hold and conduct ourselves in a way that honors Oneness. Such wonderful potential to express beautifully the reality of Oneness. Such a shame when sex is not approached that way.
Listening and speaking from the heart, I vow to take up the way of not speaking falsely.
To speak falsely—saying things we know not to be true or even being reckless about the truth—is to separate from truth. Speaking carelessly is to separate from the truth and to separate ourselves from others. I love the way this Dogen’s version of this precept opens with “Listening and speaking from the heart.” When we’re doing that, we’re being present, present to others in this speech act, in this speech communion. It’s another way to express non-separation. Another word for this is presence. When we truly are present to ourselves and others, we’re not separate. We’re manifesting the reality of Oneness.
Cultivating a mind that sees clearly, I vow to take up the way of not intoxicating mind and body.
Intoxicants of all varieties—anything we might overvalue, including work, TV, and Instagram, not just drugs and alcohol—can be a way of separating from our own lives and from others. Not being present, truly present. I drink wine. I enjoy it. And, with a nod towards Terry Warner’s idea of self-deception, it’s my practice to pay attention to that first impulse to have a glass of wine. What’s it about? Sometimes when it arises, I recognize it as a desire to separate from something that’s been difficult; that I don’t like about the day or about my experience presently. That doesn’t mean I don’t have the glass of wine necessarily, but I’ll do my best to shift into another mode around it if I do. At other times that glass of wine is so much about enjoying the company of others; communing; non-separation. Lovely.
Unconditionally accepting what each moment has to offer, I vow to take up the way of not finding fault in or with others.
“Unconditionally accepting what each moment has to offer”: right there, presence, non-separation. I don’t think too much more needs to be said about this one. This is just so common, isn’t it? Speaking for myself alone, I can and often tend towards separating myself from others in this way. Blame. Being blind to my own contributions to some difficulty.
Meeting others on equal ground, I vow to take up the way of not elevating myself at the expense of others.
In some ways, this is my favorite precept. It’s the hardest one in so many ways. It’s as if we needed a precept just to say, “It’s all about non-separation.” Elevating myself at the expense of others is the very move of the separation we’re talking about.
Using all the ingredients of my life, I vow to take up the way of not sparing the Dharma assets.
We can steal, take things from others, and we can also hoard what we have: our time, our capabilities, our talents, our resources. We can refuse to participate fully in the circle of life; in making the circle of life a virtuous circle. The circular economy, so to speak. By withholding our love. Withholding our truth; what we know to be true; not speaking up about our reasonable needs. When we’re doing that, we’re often actually elevating ourselves above others. We’re denying others the opportunity to meet us and to meet our needs, which they might want to do. Even if they don’t want to do it, they might need to learn to do it for there to be a virtuous cycle.
Transforming suffering into wisdom, I vow to take up the way of not harboring ill will.
Anger. Anger is all about separation. In the version of the Four Vows we chant, we use the word hatred. In other translations, you’ll see that word as anger. I think hatred really makes a point. It’s about aversion. Aversion is about wanting to separate from something. It’s a helpful, adaptive impulse on some level. There are things we don’t perpetually want to abide; that we want to work skillfully, and perhaps collaboratively, to change. Yet that impulse can be taken too far when it manifests as outwardly expressed anger, even hatred. That can lead to missing the mark on other precepts we’ve looked at. Anger-driven killing is the most extreme example of that.
Honoring my life as an instrument of the Great Way, I vow to take up the way of not defaming the Three Treasures.
Well, this is just another way of saying everything we’ve said so far. We’re pointing back to Oneness. Non-separation. Separation is a fraud. Indulging in it is a pretense. It’s a story. It’s impossible. The precepts remind us of this truth and help guide us towards living in truth, living this truth.
So, we can see the precepts as a little instruction manual for how to be a Buddha. If we’re living our vows and living them from the right mindset and heartset, we are likely to be showing up as Buddha, not separating from our Buddha nature. We tend to think of other practices, like zazen and koans, as the centerpiece of our practice. Thy really are not the centerpiece of our practice. They’re all just ways to help us learn to show up as Buddha; to hit the mark. They are supportive of the heart of our practice, which truly is the precepts.
Realizing, manifesting, living by them. This is being Buddha.
Turning Words 