I gave this talk at our Full Moon Zen Zazenkai on September 13, 2025. A recording follows the text.

This is 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.”

Chao-chou asked, “How can I know the Tao if I don’t direct myself?”

Nan-ch’üan said, “The Tao is not subject to knowing or not knowing. Knowing is delusion; not knowing is blankness. If you truly reach the genuine Tao, you will find it as vast and boundless as outer space. How can this be discussed at the level of affirmation and negation?”

With these words, Chao-chou had sudden realization.

The notion of no self is one of the most perplexing teachings of Buddhism to many people. You and I are so obviously here together, so what could it possibly mean? 

Most humans seem to consider themselves rather reflexively to be separate beings. Beings that function and, in some sense, exist independently of other beings and things.

If we think about this for a nanosecond, however, it becomes obvious that we’re not independent at all. We’re interdependent. We depend upon clean air to breathe, clean water to drink, and nourishing food to eat. We depend upon other people to help meet needs we cannot meet alone, from healthcare to being and feeling safe and loved. If we had been neglected by others for too long as infants, we would not be together now.

So, we’re definitely not physically independent or separable from our environment and social sphere. Yet, even knowing this, we continue to think of ourselves as having or being a separate self. This perspective, or mental formation, is a default setting in the human operating system. It seems so obviously true that most of us don’t even question it. In fact, we organize everything from most religious thought about this life and what may follow it, to human rights law, to our approaches to therapy around the idea that we’re separate selves and some theory of that self. The notion of separate, solid, possibly eternal selves is baked into our language and almost everything else in our culture. These days, in this part of the world and elsewhere, selves are elevated, amplified, and glorified. 

But Buddhism, and certainly Zen Buddhism, questions this default perspective or setting. It even pins much of our personal and collective suffering on it. How and why would it question what seems and feels so intuitively, obviously true to so many of us? Is there substance to this mental formation we call the self? If we go looking for it, can we find a self and fix its boundaries in time and space?

Let’s take a moment to try. Please, just close your eyes and settle in for a moment. Please look for yourself in, or apart from, this physical form we know is dependent upon the air you’ll be breathing and the food you ingested this morning. Can you find the self?

Okay. Let’s return. Did you find it? [Discussion]

If we can’t find a substantial, essential, surely eternal self, what’s the alternative? Does our inability to define the parameters of a durable, persistent, separate and separable self lead us to nihilism? No, that’s not the Buddhist view either. 

The Buddhist view is that we tend to think of ourselves as nouns, when, in fact, we are more like verbs. We are activity. Interdependently arising, interconnected activity. We are not a thing; we are experience itself.

Buddhism says our existence, our experience, has three key characteristics, or “marks”: impermanence, no self (or insubstantiality), and suffering. Each one seems to follow from the next. 

We are born into a realm that is constantly changing. Birth is change! We are change and we are vulnerable to the very change that we are; within which we exist. This sense of self with which we come equipped is useful. Would I eat, socialize, and do other things necessary to sustain myself if I didn’t think I had a self to take care of? 

But, as we’ve seen, we tend to objectify, solidify, and cling to this sense of self more strongly than is justified. We expect or want it to exist unchangingly, permanently, apart from the ever-changing stream of activity in which we exist.

And our resistance to accepting the fact that the first mark of existence, impermanence (or perpetual change), also applies to oneself—in other words, our resistance to the second mark of existence, no self—leads to the third mark of existence: we suffer. 

We see this suffering all around us, don’t we? Especially in this time and place in which we each of us feels compelled to precisely define, and refine, and project “who I am,” distinctively and essentially. We suffer if we don’t feel sufficiently recognized for our distinctiveness. We suffer even among companions who recognize one another’s distinctiveness. We suffer as groups that regard themselves as distinctive square off against other groups who see their respective forms of distinctiveness as opposed, and perhaps even as negating one another.

Buddhism invites us to examine and see through the illusion of ontological separateness. To hold our “selves” and other “selves” with a light, loving touch.

If we regard ourselves and others as activity, as experience itself, our perspective on life, and how to conduct our lives, shifts. We become much less focused on objects (nouns) we can have or avoid, and much more focused on improving the quality of our shared experience; the interconnected activity that we are manifesting right here and now. And now. And now. And now.

The contemporary Zen teacher Yamada Koun Roshi, said, “The practice of Zen is the perfection of character.” If there is no self to perfect, then what are we perfecting through Zen practice?

Activity. Experience. The quality of our shared, interdependently co-arising experience.

Machs gute. We want to “make it good,” as the Germans say.

This activity is as vast and boundless as outer space. Let’s make it good. Together. 

Together, because there is no such thing as apart.