I gave this talk on August 18, 2026, during our Full Moon Zen summer sesshin. A recording follows the text.

This is Case 7 in The Gateless Gate:

A monk asked Chao-chou, “I have just entered the monastery. Please teach me.”

Chao-chou said, “Have you eaten your rice gruel?”

The monk said, “Yes, I have.”

Chao-chou said, “Then wash your bowl.”

By now your knees know we’re on sesshin.

Our schedule stopped being a mental construct we’re following—a way of conceptually organizing time—and simply becomes our lived experience, the rhythm of our lives. We experience it much like the rhythm of a song: our foot begins to tap, we sway with the beat, and we’re just in it.

We are lost in it, as we say. The me I call I become less distinct, even lost at times.

Sesshin is like this: The bell rings. We stand. The clappers sound. We walk. We sit down again.

Time is embodied. Time is movement. Life is movement. We are being time; time being.

You’ve heard me say before that people mistake Zen, and zazen particularly, for something conceptual. Mental activity; mental practice. Something that something called a mind is doing to become a more realized mind. A mind that is more mind-full. A mind supposedly more full of itself.

It is simply not so. Zen is an embodied practice. Our knees will remind us of this throughout sesshin.

Our mind is our body and its movement. Our mind is the Buddha body. Celestial bodies, seen and unseen.

Our theme is surrender. I want to start somewhere very mundane and immediate: with our body’s basic needs.

In the old Pali texts, Shakyamuni Buddha describes the years before his awakening. He has chased every horizon every ancient Indian spiritual tradition pointed toward—and then some. He has studied with the best meditation teachers of his day and hacked all their methods. He has subjected himself to every form of austerity. He describes eating almost nothing, until his spine could be felt through his belly. 

Six years of this. He was the best of the best at punishing his body in search of a purified mind and spirt, whatever that might mean. He was, by his own account, more thoroughgoing and extreme in his quest than anyone.

And none of it worked. His mind didn’t become more mind—more mind-filled.

Just as this depressing realization was sinking in, he remembers sitting in the shade of a tree as a boy and dropping without effort into a state of deep quiet. He remembers the pleasure of that experience. The ease—the body-mind ease of it. He remembers this and thinks: maybe that very embodied experience of ease is the path.

And then, according to one mythical account of this moment, he asks himself: Why am I afraid of that pleasure?

He tunes into his experience and realizes he isn’t afraid anymore. 

And then he has the most profound realization: You can’t get where I want to go in a body this starved. I should eat some rice and porridge.

So he ate.

His companions, who had been practicing austerities alongside him watched him eat and walked away in disgust. They thought he had given up. He had gone soft.

The Buddha’s pivotal moment was a moment of surrender—of resignation to and acceptance of—his creatureliness. To the reality of his creaturely discomfort and needs.

And he realized the ease—the liberation—he was seeking was an embodied ease. Nirvana was an experience within our creaturely existence, not a place beyond it. 

The Buddha‘s submission looks like failure from the perspective of misguided ambition. From the perspective of spiritual materialism, or spiritual acquisitiveness. 

To accept our creatureliness is to accept the reality of suffering that the Buddha and his fellow ascetics were trying to escape—ironcially—by compounding their own suffering.

What does the Buddha realize? Something abstract or transcendent about “mind”?

No. He realizes a body—his body—gets hungry. Weak. Sick. Old. He realizes we die.

He realizes the very marks of existence that so frightened him, propelling his spiritual quest, are inescapable.

He realized spirituality is physicality.

And he realizes life—which is to say experience, right here, right now—is precious. And worth sustaining. With ease. To be enjoyed.

Shakyamuni surrenders both to the precariousness of life and to its preciousness. To life that is precious by virtue its perceariousness.

Our bodies get sick. Our bodies age. Our lives end. 

Our bodies love specific people. Our bodies outlive some of them, sadly, happily, poignantly. 

We humans have very sophisticated ways of not accepting this. Some of them have a Buddhist ring to them. We can use a word like emptiness as a place to hide from our lives.

The moment Shakyamuni stops being afraid of pleasure is the moment he accepts his creaturely existence again.

Acceptance is another word for surrender.

Receiving is another word for surrender.

When the server arrives at your cushion and you extend your bowl to receive food, your acceptance of it is the practice of surrender. Saying yes to our creaturely life.

Dōgen wrote a whole set of instructions on how to cook a meal and how to eat it. How to set out the bowls. How to hold them. People find this either tedious or transcendent.

It is neither. It is Upaya. Skillful means.

Dōgen just wants us to connect with, accept, and be nourished by our food and by one another. It seems many of us have a hard time appreciating our life, appreciating our food, without a bootcamp of tedium and minor hardship, like Zen practice. Think of it as a kinder, gentler form of the Buddha’s years of punishing asceticism. 

Think of it as the remedial plan for those of us who are slow life learners. J Yes, I’m speaking from personal experience.

We are form. Creaturely form. We are a formation, a feature of boundless life form. The universe. 

What does it even mean to say we are form? Our juvenile images are of something solid, something block-like, as if a block of wood or stone were fixed and unchanging. That image of a block is false. A delusion.

Our form, all form is fluid and changing. Change-form. Our juvenile mind loves to construct false binaries. Solid and fluid. Still and moving. Light and darkness. Now and eternity. Alive and dead. Heaven and hell.

There are no such things. There are only manifestations we perceive to have relatively more of this quality or that one. Relatively more solidity, which really means change that’s happening relatively more slowly, at least in ways perceptible to the human brain, than other things we perceive locally.

Our creaturely forms—our bodies—are change-forms. Our creaturely forms both demand change and can’t help but change.

Our knees suffer from too much sitting in one position, so we’re compelled to move. The initial movement itself is suffering—suffering that gives way to ease of movement, movement that eventually becomes suffering, compelling us to sit again, when we tire of movement and are compelled to sit again.

We don’t really have a choice about what I’m calling creaturely suffering. It’s part of the package. We should try to minimize it to a point, conscious that we create other forms of suffering—a climate crisis, a comfort crisis, a crisis of character—if we try to reduce it too much or end it altogether.

We do have a choice about whether we compound our unavoidable suffering. We tend to compound it when we refuse to surrender to it.

When we resist our creatureliness. When we neglect our basic needs for safety, nourishment, rest, and healthy, caring connection to others who are capable of connecting with us in healthy, caring ways. When we neglect our higher order needs for a sense of meaning and purpose and oneness with all that is.

Is there ultimately any choice to be made other than surrender? 

Not really.

But we can fight our creatureliness, and most of us do.

Zen is life. Zen practice is about inhabiting life and mastering it. The basics. The basics of your life.

So eat your rice gruel, and enjoy it.Wash your bowl, and enjoy that, too.