I gave this talk at our Full Moon Zen sit on Thursday, October 1, 2026. A recording follows the text.

Zen Master Boache of Mount Magu was waving a fan. A monk approached him and asked, “The nature of wind is ever present, and permeates everywhere. Why are you waving a fan?”

The master said, “You know only that the wind’s nature is ever present. You don’t know that it permeates everywhere.”

The monk said, “How does wind permeate everywhere?”

The master just continued waving the fan.

The monk bowed deeply.

— from Dōgen’s Genjōkōan

Dōgen closes Genjōkōan, his most well-known essay, with this little koan. 

“Air is everywhere and always moving,” the monk asks, “so why do you make this effort to move the air? To make wind?”

Wind is a metaphor for the Absolute, or Buddha nature, of course.

We come to practice because we want to get somewhere. Something hurts. Something feels missing. We want calm, or clarity, or awakening—whatever name we give the far shore.

Well, let’s be honest, practice helps. People who sit for years tend to become steadier. Less reactive. Kinder, often. I see it in this sangha. That’s progress, and it’s real.

But the Mahayana tradition tells us we’re already there. Nothing is lacking. We chant it ourselves in Hakuin’s In Praise of Zazen: all beings by nature are Buddha. 

So which is it? Are we going somewhere or not? If the wind already reaches everywhere, why fan?

There are two ways to try to resolve this seeming make this paradox, as if it were a paradox that needed to be resolved. Both are mistakes.

The first is the mistake of the striver. There’s a destination and it is somewhere else, somewhere later. This sit is just a means to that end. Our present is time on a treadmill, and the goal—spiritual fitness—is always just over the edge. Racing by under our feet, but we never quite seem to catch it.

The second mistake is the mistake the monk in our koan made. It’s common, yet subtler. It’s the mistake of spiritual pride. “I’m already there, so why bother?” It sounds like insight. It sounds like he’s got it. But he’s showing us the voice that tells us to skip or fiddle through this sit because, after all, buddha nature doesn’t need zazen.

The monk has his doctrine right. The wind’s nature is constant. It does reach everywhere. But does he truly know and feel it? Does it reach him? He has the idea of the breeze, even as he fails to let it touch him. Baoche can see the monk doesn’t yet know the wind permeates everywhere, because he doesn’t yet know it as permeating him.

Dōgen knew this question well. As a young monk, he was tormented by it. If we are all originally enlightened, why have all the buddhas of past and present had to practice? No one could give young Dōgen a satisfying answer. The question sent him to China. Our  koan seemed to bring him home.

I made both mistakes.

For a long stretch of my koan training, I was passing koans quickly. I’d walk into dokusan, present my response, get the nod, and I’d already be thinking about the next one. Somewhere along the way it became a game. I was playing for a high score. Each koan was a level cleared.

And I imagined a destination at the end of it all. The last koan. The final level. Some place where I’d finally arrive.

Of course, that destination kept receding. Every koan passed opened onto another one. The collections are bottomless by design. There’s always another koan. I was chasing a destination guaranteed to fade endlessly from my reach.

I also admit to feeling a quiet pride, or self-satisfaction, each time I passed through a koan.

What I was missing was right there in each koan. They weren’t steps on the way to somewhere. I wasn’t achieving anything to feel satisfied about—at least not more satisfied and appreciative than I could have been about my life apart from koan practice. 

Each koan was the whole thing. Life. The wind, reaching everywhere. I wasn’t letting it touch me.

I was the striver and I was the self-satisfied monk. I knew the wind reached everywhere. I could have told you so in dokusan. I just wasn’t fanning, and nor was I in tune with the whistling wind.

So what is Boache showing us?

The fanning, out sitting, is both journey and destination.

That’s what practice is and what it does. It doesn’t take us from here to somewhere else. It enables here to be felt.

Practice does progress. But what grows isn’t the distance from where we started. It’s our intimacy with what’s arising. This breath. The thought about lunch, and the next one, and the next. Our fellow travelers, and the depths of our appreciation for one another.

“Just this” isn’t a place we arrive at once and then own, like a house we’ve acquired. It’s the activity of life itself, and feeling at home in it—at home with ourselves, appreciating our lives. 

Dōgen has a phrase for this: practice and realization are one. Realization isn’t a prize handed out at the end of practice, like a trophy for a high score. It’s the practicing itself, more verb than noun. The beginner’s wholehearted zazen, he says, is the whole of original awakening.

Does that mean we don’t change? No. Something does change. The fan gets lighter in the hand. We stop needing to announce that we’re fanning. We stop keeping score.

But the wind doesn’t become any more everywhere all at once than it already was.

Boache just kept fanning himself. The monk bowed deeply.

Maybe that bow was the monk’s own fanning. He stopped asking about the wind and let it permeate him. He became the wind.

And if the monk had pressed him—but really, why do you fan?—I imagine Boache would have said, “Because it’s hot.”