Surrendering to the Storm

August 25, 2026August 26, 2026 Jeff

I gave this talk on August 20, 2026, during our Full Moon Zen summer sesshin. A recording follows the text.

A monk asked Tung-shan, “When cold and heat come, how can we avoid them?”

Tung-shan said, “Why not go where there is no cold or heat?”

The monk said, “Where is the place where there is no cold or heat?”

Tung-shan said, “When it’s cold, let the cold kill you. When it’s hot, let the heat kill you.”

— Case 43, The Blue Cliff Record

I spoke about that great Dharma classic The Wizard of Oz at our April sesshin. I’ll talk about another Dharma classic today: The Odyssey. I saw the new film a few weeks ago.

Both stories are about journeys of exploration and self-discovery. Spiritual journeys.

Why are these Western products Dharma classics? Because they tell a familiar story and take up familiar Buddhist themes.

Both stories are about home-leaving. That’s a very Buddhist theme. Shakyamuni Buddha leaves home. You had to leave home to become Buddhist—a Buddhist monk—years ago, as you still must do in some parts of the world today.

Both stories are about seeking a promised land, a pure land, we might say.

Both stories are about coming home. Coming home to ourselves, transformed.

I want to zoom in on one episode in The Odyssey: the final stage of the journey Odysseus is on. Odysseus is also known as Ulysses.

Let me recap what’s come before this episode. Odysseus is king of Ithica. He left his kingdom, and his lovely wife, son, and beloved dog, nearly 20 years ago to attack Troy. It took him and his army 10 years to get there and defeat the Trojans. He’s been trying to return home for 10 years since their brutal victory.

Odysseus and his men experience many trials on their journey home. They contend with the forces of nature, with evil spirts, with the gods, with their own temptations—their cravings for plenty, for power, for beauty. They anger Poseidon, god of the sea, who makes their voyage difficult and tries to destroy them.

Odysseus’s men are falling like flies through these trials and tribulations. They’re eventually down to one ship, with perhaps a dozen men.

Sadly, they begin to fight with one another. At one point Odysseus’s men defy his judgement and authority in a risky gambit that doesn’t end well for them. They anger the sun god, Helios, who asks Zeus himself to destroy them all. Zeus obliges, sinking their ship.

Only Odysseus survives. He washes ashore on an island where the nymph Calypso captivates him literally and figuratively. She seduces him with singing and sex. She offers him immortality if he remains with her.

Odysseus has survived through force of wit and will; by being wiser, cleverer, more determined, and more balanced and virtuous than his men. He has mastered his mind, and the life of the mind. He has mastered himself. He’s in control of himself.

He has even come to see the error of his ways. He has met the spirits of the Trojan men he and his army killed and his men who died in battle. He has seen the folly of war—perhaps the folly of humanity generally. His heart of war has become a heart of peace and compassion.

But Calypso is a (minor) god and Odysseus can’t escape her spell. No amount of wisdom, reason, ingenuity, virtue, or compassion will set him free. He’s dealing with forces larger than himself.

Calypso has made his existence incredibly pleasing, but still Odysseus spends his days weeping, longing for his wife and home. This isolated life of comfort is intolerable. Seven years of this. He’s not tempted to stay, but he’s small and weak in the cosmic scheme of things. It’s an eventual act of god—by Zeus, by larger forces—that provides an opportunity for freedom.

He’s allowed to build a raft to sail home. This is where Homer’s version and Chirstopher Nolan’s film adaptation get a bit out of sync. A nice twist in the movie is that Odysseus builds his raft from planks of the ship Zeus destroyed seven years earlier—from the remnants of his shattered life. It’s more like a wooden barrel—an exoskeleton, or a coffin—in the movie. Odysseus drifts off in a raft-capsule, prone like a corpse, in the film. That’s not true to Homer. Odysseus makes a proper raft with a sail from 20 trees in the original.

Soon after Odysseus sets sail, Poseidon has another opportunity to get revenge. The sea god summons a massive storm. Odysseus’s raft is destroyed. He’s drowning. His clothing is soaked, dragging him down, down, down as he thrashes about. Odysseus clings to a single beam from his raft. Is it enough to buoy him? To ride out the storm? To save him?

Just then, the god Ino appears. That’s right: Ino. Pronounced a bit different than the Zen word for our chant leader, but spelled the same. (There are Lotus flowers in The Odyssey, too, but don’t eat them.) Ino has taken pity on Odysseus. She offers him a veil of immortality. She tells him to let go of what is left of his raft, to strip off his soaked clothing, to wrap the veil around his chest, and to swim.

Odysseus doesn’t know what to do. He’s told to let go of what security and stability he has left, to become naked, and to surrender to the storm—to powerful forces he can’t influence, let alone control. He doesn’t know whether to trust Ino. He doesn’t know who or what to trust anymore.

What does Odysseus do? He takes a leap of faith. He does as Ino suggests. He submits. He accepts his vulnerability, exposes himself to the storm, and swims with it.

And he finds his way home.

When Odysseus reaches the far shore of Ithaca, arriving home, he takes off the veil of immortality and casts it into the sea. He leaves it behind.

I suspect I don’t need to convince you now that The Odyssey is a Zen classic. You get it.

But allow me to remind us of Shakyamuni’s own parable of the raft, which he told to explain the purpose and value of what he was teaching.

A man is standing on the shore of a river. On his present side of the river, he encounters danger everywhere and lives in fear. He can see the other side of the river is free of danger and fear. He wants to reach the far shore.

The man binds grass and twigs and branches and leaves to make a raft. He crosses the river in it, and he finds safety and peace.

Shakyamuni asks his students if the man should now strap the raft to his back and carry it around for the rest of his life. Wisely, they say “no.”

The Buddha affirms their response, “I have shown you the Dhamma (the teachings) as a raft, for the purpose of crossing over, not for the purpose of holding onto.” He’s saying spiritual tools—meditation, forms, and philosophy—are vehicles to get us to safety, peace, freedom—not possessions to be hoarded. He’s warning against spiritual materialism, of treating what we’re offered and experience along a spiritual path as merit badges to be earned and to humble-brag about. He’s even warning against ego-attachment to being “religious” or “spiritual” more generally. The story ends with the Buddha telling his students they eventually must let go of his teachings, even what they regard as the best of them.

When Maezumi Roshi, founder of our White Plum lineage, was asked about our Zen forms and practices, or about some Zen teaching or idea, he would offer a kind response. He’d offer a traditional explanation. Often, he would add, “But don’t lose the point.”

The point isn’t the form itself. The point is Life. Connecting to life.

Knowing that no amount of wisdom, reasoning, cleverness, virtue or compassion will get us where we want to go if where we want to go has a trace of conquest or control in it, any more than Odysseus’s wisdom, reasoning, cleverness, virtue or even compassion could transport him home.

It may look like the Buddha’s teaching got the man to the other shore, but that misses the deeper point.

The point of the Buddha’s teaching, and of the Great Vehicle that is Zen and the other streams of Mahayana Buddhism, is to help us release ourselves into the storm. The world beyond our control. That we can’t control, and have no hope of controlling if we were to try. And try we do.

Notice that the man in old Shakyamuni’s story builds his own raft, just as Odysseus did. And he ultimately let go of his raft, just as Odysseus did. Odysseus had to let go of the very last beam of his shattered raft. To expose himself. To accept his vulnerability. He had to take a leap of faith. To entrust himself to the storm.

I have to believe that’s what the man in the Buddhist parable does. He stepped into his fear and onto a raft he wasn’t sure would carry him. He took a leap of faith. He trusted.

Remember the story I told Tuesday about Shakyamuni ending his self-deprivation by taking food? He decides to eat, to accord with his creaturely vulnerability, after remembering a moment of deep quiet and peace he enjoyed as a boy.

By this time in his six-year spiritual quest, having practiced meditation intensively, I have to believe he was experiencing many such moments of deep quiet and peace. Experiencing them regularly.

But he continued seeking nonetheless. Why?

And why does this recollection of precisely that kind of experience in childhood become such a turning point for him?

It must have dawned on him that, as a child, he had that experience before he thought there was something missing in his life. Before he became anxious about sickness, old age, and death.

He had had that experience without going on a spiritual quest. Without believing he had to earn it. To attain it.

He must have realized that sense of ease had always been freely available to him amid all the ups and downs of life. He must have realized the only difference between then and now is that he didn’t appreciate, enjoy, and trust life–trust experience–like he once did.

What he was searching for was his all along, in the eye of the storm. Somewhere along the way, he’d just forgotten how to “accept this pleasure.” To release himself to Life. To trust it.

You and I live in a storm, just as humans always have. There is intrigue and war and danger everywhere. Friends and family members turn on one another, perhaps even on us. A loved one gets a concerning diagnosis. AI threatens our jobs, maybe even humanity itself. People we like or dislike rise to power. There are avalanches and crashes, literal and figurative.

Much of this is beyond our control.

Can we surrender to the storm? Feel it? Become it? Trust this tumultuous Life and appreciate it? Lose ourselves in it to find ourselves in it? To reach the other shore? To return home? To discover it was here all along?

Surrendering to Embodiment

August 24, 2026 Jeff

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.

Zen and Metaphysics

May 8, 2026 Jeff

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 . . .

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.

No Self

September 20, 2025December 3, 2025 Jeff

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.

Even This Perishes

June 13, 2025 Jeff

I gave this talk at our Full Moon Zen Sunrise Sit on Wednesday, June 4, 2025. A recording follows the text.

This is Case 55 in The Blue Cliff Record:

A monk said to Dasui, “When the thousands of universes are altogether and utterly

destroyed in the kalpa fire — I wonder whether this perishes or not.

“This perishes,” said Dasui.

“If so,” persisted the monk, “does it follow the other.”

“It follows the other,” said Dasui.

Sleep. Morning dew. The chill in the air. Feeling happy. Feeling sad. This day. Tomorrow. This life. All life.

Impermanence is a core tenet of Buddhism. Why? Because it’s observably true. How can we deny the reality of change?

Another core tenet of Buddhism is that our default mode is to resist the reality of change. We cling to whatever evokes pleasurable feelings. We’re averse to whatever threatens to take away pleasurable feelings. We remain willfully ignorant to the reality of impermanence; to our inability to avoid change.

This koan probes the furthest reaches of Zen Buddhist notions of impermanence. The monk accepts that the morning dew, and even our whole universe, will vanish. But what about this?

We Zen types are always point to this. Just this. But what is this? Is this permanent?

No, the Dasui says. Even this perishes. It perishes with the tea and the teapot. With the moon and the stars.

As usual, the answer to the koan is in the question. The monk divides the world into this and that. Destroyed and not destroyed.

And, as usual, the question is about oneself. The monk has some insight into the Great Matter. He’s seen into emptiness—and has become identified with it.

If emptiness is not destroyed, might I live on?

Just as form is no other than emptiness. Emptiness truly is no other than form. When all the many universes are destroyed in the kalpa fire, their moons and stars with them, emptiness perishes with them. And you and me with them. This is no thing.

This koan is about as close as Zen gets to dogma on physics and metaphysics. As physics and metaphysics, this perspective undoubtedly is debatable. But we know the Buddha declined to engage in metaphysical speculation. I don’t think Dasui is engaging in metaphysical speculation either.

The monk is still looking for something permanent to hold onto. He’s searching for the ultimate and equating it with permanence. Dasui is channeling the ancients that preceded him, and foreshadowing the ancients that will follow him, like Dogen, who tells us that hitting the mark—finding what we’re seeking—is knowing we never have another nest than this fleeting moment in this fleeting life in this fleeting universe in which to settle.

Dasui is advising the monk, and advising us, that, whatever perspective you may have on physics or metaphysics, it’s best to live in accord with the observable reality of change, including the ways we ourselves, and our own perspectives, are susceptible to change. Orienting ourselves in this way invites and enables, in turn, a particular orientation toward our actions, or activity, another key Zen theme that Dogen emphasized in his teaching. It opens us to newness and the possibility of an appropriate response to what’s arising here and now, rather than to our prior, fixed and, quite possibly, misguided views on ourselves, others, and the situation in which we now find ourselves–views on which we may have a death grip and which we may layer over our immediate experience, strangling the life from it. I’ll return to and develop this theme in my talk during our upcoming Zazenkai.

I’ll close by reading our koan again . . .

Not Knowing is Most Intimate

April 15, 2025 Jeff

This is a recording of a talk I gave on April 12, 2025, the third day of Full Moon Zen’s recent sesshin.

Rohatsu 2024: Enlightenment Beyond Belief

December 8, 2024December 9, 2024 Jeff

I gave this talk today at our Rohatsu Zazenkai. A recording follows the text.

This is Case 32 in The Gateless Gate, A Non-Buddhist Questions the Buddha:

A non-Buddhist in all earnestness asked the World-Honored One, “I do not ask about words, I do not ask about no-words.” The World-Honored One just sat still. The non-Buddhist praised him, saying, “The World-Honored One in his great benevolence and great mercy has opened the clouds of my delusion and enabled me to enter the Way.” Then, bowing, he took his leave. Ananda asked Buddha, “What did the non-Buddhist realize that made him praise you so much?” The World-Honored One replied, “He is just like a fine horse that runs even at the shadow of a whip.”

Tomorrow is Rohatsu in Japan, the holiday when Zen Buddhists remember Siddhartha Gautama’s enlightenment. I suppose this is Buddhism’s Big Bang. Pow! as our friend José Ramirez likes to say.

This koan is perfect for the occasion. Its form is so familiar. A seeker brings a question to a teacher. The teacher responds. The student finally breaks through. It’s her Big Bang. Pow!

Your meetings with Fran and me are just like that, right? 🙂

In most of our koans, the teacher is abbot of a Zen monastery in China living hundreds of years after the Buddha died. The seeker is a resident monk. They’ve each taken hundreds of monastic vows. They’ve identified as Buddhists in every way. In what they wear, how they eat, how they pass each day and year, each full of recurring ritual forms and practices.

In today’s koan, the teacher is Shakyamuni Buddha himself. I’ve read Koun Yamada’s translation of this koan because he refers to the seeker as a “non-Buddhist.” I find this a bit amusing, because I’m not sure we can say Buddhism even existed at the time, at least not as a tradition with stably established forms and practices. The Zen tradition as we eventually would come to know it certainly did not exist yet. Other translations of this koan refer to the visitor as an “outsider” or a “nonbeliever,” as if belief had anything to do with Zen.

While the structure of this koan is familiar, much of its content is quite different. The Chinese, who developed koan practice using anecdotes from their own experience and unique cultural context, seemed to want a handful of koans featuring the historical Buddha, perhaps as one more way to assure themselves and others they were connected to him. They crafted a few koans from snippets of much earlier Buddhist texts.

We also get this interesting exchange between the Buddha and Ananda, his cousin and attendant, at the end of the koan. Ananda often is portrayed as the Buddha’s foil in the Pali Canon and in Chinese koans. If the Buddha is Laurel, Ananda is Hardy. We’ll return to their exchange in a moment.

Let’s look at the question this unnamed seeker brings to the Buddha: “I do not ask about words, I don’t ask about no-words.” This sentence doesn’t quite form a question. It seems inarticulate—like the speaker is on the edge of his own awareness and understanding and can barely find the words to express himself. An insight is emerging, but this seeker doesn’t yet know what he knows.

He’s asking about what the sutras call form and emptiness. Form is words. Emptiness is no-words.

This seeker is sensing this seeming binary is a trap.

Form is our starting point early in life; even throughout life for many, if not most, of us. First, we take things—beings, objects, concepts—as concrete, separate things with essences.

Later one may begin to sense this understanding of things is amiss. We start to question whether things are so solid and separate. We begin to penetrate the illusion of separateness. We open to Oneness. Emptiness.

Eventually we may come to realize form is Emptiness and Emptiness is form. But as long as we’re relying on words and no-words, things and no-things, and even if we’re saying one is the other, we’re still holding onto ideas to some extent. We’re still partially in the conceptual realm.

The Buddha’s visitor senses that “form is Emptiness, Emptiness is form” doesn’t quite get to the heart of the matter.

The Buddha knows exactly where this seeker is at and what he is asking. What is the Buddha’s response?

Presence. Pure and simple.

This response affirms what the seeker intuits. The Buddha is saying, “Yes, this is it. What you see, feel, and know is what I see, feel, and know.”

With this encounter, the knowledge that was on the perimeter of the visitor’s awareness a moment ago is now in his bones, not as an idea. Pow!

What about the Buddha’s exchange with Ananda? What’s with the horse and whip. This was a common metaphor where and when the Buddha lived—and this was high praise of the visitor.

It’s a rather grim image. Horses were trained with whips in those days, as they often still are today. Particularly willful or slow learning horses were struck with a full crack of the whip. A horse that’s a bit more insightful, we might say for purposes of the Buddha’s analogy, just needs to feel the coiled whip held against its body. An even more insightful horse just needs to see the whip. The Buddha’s visitor didn’t need much nudging. Seeing the shadow of the whip was enough.

On Tuesday I was in Washington, D.C., for a dinner hosted by Saudi Sheikh Mohammed Alissa. Sheikh Alissa heads the Muslim World League, which includes clerics and religious scholars from all Muslim countries and promotes moderate forms of Islam.

Sheikh Alissa played a leading role in producing the 2019 Charter of Mecca, which was endorsed by 1,200 Muslim clerics and scholars. Here are the first three of its 30 principles:

All people, regardless of their different ethnicities, races, and nationalities, are equal under God.
We reject religious and ethnic claims of “preference.” [The idea that there is a chosen people.]
Differences among people in their beliefs, cultures and natures are part of God’s will and wisdom.

In his remarks Tuesday, Sheikh Alissa said, regardless or our religious or non-religious beliefs, we all come from and return to the same source. Speaking in his religious idiom, he asked whether God wants the destructive, belief-based conflict we see everywhere today. He answered his own question with an emphatic no. Sheikh Alissa discourages Muslims from drawing hard sectarian lines within Islam or hard lines between Muslims and non-Muslims.

Of course, a history of drawing hard lines between and within religions, isn’t unique to Islam. We see this happening in some expressions of every major religion. Buddhism doesn’t get a free pass. Some Zen teachers before and during WWII fanned the flames of ideologically based hatred raging across the globe, doing so in explicitly religious terms. Many Buddhist monks in Burma (Myanmar) support militarism in defense of ethnic and religious purity.

What the Buddha saw, and what we seek and see, isn’t something exclusive and proprietary. It doesn’t depend upon having the “right” beliefs or the “right” practices or the “right” authorizations. It doesn’t depend upon anything because it’s always right here. We depend upon it. We are it.

“I and all sentient beings and the great Earth itself attain enlightenment simultaneously,” the Buddha purportedly said upon his enlightenment. Dependent co-arising. Interdependence.

Now, our conscious recognition of this—the personal experience of enlightenment—is likely to depend upon our openness to that recognition, and our acceptance of it once it begins to dawn. Upon turning toward, not away from, our aching for this recognition, as the Buddha’s visitor did. Upon our diligent effort to break down our own defenses to that recognition.

Seek, and you shall find. Right under the North Star. Right under the Bodhi tree. Right under your nose.

Every Day is a Good Day

November 27, 2024 Jeff

I gave this talk at our Sunrise Sit today, the day before Thanksgiving. A recording follows the text.

This is Case 6 in the Blue Cliff Record:

Yunmen gave a teaching, saying, “I’m not asking you about before the fifteenth day of the month. Why not say a word about after the fifteenth day of the month?”

He answered himself, “Every day is a good day.”

The full moon is a metaphor for enlightenment in Zen. In the Chinese lunar calendar, the full moon appears mid-month, so the monks training with Yunmen would have heard him asking them what it’s like to be enlightened.

They seem confounded, so Yunmen answers his own question, “Every day is a good day.”

What does he mean? Is he taunting the monks by saying every day is a good day only after the full moon rises; only after one is enlightened? I don’t think so.

I expect there was a long silence before Yunmen answered himself. He would have known the monks were thinking to themselves, “I have no idea what it’s like after the full moon. Why are you asking me? I can only imagine my life right now, before the full moon.”

Living in close quarters with Yunmen, the monks also would have seen him getting sick, getting frustrated occasionally, sometimes forgetting things and making mistakes, after the full moon; after enlightenment.

I think Yunmen truly means every day is a good day, including the days before the full moon. These days when the monks think the moon is hidden and they lack enlightenment.

Yunmen’s question simultaneously meets the monks where they believe they’re at and contests their self-understanding. Yunmen is addressing seekers; people seeking enlightenment. They’re sure they don’t have it or haven’t yet found it. More than one of these seekers would have asked Yunmen, “What’s enlightenment like? I want to know. Tell me.”

Yunmen turns this question back at them. “You’re always telling me about your troubled lives before the full moon; before enlightenment,” he seems to be saying. “Tell me something about your life beyond the full moon, right here and now.”

But they’re dumbfounded.

Yunmen’s question both confirms the monks’ belief that there’s a time before enlightenment and a time after it and challenges that belief. Yunmen implies they can describe the enlightenment experience and invites them to do so.

If Yunmen thinks they can describe life beyond the full moon, then perhaps it’s not the idealized life they imagine. Perhaps it’s still a life with troubles.

If only someone had just groaned about their splitting headache or the lukewarm tea.

Yunmen’s question divides time into before and after, but, as I’ve said, his response doesn’t differentiate between the days before the full moon and the days after it. No before. No after.

Troubled or untroubled. Our awareness attuned to the light that shines within or not. Grateful or not.

Every day is a good day.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Kill the Buddha

November 27, 2024March 26, 2025 Jeff

I gave this talk on November 8, 2024, during our Full Moon Zen sesshin. A recording follows the text (which is lightly edited).

Our koan for this sesshin is Linji’s famous line, “If you meet the Buddha on a road, kill him.”

If I had to pick just one koan or phrase to sum up all Zen teachings and their spirit, this just might be it. It certainly would be among my top few.

This line isn’t a koan exactly. It doesn’t appear in any of our koan collections. We find it instead in The Record of Linji, a compilation of Linji’s talks. He said something more like, “If you meet the Buddha, slay the Buddha,” but the line sometimes is transformed and used informally as a koan.

Linji lived during the ninth century, the heyday of Zen in China. He’s credited with founding the Rinzai line of Zen. The Zen stream we’re in is mostly Soto-derived. Maezumi Roshi, who founded the White Plum Asanga (with Bernie Glassman), initially received transmission from his father, a prominent Soto teacher who did not practice with koans. But Maezumi also studied with and later received transmission from the lay Rinzai teacher Koryu Osaka, as well as Hakuun Yasatani, a Soto reformer who studied koans with his teacher, Harada Daiun Sogaku, who had taken up koan practice with Rinzai teachers. So our stream is unusual; we’re a bit of a mix. I think we can fairly claim Linji as our own.

You can imagine that Linji got some quizzical looks when he gave the talk that includes this line. For me, this line has resonances with some of the deepest, and, I think, most misunderstood wisdom in my birth tradition, Christianity. I’m talking about one of the most remote and, for some, most suspect corners of that tradition: its contemplative or mystical strain.

I’m conscious that we’re Zen practitioners, and that Zen is a non-theistic religious tradition, and that some of us have an uneasy relationship with theism, maybe even an aversion to it. But let me take a a very brief detour nonetheless, if you’ll permit me. I promise to return to Zen soon to make the connection I want to make.

In the Christian tradition, the notion of idolatry arises in the Old Testament, in Jewish scripture, in the book of Exodus. Many of us are familiar with this story. Moses has an encounter with God, who gives him the Ten Commandments on stone tablets to bring to the Israelites as God’s covenant with them. The first commandment has been translated several ways but boils down to something like this: “I am God. You shall have no other God before me. Don’t make graven images of me. Don’t worship anything in my place.”

When Moses returns to camp, he finds the Israelites partying and worshiping a golden calf. Moses has a fit. He smashes the tablets and the golden calf. Party over. Fortunately for the Israelites, they repent, and God replaces the stone tablets.

In Jewish tradition to this day, in this spirit, one doesn’t use the word God. When we see God in print, we might see an asterisk in the place of the “o” (G*d). Or we might hear the word Yahweh, but see it spelled without the vowels (YHWH). Yahweh translates to something like “I am” or “He that is.” Christian monks later translate Yahweh as Jehovah.

So, as we can see, there is this uneasiness with representation in Jewish tradition; with thingifying. There’s an emphasis on being. On ultimate reality as verb, not noun. As pure, vital, vibrating presence.

To my taste, the deepest thinking, the deepest feeling, the furthest and most insightfully seeing later Christian practitioners and teachers pick up this aversion to representation and push it even further. In the Middle Ages, for example, we get the great German mystic Meister Eckhart, who was very quotable. He was famous for saying things like, “Pray God that we may lose God for the sake of finding God.”

Alright, back to Zen, and to the soil out of which it grew. Soil that’s different in some ways and not so different in other ways.

There always were local gods in India, in China, and in Japan. There still are, even to this day, in Japan, from which we’ve received the Zen tradition. Very local deities. In Japan, today people have Shinto weddings and Zen funerals, with a bit of Christianity mixed in along the way for some. The religious culture there is very syncretistic. But long before Buddhism arrived, and long afterwards, people have perceived gods everywhere in Japan.

So, it’s fair to ask if Buddhism made a clean break from the theism that was pervasive in India when it arose and that was pervasive in the places Buddhism traveled over time. Not exactly. The strong monotheism that developed in the Western world in antiquity won’t contend with Buddhism for some time, but we don’t exactly see Buddhism dispatching with all hints of forms of theism before that encounter, in my view.

If we focus solely on what the historical Buddha seems to have taught, it’s probably fair to say there was a clean break from the forms of theism present in his time. He didn’t so much reject theism, as dodge it. He seemed to say, not unlike Meister Eckhart, “Don’t get so twisted up about ideas like god.”

But those who follow the founder of a tradition have a way of messing it up, as we see time and again. There are gods and proto gods in early Buddhism, and even Zen, I’m inclined to say. Look at this beautiful tapestry above us with its many Buddhas, and its Bodhisattvas who seem to have divine qualities. Think about our meal chants. We chant about mythical Buddhas before the historical Buddha, Buddhas yet to appear, and Bodhisattvas who are larger than life.

But I do think most of the old Zen teachers we remember, and most present ones too, are offering us something different. Most Zen teachers throughout space and time double down on the notion that there really is no need for a reified concept of the ultimate.

And in our koan, “If you meet the Buddha on a road, kill him,” we’re clearly being told to smash our idols. I mean really smash them. Smash them by not even positing the existence of something we could idolize. Zen doesn’t offer us a lot of fodder for that.

But if we look—and we humans don’t have to look too hard—we can find (or concoct) ideas in Zen to thingify and fixate on. Take the Absolute and the relative, for instance. Some theists drawn to Zen might even draw parallels to God and Jesus as the Absolute manifest in and as the relative.

But we shouldn’t read too much into or hold too tightly to these metaphors. I’d say to any theist interested or not interested in Zen, “Whatever God is to you, I sure hope God is not an idea.”

None of these metaphors, none of these ideas, none of these concepts that the Buddha didn’t want us to get twisted up about can resolve the mystery. A mystery the resolution of which is as plain as the nose on your face. Is the nose on your face.

The mystery doesn’t need resolving, thank you. The mystery is resolved here and now.

We mistake so much for the ultimate, including the idea of the ultimate. That tendency can be so subtle and insidious.

Teachings and teachers can become idols, for sure. Hopefully, any good teacher will recognize this and deflect it.

We can have our political saviors and our political devils. Some of us might want to kill those devils. But the devil is just another idol. It’s a kind of anti-God idol.

Relationships, I think, are a domain in which we often idolize. We often expect too much of those with whom we’re intimate. It’s a kind of category error. I think one reason we can get so, so incredibly frustrated with intimate partners is that we’re idolizing them, even as they drive us mad, and we criticize them. We want them to serve a godlike function for us. To ultimately ground us, to be our salvation, to be our paradise.

Even more subtly I can make myself an idol, good and/or bad, God and/or devil. That’s what our self-sense inevitably is, I suppose. Our self-sense, or ego or whatever you want to call it, is a facsimile of our being. It’s a partial representation of it. It’s a construct that’s useful, and with which we can become at ease if we don’t hold it too tightly. If we don’t inflate it or deflate it. If we’re humble.

(By the way, my favorite definition of humility is from a Carmelite monk who said it’s not thinking little of yourself but thinking of yourself very little.)

When we kill the Buddha, when we kill all idols, it’s only then that we’re truly able to realize ourselves as Buddha, and all others as Buddha. Killing the Buddha opens that possibility for us. It just comes storming in.

The deepest meaning of the holy truths cannot be contained or represented. It can’t be embodied in or as just one thing, because the deepest meaning of the holy truths is nothing less than everything. Just as it’s manifesting right now.

Another way to translate Linji’s expression “Kill the Buddha”—to translate all the teachings is—this is it. Full stop.

We’re grounded in everything, all at once, all the time. We must discover that ground. We must discover the self as that ground.

The bad news is there’s nothing discreet we can hold onto. The good news is there’s no risk of falling.

Just don’t try too hard to define everything; to contain it. Let it be. Let it be you. When we do our three bows, we’re honoring the three treasures. Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha.

Let’s honor the three treasures. Let’s honor ourselves; let’s honor everybody else; let’s honor everything. Let’s just not idolize things.

So, if you meet the Buddha on a road, extend a hand. Offer him a place to rest his weary frame. A meal, a cup of tea. Pour one for yourself, as well. Sit down and enjoy his company. Offer him the pleasure of your company.

Nothing Twice

July 17, 2024 Jeff

I gave this talk at our Full Moon Zen Sunrise Sit on July 17, 2024. A recording follows the text.

This is a translation of “Nothing Twice” by the late Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska:

Nothing happens twice,
Nor will it ever. For this reason,
We were born without proficiency,
And will all die without routine.

Though we be the most obtuse
Pupils in the school of this world,
We will never be held back to repeat
A single winter or summer.

No day will be repeated;
There is no such thing as two similar nights,
Two identical kisses,
Two equivalent gazes into someone’s eyes.

Yesterday, when your name
Was said by someone as I chanced to overhear,
I suddenly felt as if a rose
Had fallen in through an open window.

Today, when we are together,
I’ve turned my face toward the wall.
A rose? What does a rose look like?
Is it a flower? Or perhaps a stone?

Why are you, O evil hour,
Thus admixed with needless fear?
You are — and therefore you must pass.
You will pass — and therefore you are beautiful.

Smiling, in a mutual embrace,
We will try to find accord,
Although we are as different from one another
As two drops of pure water.

Our group meets most days. Follows the same routine. Bows. Bells. Chants we chant again and again. Sitting still in the same posture as before. Rehearsing familiar forms. Talks and dialogue on familiar themes.

All this seeming sameness is a call to awaken to the reality of nothing twice.

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus tells us no one can step in the same river twice, because it’s not the same river and we’re not the same person. We can take his thought further: no one can step in the same river once.

What is “this river”? What is “once”? Useful constructions, but constructions, nonetheless. All impermanent. Nothing ultimately graspable.

Dōgen equated ungraspable activity with Buddha nature, with emptiness, with realization.

From not one perspective, the perspective of our everyday perspective, ceaseless, ungraspable activity. From not another perspective, absolute stillness.

Just this not one, not two perspective.