Category: Koans

Surrendering to the Storm

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

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.

Spiritual Maturity and Strength of Character

Jeff

I gave this talk at our Full Moon Zen Sunrise Sit this morning. A recording follows the text.

This is Case 20 in the Gateless Gate:

Master Shôgen said, “Why is it that a person of great strength does not lift up his or her leg?”

He also said, “It is not with the tongue that we speak.”

The longer I practice, the more aware I become of Zen’s “bait and switch” quality.

Many of us come to practice seeking some sort of superpower we’re certain we lack. Enlightenment and all it connotes—insight, wisdom, equanimity, and more. Enlightenment is the umbrella term for that superpower, I suppose.

We think we’ll be a different sort of person once we have it: a Buddha. Shakyamuni, the historical Buddha, is a pardigmatic wisdom figure to whom volumes of brilliant and transformative teachings are attributed. By some especially idealized accounts, he also was all-seeing and all-knowing, and he even had magical powers and visibly used them. This is not just a person of great strength, but some sort of super-person.

So why does Shôgen say a person of great strength doesn’t display it; that he speaks, but not with his tongue?

He’s offering us a different image of spiritual maturity. Practice does make us stronger, but we develop a quiet strength that manifests as gentleness and humility, not necessarily a gusher of insights and words to go with them and noteworthy acts that attract attention.

The wisdom that practice cultivates is more earthy than philosophical. It’s more about simplicity than sophistication. 

The compassion that practice cultivates is more about basic kindness and quiet, genuine presence than showy efforts to save souls or save the world. Any visible, big effort to save souls and save the world that isn’t grounded in basic kindness and that quiet, genuine presence is bound to miss the mark—if it’s propelled by some different sort of energy, especially anger in the guise of goodness. 

The longer I practice, the more inspired I am by solid, simple people, many of whom would struggle to preach the Dharma with their tongue—who lack the gift of gab—but who transmit it in the ten directions by the loving care with which they prepare a meal and by their warmth, openness, and attentiveness that make others feel welcome and accepted.

For those of us who do have the gift of gab, or who otherwise are inclined to speak, Keizan Jokin’s line in At Ease and in Harmony points toward a mark of the spiritual maturity and strength of character I’m talking about, “If you wish to speak ten times, keep quiet nine.”  Show, don’t tell, as the saying goes.

So the next time you’re inclined to compare yourself to Shakyamuni or Dōgen or any of the great teachers in our koan collections, and to tell yourself you don’t measure up, remember Shôgen’s encouragement. The person of great strength doesn’t lift a leg or speak with their tongue, at least not loudly or often.

Zen and Metaphysics

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 . . . 

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.

Receiving by Letting Go

Jeff

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

away of each present moment.

Regardless of how things work out—

or don’t.

Where There’s a Will, There’s the Way

Jeff

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.

Modes and Styles of Practice and Teaching

Jeff

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.

Nanquan Kills the Cat: Reflections on Zen’s Attitude Toward Ambivalence

Jeff

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. 

If you can say a word, I’ll spare the cat.

I’ve said my word. I look forward to yours.

Heart-Mind: Compassion as the Other Face of Wisdom

Jeff

I gave this talk on October 2, 2025. A recording follows the text.

This is Case 42 in The Gateless Gate:

Once Manjushri went to a place where many Buddhas had assembled with the World-Honored One. When he arrived, all the buddhas had returned to their original dwelling place. Only a young woman remained, seated in samadhi, near the Buddha’s seat.

Manjushri addressed the Buddha and asked, “How can the young woman get near the Buddha’s seat when I cannot?”

The Buddha replied to Manjushri, “Awaken this young woman from her samadhi and ask her yourself!” Manjushri walked around the young woman three times, snapped his fingers once, took her to the Brahma Heaven and exerted all his supernatural powers but he could not bring her out.

The World-Honored One said, “Even a hundred-thousand Manjushris cannot awaken her. Down below, past twelve hundred million lands, as innumerable as sands of the Ganges, lives the Bodhisattva of Delusive Wisdom. He will be able to bring her out of her samadhi.”

Instantly the Bodhisattva of Delusive Wisdom emerged from the earth and made bows before the World-Honored One who gave him his imperial order. Delusive Wisdom stepped before the young woman, snapped his fingers once and at this she came out of samadhi.

Here’s Yunmen’s verse:

One can bring her out, the other cannot;

both of them are free.

A god mask; a devil mask –

the failure is an elegant performance.

When I decided to talk tonight about the two major virtues Zen foregrounds, wisdom and compassion, and about the relationship between them, I went looking for a koan that would provide a good starting point. I read all the koans featuring Manjushri, the bodhisattva of wisdom, and landed on this one. It’s a doozy. I think it works for my purposes. We’ll see what you think when we get to the dialogue after the talk.

You may have noticed that many zendos have at least one image of Manjushri. In the monastery zendo we use on sesshin at Providence Zen Center, you will find him in the lower right of the colorful mural behind the large Buddha statute on the altar. Manjushri is depicted holding a sword, which symbolizes prajna: discriminating wisdom that cuts through delusion, ignorance, and false distinctions. Buddhism regards ignorance and conceptual confusion as the root of suffering.

What are we confused about? The nature of our own existence. We think of ourselves, and we feel, separate, rather than interconnected; woven together as one fabric. Manjushri’s sword severs false views. It cuts the root of our suffering.

We often also find images of Avalokiteshvara, also known as Kanzeon, the Bodhisattva of compassion, in meditation halls. She is carved into the front panel of the altar in the monastery zendo at PZC. Their Kwan Um School of Korean Zen is named after her, so you find her everywhere there. The white porcelain statue of a woman with many arms and hands—it’s supposed to be 1,000—is Avalokiteshvara.

In the carving on the front panel of the altar, a massive Avalokiteshvara—aka Kanzeon or Kwan Um—sits on the shore beside rough waters in which a tiny human is thrashing about. Drowning, he reaches out to Avalokiteshvara, who saves him. That human is you or me. The 1,000 hands on that white porcelain statute of Avalokiteshvara nearby are there to sense our needs and to reach out to save all of us.

We tend to dualize thought and feeling, mind and heart, in Western culture. Wisdom is associated with the mind, which we tend to associate with directed thought, so the idea of wisdom takes on a rational, analytical character. It’s solely a product of reasoning. Feeling is associated with the heart, and the heart is associated with emotion, which we tend to regard as irrational.

Asian cultures don’t dichotomize this way. Heart and mind are one. The Japanese word kokoro is translated as heart-mind. That’s heart-hypen-mind. If you ask the Japanese to indicate where in the body this heart-mind resides, they won’t point to the head or the chest. They’ll point to the belly, which is the center of our body, where our breath in meditation and our nervous system settles—where we have butterflies or not. It’s also where we have gut feelings. We associate the gut with intuitive knowledge, of course; knowledge that we feel.

Let’s return to our koan and its verse. When Manjushri arrives to meet Shakyamuni Buddha, all other Buddhas who had been with him disappear. Manjushri’s wisdom sword cuts through false dichotomies. The many dharmas, the many Buddhas, are one. Form is empty. All is Buddha. There is no Buddha to whom Manjushri can get near because all is one.

But there is a woman lost in samadhi—peaceful, even blissful perhaps, but still feeling separate. She is near the Buddha, but apparently has not yet fully realized, fully known and forgotten, her own Buddha nature. Manjushri can’t reach her.

The Buddha says even 1,000 Manjushris, with their penetrating insight into false distinctions and the emptiness of form, could not reach her. In other words, just approaching her with the idea of Emptiness and Oneness won’t reach her. 

But, we learn, there is a Bodhisattva of Delusive Wisdom—a Manjushri that apparently sees form in emptiness, and who can make contact with the Buddha and the 10,000 things. This bodhisattva appears, snaps his fingers, and the woman is released from her spell. Presumably she now realizes that form is emptiness.

This Bodhisattva of Delusive Wisdom is fascinating and illuminating. Here we see wisdom not as a detached observer or witness, somehow above it all, but in the tangled vines with us. Embodied wisdom. Feeling wisdom. Emotional wisdom.

Of course, it must be so. There is no “above”; no separate place or perspective from which we judge our own or others’ experience. Wisdom is embodied and must be embodied. Wisdom is born of experience. There is solid research showing that feeling our feelings, relating to them well, and integrating them helps us make good decisions, as if we need such geeky confirmation of something that should be so obvious. Feeling and thinking are partners.

The Bodhisattva of Delusive Wisdom, Manjushri’s other mask, is Avalokiteshvara—compassion. The heart-mind is in the world of form, of humans with our sense of lack and separation, feeling pain that enables us to recognize others’ pain, hearing and feeling others’ cries, knowing we’re not separate, but also not getting lost in emptiness, able to make contact, able to respond with our 1,000 hands.

Wisdom-and-compassion. We find Zen’s lost coin when we realize wisdom and compassion as its two sides.

If you try to direct yourself you betray your own practice

Jeff

I gave this talk at our Full Moon Zen Sunrise Sit today. Here’s the text of the koan I used, with a recording of the talk.

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.