Category: Practice

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.

Happiness

Jeff

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

This is the “Happy Chinaman,” story 12 in 101 Zen Stories by Nyogen Senzaki and Paul Rep:

Anyone walking about Chinatowns in America will observe statues of a stout fellow carrying a linen sack. Chinese merchants call him Happy Chinaman or Laughing Buddha.

This Hotei lived in the T’ang dynasty. He had no desire to call himself a Zen master or to gather many disciples around him. Instead he walked the streets with a big sack into which he would put gifts of candy, fruit, or doughnuts. These he would give to children who gathered around him in play. He established a kindergarten of the streets.

Whenever he met a Zen devotee he would extend his hand and say: “Give me one penny.”

Once as he was about to play-work another Zen master happened along and inquired: “What is the significance of Zen?”

Hotei immediately plopped his sack down on the ground in silent answer.

“Then,” asked the other, “what is the actualization of Zen?”

At once the Happy Chinaman swung the sack over his shoulder and continued on his way.

Let’s talk about Zen and happiness.

Zen isn’t particularly known for its cheerfulness. We turn toward suffering. We contemplate the First Noble Truth — dukkha, or dissatisfaction with our experience — and sit with it long enough to truly feel it. We remind ourselves of sickness, old age, and death whenever we chant. We try to see the three poisons of greed, anger, and delusion clearly in ourselves. Bundling these and other teachings together, it’s hard to deny that we tend to linger with what hurts.

But Hotei, the wandering, gleeful, gift-giving, master in our story, appears in the last of our Ten Oxherding Pictures as the exemplar of complete realization. As what Zen is all about.

So why all this attention to difficulty?

Because we can’t put something down until we know we’re holding it. We can’t put something down that has a grip on us. We can only thrash about and try to escape.

Hotei embodies this realization. Lore has it that he was the Chinese monk Pu-tai, who had a reputation for being especially benevolent and fond of children—not to mention having a big belly. Our collective memory of him became molded into an icon over time: the round, beaming fellow we see in some Asian restaurants, his broad smile, bright eyes, big belly, and out-stretched arms expressing a kind of cosmic yes. This is the Laughing Buddha. I have a ceramic image of him on the bookshelf to my left. 

This is not Shakyamuni, the historical Buddha. Hotei is someone different, and perhaps more relatable for us. Hotei is a portrait of what becomes possible when we can see what we’re carrying and set it down. He’s what ordinary people like us are more likely to become through practice: more easy-going, happier, more connected versions of ourselves, rather than a globally-visible wisdom teacher.

But here’s the thing about Hotei: he doesn’t just put the bag down, he also picks it back up. He knows we can’t separate from our suffering or our histories—our baggage, so to speak. We can just carry them differently; relate to them differently.

When another master asks, “What is the significance of Zen?” — Hotei just puts the bag down. Everything in that bag, all of it, accounted for and gently set down. That’s the significance of Zen: the possibility of recognizing we are not completely subject to the suffering we experience. We have the potential for considerable agency in relation to it.

“What is the actualization of Zen?,” Hotei is then asked.

Hotei swings the sack back over his shoulder and walks on.

We are always carrying that bag. It’s a bag full of gifts—the whole mess. The bag of this one precious, impossible life. Inside it, along with the donuts, fruit, candy, the love and the joy, are worry and grief and boredom and loss, all mixed together, somehow inseparable. The medical bills. The relationships that aren’t what we hoped for. The unfinished work. The departed loved ones. And, mixed in with all of that, the sweetness. The cup of coffee on the patio as the morning sun shines and birds chatter. A friend’s laugh. All the stuff of my life. All of it right here, right now.

These seemingly dour Buddhist teachings are meant to help us see our suffering and its sources clearly, and to transform our relationship to it all.

We can put it down, metaphorically, and pick it up again and hold it with a lighter touch. We don’t cling to or compound the suffering that is part of this sweet life. We hold it, and ourselves, and others more gently. Suffering is no longer holding us.

I think Buddhism’s teachings about suffering are misunderstood—or maybe it’s all a clever bait-and-switch designed to draw us toward practice. We hear the Third Noble Truth—that it’s possible to end suffering—as an almost mechanistic guaranty that Buddhism is a cure for every toothache, worry, and all that’s worse. That’s not the promise. That’s not the liberation it offers. What practice offers instead is a new relationship to life and its inevitable hardships, and a reduction in the optional hardships our delusive perspectives and behaviors impose upon oneself and others. That’s the liberation we’re offered.

To sit is to put the bag down. When the bag is on the ground before us, even for a moment, something else may come forward. Clarity. Lightness. Things just are, presenting themselves fully, right here, right now, without need to name them.

This ease within full engagement, which Hotei embodies, is what we call the samādhi of play.

Not play as frivolity, or escape. Play as full presence. Watch children completely absorbed in a game and you see it: time disappears, nothing is held back, the game is the whole world. This is samādhi. And it is, paradoxically, exactly what the Buddha was pointing to in and through all that suffering. The whole, seeming catastrophe, the bag and everything in it: this is the field of liberation. This is where happiness lives. Not as a reward for having finally sorted things out. Not as the absence of difficulty. Happiness as the completeness of just doing the thing you’re doing, without the extra burden of wishing it were otherwise.

Realizing this, we can actualize it.  We can pick the bag back up and carry it differently.

We return to and accept our lives. We come back to life differently. Not crushed under it or resigned to it. We pick it up the way Hotei picks it up his bag: laughing, walking, giving candy to the children.

Sickness is still sickness. Old age is still old age. Death is still death. The three poisons still arise — 

which is why the Second Great Vow doesn’t say “delusions will eventually end.” It says delusions are inexhaustible; I vow to transform them. They don’t disappear. We just stop being ruled by them.

And in that freedom happiness arises by itself. Like sunlight when the clouds move. The sun wasn’t gone.

“Give me one penny.”

Hotei kept asking for a penny from anyone who wanted him to teach. This response, which is a kind of joke, is his teaching. It’s a finger pointing at what was already there in the person asking for his teaching. Zen’s proverbial lost coin has been in your pocket all along. 

The whole bag is ours — the weight and the delight of it. 

What practice offers us is the moment of putting it down.

And the opportunity to pick it up, chuckle, and keep walking.

Coming Home

Jeff

I gave this talk at our Full Moon Zen sesshin on April 18, 2026. A recording follows the text.

Here is the prose poem “This Moment is the Koan,” by Keizan Jokin:

Although we speak of practice, this is not a practice you can do.

Don’t try to fabricate Buddha; and don’t be concerned with how well or how poorly you think you’re doing.

Just understand that time is as precious as if you were putting out a fire in your hair.

Shatter obstacles and become intimate with awakening awareness. Arising from stillness, carry out activities without hesitation.

This moment is the koan. When practice and realization are without complexity, the koan is this present moment. 

That which is before any trace arises and the scenery on the other side of time’s destruction, the activity of all Buddhas and awakened Ancestors, is just this one thing. 

Just rest and cease; be cooled; pass numberless years as this moment. This is like coming home and sitting at ease.

“Tap your heels together three times and repeat, ‘There’s no place like home,’” Glinda the Good Witch tells Dorothy near the end of The Wizard of Oz. This incantation transports Dorothy back to the family farm in Kansas. Home had become a strange and dangerous place for her in late adolescence—but nowhere near as strange and dangerous, and ultimately wonder-filled and transformative, as the journey that began when she left.

Dorothy needs to escape home as the story begins. As it ends, she has a different perspective on home. Now she knows home is where her heart is, and she longs to return.

I think The Wizard of Oz is an underappreciated spiritual classic—perhaps not quite up there with Dōgen’s teachings, but close. 🙂

Dorothy doesn’t feel quite at home in her life, and then discovers her life as home. The scarecrow can’t think straight and then finds clarity. The tin man feels heartless and discovers love and compassion. The lion feels timid—separated from his nature—and regains his courage.

Ignorance and delusions replaced by clarity and wisdom. Heartlessness transformed into big, open-hearted love and compassion. Fear of life transformed into courage to meet it. Separateness transformed into connection. Restless, anxious wandering resolved into a sense of place wherever we are.

Well, that’s a pretty good summation of the arc of long practice; the arc of our journey. We arrive with a sense of lack and separation and discover wholeness. We come home.

Keizan offers a Zen coda to this story. He reframes it in the language and spirit of Zen. 

We only imagine we are wandering from home when we take up practice, he says. In reality, we can’t leave home. 

There is no ultimate doing well because there is no ultimate doing poorly. There is no ultimate difference between realization and practice. There is no becoming more Buddha than we are right now.

No homecoming because there is no going away. No departure; no return.

Just this. This precious moment. This moment is home.

What is home as this moment?

The word and idea of home likely evokes something different for each of us, depending upon our past and present experience. For some, home signals safety, warmth, comfort, contentment. For others, less so, or maybe not at all.

Keizan is pointing to a deeper meaning of home that is sensory but not sentimental. Home as a sense of intimacy, comfort, and ease wherever we are. Being home in this vast universe. Being home in our own skin. Not separating from this skin-bag here and now, as Shitou encourages us not to do—as if we could.

Whatever our associations with home life may have been as a child, and whatever they are as an adult, the message and gift of Zen is that we can discover a sense of okayness and ease here and now, in this moment. A sense of home amid whatever arises. A sense of home that isn’t dependent on our outward circumstances. A sense of home that abides. Abiding abode. Home that emerges continually.

Home-leaving is a huge theme in Buddhism historically, and it still is today in other parts of the world. It’s not just a metaphor. For millennia, people have been leaving their families, shaving their heads, and entering monasteries. For millennia, and still today in most forms of Buddhism, in most parts of the world, living as a monk is considered the most authentic, elevated form of spiritual life. The word “sangha” is reserved for the community of monastics in most corners of the Buddhist world.

Fortunately, those ideas are beginning to be contested and to dissolve, especially here in the West. Monastic life can be beautiful for those who are called to it. We should be grateful for the teachings and forms that evolved from monastic life, which are available to us householders as inspiration and potential raw material for use in our lives.

And we need more people to discover home at home, so to speak. Our families, workplaces, local communities, and nations need to come home at home. We home-stayers must claim and develop our own contemplative birthright and ways of life that honor and fully express it.

I’m not advocating for more corporate and school-based McMindfulness programs. I’m talking about reshaping and recentering our lives to realize—to experience and manifest—at-one-ment moment to moment.

Meditation is a one of our key practices, but there are others—our liturgy, bowing and chanting, study of the sutras, koan work, how we eat, work, and play, the Precepts, our many forms—all of it. And the spirit and practice of meticulousness we bring to it all. Reverence, which is to say loving attention. Loving attending. The practice and experience of presence. Pure presence.

Meditation, the core practice for which Zen is known and after which it is named, is not about efficiency gains on the job or even self-help. Our self gets the help it most needs when it discovers itself at home—by which I mean not separate from—this vast robe of liberation that is, quite literally, everything. All us. No one and nothing separate.

We know we’re home when that realization and experience overcomes us; when it becomes familiar. Steady. Trustable. Ordinary. 

That is the ripest fruit of our practice. And it might just help us fall toward and find our ground in and as relationship, in and as our work, in our homes and the other places we inhabit. And sweeten our experiences there.

So bow three times and repeat, “There’s no place like home.” Know you’re already here, always have been, and always will be, in the bowing and repeating.

Here in this moment. In and as the scenery that has arisen, fleetingly, on this side of time’s destruction. 

Home.

Where is the Ease and Joy?

Jeff

I gave this talk at Full Moon Zen’s Zazenkai on January 31, 2026. A recording follows the text.

A phrase from our Oryoki meal chant popped into my head the other day: “This meal of ten benefits nourishes us in our practice. Its rewards are boundless, filling us with ease and joy.” I chuckled as I thought about my experience of Oryoki practice during my first many sesshins. That line always stung. I was feeling anything but ease and joy as I tried to observe all our minute meal forms while my knees, ankles, and back ached and my mind was racing.

Dōgen repeats this phrase at the end of his short essay “Rules for Zazen.” He tells us zazen “is the great dharma gate of ease and joy.” I can hear his novice monks groaning, “Yeah, right.”

Some of us have been dealing with some pretty tough stuff lately, myself included. Even those of us who haven’t lost a loved one, separated from a partner, had surgery, or dealt recently with some other major challenge may be feeling there isn’t much ease and joy going around generally these days. Many of us are feeling the weight of the world. There are immigration raids and shootings, an affordability crisis, wars and threats of new ones.

So what’s all this talk of the Zen path being about “ease and joy”? Where is the ease and joy? Where do we find it? How does a path that includes sitting uncomfortably for hours on end and eating in silence while performing tedious rituals help us find it?

I don’t intend to “Zen out” by pretending this path is all bliss all the time, or that it leads to blissful feelings all the time. Life is hard. In some ways, Zen confronts us with and amplifies this reality.

The notion of ease in Zen isn’t about reaching a place where life is without difficulty. It’s not really about external circumstances, or what we can’t control. It’s about our own perspective and disposition. A better perspective and disposition certainly can help improve our circumstances, but not entirely or mechanistically. There are causes and conditions beyond our immediate influence.

Ease is about how we meet things. About our capacity to be present to challenging circumstances with openness and curiosity. Without being reactive and making them worse. This tends to be harder to pull off in contexts that feel stressful. For some of us, that means speaking or other activities when we’re being observed by others. For some, it’s the realm of intimate relationship. For some, it’s moments that limit our agency, like having to keep a commitment we made earlier but don’t want to keep now.

Zen can help us experience more ease in this sense. We become better a coping with the small challenges practice presents, and so we become better at coping with other challenges. We relax our grip on our sense of self—which, in case you hadn’t noticed, is the central character in all our dramas. We learn to be nakedly present to what is; what’s arising moment by moment. Less anxious, or less reactive as anxiety arises.

Joy in Zen isn’t an amped-up, exuberant state. Zen has nothing against exuberance, but a constant, elevated mood is not the goal. We might even say that happiness as we tend to talk about it in the West is not the goal of Zen practice. Again, Zen has nothing against feeling very happy. But, honestly, who among us is in an elevated mood all the time, never frustrated or upset? That’s not a realistic goal, nor would a constantly elevated mood be a mark of maturity, of an integrated self. Psychologists see that sort of presentation as a defense mechanism against less pleasant feelings, like anger or shame, one might have a harder time integrating. 

A better synonym for joy in the Zen sense might be contentment, which is really about an abiding sense of appreciation for our life as a whole and each thing in it. Even the difficult things. If we look closely and are honest, there often are past, present, and possible future blessings mixed into challenging experiences. We need to allow ourselves to feel the hard stuff: sadness, grief, and the like. Let it move through us. But let’s not miss the diamonds in the rough either. A baseline experience of joy is about noticing small things and diamonds in the rough.

Zen practice can help us experience more joy in this sense. Our friend Bob Waldinger had his first, big opening during Oryoki practice deep into a sesshin. He’d been experiencing all the discomfort and hardship most of us experience in the early days of Zen practice, and even beyond the early days. At one point during the meal he became totally aware of and present to a single grain of rice in his bowl. Bob, the grain of rice, and all things merged in that instant. Total presence. Total appreciation. Total joy.

So perhaps when we hear that our simple meal and fussy, difficult way of eating, or our long hours sitting still are dharma gates of ease and joy, we can recalibrate a bit. We can think of Zen as a path of presence to and contentment with what is; as an invitation and opportunity to meet what is differently than we otherwise might. 

We are confronted with what is here, now, whether we like it or not. We have no choice in the matter presently. Our only choice is about how we receive and respond to it.

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.

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.

Layman P’ang 3

Jeff

This is the third of three talks I gave at our weeklong sesshin, held from August 24-30, 2025, at Providence Zen Center, a monastery. Our theme was “Chop Wood, Carry Water”: Everyday Form and Formation on the Householder Path. A recording follows the text, which is edited for clarity and conciseness.

This is Case 2 in The Sayings of Layman P’ang:

One day, Shih-t’ou said, “I’ve come to visit you. What have you been doing?” 

The Layman said, “If you’re asking what I do every day, there’s nothing to say about it.”

Shih-t’ou said, “What did you think you were doing before I asked you about it?”

The Layman made up a verse:

“What I do every day is nothing special.

I simply stumble around.

What I do is not thought out.

Where I go is unplanned.

No matter who tries to leave their mark,

The hills and dales are not impressed.

Collecting firewood and carrying water

Are prayers that reach the gods.”

Shih-t’ou approved saying, “So, are you going to wear black or white?”

The Layman said, “I will do whatever is best.”

It came to pass that he never shaved his head to join the sangha.

In this talk, my third and last for this sesshin, I aspire to seize at least one of two opportunities, where I perhaps have room for improvement. My other two talks were longer than usual . . . although, honestly, I am known to give long talks. This one may be just a tad shorter. I hope I don’t break that promise. The other opportunity: the past two talks were packed with a lot of points to follow. Well, I’m going to fall down big time on that front again!

What I’ve been thinking about since the second of the talks I gave is the moment when it came to pass that P’ang didn’t shave his head to join the sangha. He chose a householder’s life. When we meet him here, what words of encouragement might we be able to offer someone who is choosing that life? What words of encouragement might I be able to offer P’ang?

Somehow my response to that question began to come out in a series of tips or encouragements. I think this is probably because, as those of you who join us on Thursday nights know, Nick Patterson, when it’s his turn to do a reading, has for the last several months been reading three or four of Wumen’s 14 Cautions that come at the end of his compilation of the Mumonkan, The Gateless Gate. Wumen is offering cautions presumably for people who live in a monastery. I thought I might offer some encouragements for people who don’t. 

I’m not sure I was driving for 14, but I came up with 14. This is something like the alpha version, v0.1 of them. I’ll be continuing to think about them. And because there are 14 of these points, and because I’ve got just a little bit to say about some of them, well, that’s a lot. I encourage you just to listen and let them wash over you. If one thing I say jumps out and sticks with you—is meaningful to you somehow—we’ll be lucky. These eventually will be in writing on my blog, so there’s no need to try to remember it all.

These are not ready for prime time, so thanks for bearing with me as I test drive them with you. Maybe someday these will be in one of those to-be-written books I mentioned during my first talk. One book I want to write is about householder life on the Zen path; maybe I’ll put a more developed version of these points at the end as, I don’t know, Kōgen Roshi’s 14 encouragements or something. We’ll see.

There is no inside or outside

Don’t imagine you leave the world when you enter a monastery or that you enter the world when you leave one. 

To be in the world is to be of the world.

As Linji says, “There’s no Dharma outside to run after. There’s no Dharma within to obtain.”

There is no home leaving, ever.

Hide it in plain sight

As Dongshan says, “With practice hidden, function secretly, like a fool, like an idiot,”

As Shih-t’ou, who our beloved P’ang knew well, said “If you wish to speak ten times, keep quiet nine.”

All is sangha

By which I mean: Buddha is Dharma is Sangha.

Be the guest house of which Rumi writes. Welcome all.

There’s truly nothing worth begrudging, as Bodhidharma said.

Relate: Lead with the relational perspective

Those of you who’ve been in our Precepts study group this round, or in the past, or who have read Bernie Glassman’s book on the Precepts, Infinite Circle, know that, in Zen, we look at our Bodhisattva Precepts—our ethical precepts—from three different perspectives: the literal, the relational, and the Absolute. 

For our lives in the world, of the world, whether in a monastery or outside of one, the relational is in the lead. It’s where the rubber of the Absolute meets the road of the literal.

Non-killing is the first of the ten grave precepts. Let’s look at it:

The literal is don’t kill. Full stop.

The Absolute: nothing is born or dies. Non-killing.

The relational: If you’re a vegan and the cook doesn’t know it, don’t kill her joy, his joy, whether you choose to eat the beef stew or not.

Not too tight, not too loose

That’s the phrase a hidden Buddhist friend of mine—a certified, crusty, old, cheap Vermonter named Bob Bender, the elder brother of my close friend, Bill—repeats often. “Not too tight, not too loose.”

In other words, seek the middle way.

Make space

This universe is the altar. This planet is the wisdom seat.

Clear a place for yourself; a little place at home to sit. Make a simple altar at which to dedicate your practice and your life.

Make time, and mark time

Make time a time to sit each day; time for group practice; time for sesshin—all as your circumstances permit.

Mark time: holidays like Bohdi Day, the Buddha’s birthday, and Obon. Holidays from your birth tradition if you have one and they’re still meaningful to you.

In Zen monasteries in Japan, they have endless regular and special rites and rituals and religious holidays. In householder life, especially as our cultures mixed and secularized, we can feel adrift in time.

So find ways to mark time, including over the course of a day: waking time, mealtimes, bedtime. We can mark these with little gathas. Like our simple meal gatha, which I say to myself at every meal: We receive this food in gratitude to all beings who helped to bring it to our table, and vow to respond in turn to those in need with wisdom and compassion.

Be time, by which I mean be present and give your presence. Give your genuine attention to other people. There is no greater gift you can give them, and yourself.

Everybody here is keeping time during sesshin: Matt and Libby and Paul and Cheryl—each of us in different ways. You have given me a real gift. Over the last couple of days, I’ve mostly not been wearing my watch, which I realized was making me mildly anxious. I don’t need it. Dropping the watch has helped me be time.

Make a mark

We can’t help but make a mark, whether we intend to or not.

Some of you know I practiced Zen archery years ago with Kanjuro Shibata Sensei XX, one of my first teachers. He was the imperial bowmaker of Japan. He stood in a long line, as the 20th of Japan’s Imperial bow makers.

Most of the shooting one does is inside a kyudojo room where there are hay bales, each covered with a white sheet. You stand a few yards from a hay bale and shoot into it. Far more arrows are shot into hay bales than circular targets far away.

As you can imagine, those sheets get poked full of holes. Everything you do in kyudo is ritualized, like what we do here. There is a ritual way to pull the arrow out of the hay bale. You pull it out slowly, twisting it. And the last thing you do, before you return to where you stand and prepare to take another shot, is to put your finger at the tip of the arrow and touch the arrow tip to the hole you have made. This gesture acknowledges you’ve made a mark. We can’t help but make a mark.

How do we make a mark through our householder existence? By not sparing the dharma assets. Develop and share your talents. Master some craft to life craft, to self-craft: teaching, cooking, poetry, medicine, hospitality, physical therapy. In other words, like Pierre, Maurice Sendak’s character, who I loved—and if you don’t know this reference, check it out: Care.

But as you make your mark, be gentle, and leave no trace. Don’t forget: The hills and dales are not impressed. 

All is precious, but don’t be too precious

All these forms to which we attend in minute detail are only to help us have a good shared experience. They’re not for the sake of the forms themselves. We embrace them to give life a pleasing shape and texture and feeling when we’re practicing them, and to learn to give life a pleasing shape and texture and feeling when we’re not.

So hold them with the light touch. Don’t force them if we are forcing others by forcing them. If we’re pooping the party.

It’s nothing personal

By which I mean two things:

First, enlightenment isn’t something we can get. Something we can have.

Second, don’t take that, or anything else, too personally.

Optimize for wholeness and integration

This also has two dimensions:

First, about our life choices. You probably will make less money if you walk the Zen path. We could all be working right now. It probably will influence choices you make about your livelihood and how you live; opportunities we don’t take up.

Still on this first dimension, don’t privilege the formal forms of our practice over the rest of your life. Find the right balance, like the surfer. For example, if you’re married, your marriage probably will suffer if you don’t leave sesshin to celebrate your spouse’s birthday, if it falls during the week of sesshin. I know this from personal experience with teachers who expected me to be at sesshin over my wife’s birthday year after year. Don’t ever practice with a teacher who wouldn’t let you leave sesshin for an evening to celebrate your partner’s or child’s birthday.

Second, optimize for wholeness and integration by exploring your shadows and welcoming what you meet there.

Okay, on to the last three encouragements. I have less to say about them.

Life is the teacher

Trust your experience.

A footnote on that is, if you invite somebody into a Zen teacher role in your life, make sure that is what they are teaching. Make sure that’s what they want for you. That they know life is your ultimate teacher.

Time passes swiftly, and opportunity is lost. Do not squander your life.

This is from our Evening Gatha, of course. Some of these aren’t very original.

Choose the long road, take it easy, and enjoy the ride

Sometimes swiftly, always slowly.

There is no short road. There are no shortcuts, either.