Tag: buddhism

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.

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.

War, Peace, and Zen

Jeff

I gave this talk at our Full Moon Zen sit tonight. A recording follows the text.

Earlier this week Nick asked that Fran or I speak about war, peace, and Zen. I volunteered.

My first instinct for most talks is to reach for a koan or another teaching that speaks to a theme and then to build on it.

Quickly I realized this topic is so woven into the causes and conditions of my life, my past and my present, that I had to take a different approach. This talk will be more autobiographical than some, but hopefully I’ll manage to speak to Nick’s topic to his satisfaction and yours.

I don’t exactly come from a multi-generational military family but I did grow up aware of my dad’s service in the Air Force. He was stationed in the Middle East between the Korean and Vietnam Wars before I was born.

I also was aware of an uncle’s service in the Marines. He was a top sergeant during WWII, a decorated soldier who saw a lot of combat. He was wounded in a battle in the Pacific as he ran into fire to save members of his troop who’d been shot. He was at Pearl Harbor when it was bombed. He met my aunt, my dad’s sister, in a military hospital where she was a nurse. He was a lovely, gentle, humble man. He worked as an electrician after the war. He was into shortwave radio and model trains, hobbies that fascinated me and all my cousins. I couldn’t articulate it as a child, but somehow this juxtaposition of his bravery and competence as a soldier and his gentleness made a deep and lasting impression on me. 

He had a nervous breakdown later in life. The things he experienced in combat finally overwhelmed him. He never talked about it with his kids and many nephews and nieces, but one of his grandkids eventually got him to agree to an interview for a school project. He spoke openly about his experiences for the first time. This grandson went on to become a Top Gun pilot, and eventually a Top Gun commander. The real Tom Cruise. He was the, or one of the, senior officers leading air operations in the Gulf War. 

As a young kid, our classes and schoolyard play sometimes were interrupted by “civil defense drills.” Others here likely remember that. Whenever we heard the deafening sound of an air raid siren we took cover under our desks, as if they could protect us from a Russian atomic bomb blast and its radioactive fallout. 

Neighbors had an encyclopedia set. I used to sit in their living room for hours reading about military history. I was fascinated by the uniforms, flags, and insignia. By the sense of honor and virtue that seemed to permeate it all. By the notion that people would risk and give their lives for a cause. Something they believed in. Something that seemed to be operating at levels even deeper than belief.

I went to high school in a small, hardscrabble town deep and high in the Colorado Rockies. One year the Army chose our town and the surrounding mountains as the location for its war game. I somehow was recruited to be one side’s secret civilian collaborator. I recruited a small group of friends to the cause. We snuck out of our houses after midnight as the game began and went deep in the mountains to meet paratroopers dropping from the sky. We helped coordinate covert actions for our side for the next two weeks. The game ended when we captured the other side’s commander at Pizza Hut, one of the few chain restaurants in town. I was there. I played some minor role in that operation I can’t recall.

Going to college wasn’t a given. Most of the 100 or so students in my class didn’t. A good friend resolved to attend West Point and I resolved to attend Annapolis (the Naval Academy) to become a Seal commander. We were both accepted and sent to the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs for our matriculation physicals. I failed the color vision test, so my acceptance was withdrawn. There were prior hints I was colorblind, but we didn’t really know until that moment. I was crushed.

I didn’t know what to do. My Catholic parents (who didn’t go to college themselves) told me to “go to the Jesuits,” so I enrolled in the nearest Jesuit school, which is in Denver. There my perspective began to shift. Reagan reinstated the draft. Compelled service bothered me at the time. (It still does, but I now see how voluntary service gives socially and economically privileged young people a pass.) I wrote “conscientious objector” all over my draft registration card. I explored pacifism in some of my classes. I began to study the art and science of dialogue.

Years later I spent considerable time in Berlin before the Wall fell. I moved there for a couple of years after it fell.

I studied and began practicing law before moving to Berlin. In truth, those couple of years in Berlin were my way of coping, or not coping, with my inability to reconcile what I’ll call the hard and soft sides of myself. At the time, law (like the part of me that had wanted to be a Navy Seal) was the hard side. The soft side had begun to express itself through contemplative spirituality—the Christian mystical tradition and Zen. Thich Nhat Hahn’s book Being Peace made a big impression on me during this time. It was my first acquaintance with the connection between contemplative spirituality and notions of peace.  I began reading others who speak to this connection. Thomas Merton. Krishnamurti.

Tortured by my inability to reconcile hard and soft at that stage of life, I left law practice for Harvard Divinity School, where I planned to study the intersection of Christian mysticism and Zen.

But I had a crisis soon after I arrived. The hard side of myself missed the realm of practice; of change-making activity in the world. Around then the New York Times published an article about the massacre in Srebrenica at the end of the war in the former Yugoslavia. A picture of a Muslim woman who hung herself to avoid being slaughtered moved me to tears. I resolved then and there to understand how religion, and our beliefs and values more generally, get tangled up in conflict and how to untangle them. 

I pivoted hard to studying negotiation and conflict resolution. I was fortunate to find mentors like Herb Kelman, a social psychologist who became the first and most longstanding backchannel mediator among Israelis and Palestinians, and Roger Fisher, an international law professor who is one of the founders of the negotiation field and who also became a mediator in armed conflicts. They helped pioneer the field of negotiation and conflict resolution because of their own painful experiences of war. Herb escaped the Holocaust as a child. Roger was a naval aviator in WWII who lost many friends in that war.

Today, as many of you know, I teach in this area and am involved in that sort of work myself. 

What does all this have to do with war and peace and Zen? There’s war and peace and Zen in my personal story, but how does that all hang together and respond to Nick’s request?

Honor. Virtue. Belonging. These are deep-rooted human sentiments. 

Buddha, Dharma, Sangha

Buddha: Oneness can become an ideal

Dharma: Individuals

Sangha: Individuals in community bound by an ideal

We can relate to each of these things—an ideal of oneness, ourselves, and others—narrowly, rigidly, and jingoistically. Sometimes Buddhists have. Think of the many Zen Buddhists in Japan during WWII who were warmongers. Think of some Buddhists in Burma today.

Or we can relate to them broadly, loosely, and inclusive of strangers and outsiders.

That’s better, but let’s not kid ourselves. We can’t deny our twin nature. However tolerant, accepting, and pacific one may be, we are hard-and-soft. We are open-and-closed. We favor those for whom we feel an affinity. Likely we always will. Perhaps that’s natural and good, to a point. A point we too often cross.

Perhaps the best we can aim for, perhaps good enough, is captured in the lovely lines of the hymn Finlandia:

This is my song, O God of all the nations

A song of peace, for lands afar and mine

This is my home, the country where my heart is

Here are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine

But other hearts in other lands are beating

With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine

My country’s skies are bluer than the ocean

And sunlight beams on cloverleaf and pine

But other lands have sunlight, too, and clover

And skies are everywhere as blue as mine

O hear my song, thou God of all the nations

A song of peace for their land and for mine

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.

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.