Tag: buddhism

Layman P’ang 2

Jeff

This is the second 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.

Today I want to zero in on the final three lines of this case:

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. 

So what might Layman P’ang have been deliberating about at this moment he was considering leaving home; joining a monastery or living a hermit’s life? I’m not sure that, when we meet Shih-t’ou in this case, he even would have had a monastery yet. Ancient Zen masters were often named after the place they sat, like a certain mountain. If I’m not mistaken, Shih-t’ou means flat rock. He apparently just sat on top of a flat rock and eventually built his monastery at or near that spot. The flat rock was where people found him. 

P’ang is thinking about taking up this life himself. Why might he want to do that, we can ask? I can sort of relate to him at this moment in his journey. Probably like many of you, I have long had what we might call a contemplative orientation. When I was very young—probably before, certainly in, first grade—I did some things that were kind of weird for a little kid, I suppose. I created a little monk’s cell on the floor of my closet. I would go in there and shut the door, turn on a little light and read the Bible, and The Hardy Boys, and Maurice Sendak. It was a comfortable little place.

We lived in a suburb of Denver at the time. It was still developing. We lived in a track home community; we were the first occupants of our home there. And there was a lot of construction around us. I created a little shrine in a nearby construction site; a little cavity in the side of a large pile of dirt where I put some religious objects. I can’t remember what. I was raised Catholic, so probably a little Jesus statue or something. I’d go there periodically to pray.

Fast forward to my 20s and early 30s—so about the age when we meet P’ang in our story—and I was doing what P’ang did. I was traveling around meeting teachers. I learned to meditate in my mid-20s, though I think even that little kid was doing something we might call meditation. But formal meditation: Maybe I’d read about it and experimented with it earlier out of books. I certainly read a lot of contemplative literature and Dharma books when I was in college and graduate school. I took classes that were relevant to what we do here. But my first formal instruction in meditation was with Tibetan Buddhist teachers in Berkeley, California, when I was a young lawyer in working in San Francisco.

I lived in Berlin for a while after that, and I made the rounds in Germany and Europe meeting teachers and sitting with different groups. I read a lot of Dharma books there and I sort of began to settle down and mature into two primary forms of practice. Back then I was still centered in Catholicism, I suppose. I discovered the contemplative strain in Catholicism, and the Trappists specifically. I used to go on retreat to a Trappist monastery and to a Carmelite hermitage. I also began sitting with his Zen community led by Kanjuro Shibata Sensei XX, the imperial bowmaker of Japan—practicing Zen archery with him and sitting Zazen. 

I rarely went on a normal vacation for many years. All my vacation time—all the vacation time I could get, and many weekends, too—I would spend on retreat, often at monasteries. I was in the same kind of period of discernment as P’ang was when we meet him. I was considering entering a monastery.

Why didn’t I do it? Why did I even consider it? Why I considered it is clear, and I’ll get to that in a moment. Why I didn’t do it is less clear to me. Or is still becoming clear to me, even today. So why may P’ang or you or any of us consider taking up monastic life? Well, let me suggest some reasons. This is not an exhaustive list. 

As we experience when we’re here, on sesshin at a monastery, it’s a very structured life. Time is structured. Space is structured. Many of the decisions we must make on a day-to-day basis outside of a monastery are made for us. The forms, the norms, are very clear and regularized. We just follow them. We’re midway through sesshin, and we’re kind of in that groove now. What do we gain from that? What does it afford us?

All these forms are designed to support us in a particular way; to support our spiritual development, or what we might imagine to be spiritual development. They take away certain types of burdens from us. The burden of making a decision. The burden of endlessly negotiating things with others. They resolve conflicts in advance, if you will. There’s a Chinese proverb that I think is interesting: Like minds make peace. When we align our minds around a set of norms or behaviors, it tends to unify us and makes peace in a sense. 

What does this word “spiritual” mean anyway? Well, etymologically, it’s associated with breath. We can get metaphorical about that; the breath of God, breath of life. But it’s also about basic, physiological breath. Lots of words related to “spiritual” are really interesting too, like aspire. It’s no coincidence that in Zen practice, and lots of other spiritual practices, we focus on or regulate our breath in certain ways. In Zen practice, we just learn to breathe naturally.

These norms and routines in an environment like this make it easier just to live naturally in every way, including physiologically. To catch our breath. To breathe in a steady way. Steady breathing slows our heart rate; settles or calms our nervous system. That helps us find a kind of still point, and this tends to make it easier to to show up with ease and harmony—as we’ve been chanting about. If we can meet life that way, things tend to go better, and we tend to tune in to the frequency of life; to what life is always trying to offer us.

These are some of the opportunities that the structures and rhythms of monastic life offer. I think many of us come to a place like this, observe monastic life, and think of it as very rigorous and otherwise hard. But I want to turn that notion on its head. Many of us initially experience these sort of routines—the rigor and the forms— as hard and probably novice monks experience things that way. But from the perspective of a seasoned practitioner—and I know this from talking to people who have spent their whole life in a monastery, like my teacher, Kevin Hunt, who has been a monastic since his late teens and now is 93–one ultimately comes to experience that life as easier. It’s designed to remove challenges and burdens of life outside the monastery. I think it’s fair to say that Kevin sees life outside the monastery as harder.

Kevin’s Dharma heirs and those of his teacher, the Jesuit Bob Kennedy, are mostly householders. They have told me they see the kind of life we live as where the real action is at in this era. The future of practice. And in fact, Bob’s teacher, Bernie Glassman, who trained with Maezumi Roshi in more of a monastic model, eventually gave up the pretense of monasticism entirely to begin to tinker with and pioneer a new way of approaching and thinking about Zen practice that was more focused on householder life. I know from talking to people familiar with his thinking that Maezumi Roshi thought and dreamed about that, too, but felt constrained by the old norms and the expectations of the Soto authorities back in Japan. He felt constrained from taking any bold steps in that direction. Bernie waited until after Maezumi Roshi’s death to begin to take those steps.

So Why enter a monastery? Why consider entering a monastery? Well, maybe there are better and worse reasons for doing it. And maybe some of the worst reasons are, in a sense, inevitable for many who do enter a monastery. I think a lot of people probably enter to escape. And some likely enter because they imagine that, to be spiritual, to be holy, they need to do this. That it somehow will make them more spiritual or make them more holy.

Kevin’s example is interesting. I think he represents the best reason to enter a monastery. He knew from an early age that he wanted to be as close to God as he could be, and, for him, that meant living a monastic life. His orientation is theistic; an interesting brand of theism that is married with Zen. It was about intimacy from his perspective. His karma was such that monastic life was how he could feel closest to God.

I want to suggest—and I hope—that Layman P’ang chose not to shave his head to join the sangha out of a similar impulse. I sense he made the same kind of decision Kevin made, having explored these different options for living a whole bunch. I don’t know whether the Ten Ox Herding Pictures existed yet. Regardless, I think he understood that ultimate image of returning to the marketplace with empty hands. Somebody, you know, “in the world,” as we say, living life intimately.

So what’s lost when we enter a monastery? Well, certain types of freedom and choices. These days, Kevin really loves to leave the monastery. He usually wants to go to a restaurant and have a piece of red meat, which is served less in the monastery. He might even have a beer or a martini, not a common occurrence in his life generally. Most of us in this part of the world, who are insanely fortunate compared to most humans, almost have the opposite problem. We must make the choice not to over-indulge. Kevin is part of the Trappist order, which is the most hardcore of the monastic orders. People have very few possessions; they take a vow poverty. There are certain pleasurable experiences we take for granted that they don’t have.

Of course, something is gained by that. They strip away what is not essential, so they discover simple pleasure—like we have right here, now, if we notice the gentle breeze blowing through the Zendo. They experience how incredibly sweet a mandarin orange is if we’re not comparing it to sugar cookies and sodas. With our constant access to amplified pleasure, novelty is lost. We get to have new experiences all the time. Surprising new experiences; experiences that come out of the blue. Of course that happens in monasteries, too. It’s always happening everywhere, but we might not notice it if we’re compulsively seeking novelty and peak experiences all the time.

Our settling practices can help us encounter every moment as new. You’ve heard me say Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher who said, “You can’t step in the same river twice,” got it completely wrong. I say you can’t step in the same river once. Everything’s always in flux and changing. Our settling practices can help us notice that experience and appreciate the novelty and the newness of every moment.

But there are some types of newness, like the concert I’ll see in October with one of my new favorite bands, that monastics probably aren’t going to have. Key relationships: they don’t have free access to family and friends. They don’t speak to them as regularly. They certainly don’t text with them 14 times a day, as we’re used to doing. 

What else is lost? Certain types of impact potential. This is what I think Kevin and Bob are getting at; why they think the kind of life we live is really where the action is today. It must be sort of hard at times to sit in a monastery with so much suffering in the world and only be able to pray; only be able to interact with the people who come visit. We have much more opportunity, and perhaps obligation, to intervene, as we’re called, and as we skillfully can, in situations where we can be helpful.

The last thing I’ll mention—and, again, this is not an exhaustive list—that you’re giving up by becoming a monatstic is many important training opportunities. As householders, we train amid intimate relationships with partners and family members. We train in a torrent of choice and change that they don’t experience. Their physical needs are met. They brew beer or make chocolates to help subsidize their material needs, but, in general, they can’t be fired from a job, and they mostly don’t have to deal with demands of unreasonable clients and bosses. They don’t have to meet those circumstances as practice opportunities as we do. All this is why many of them would say the life we live is a harder life. They mean it’s harder to practice amid all that. They know we have the same aspiration; the same breath, the same spirit—at least those of us who occasionally visit places like this and strike up relationships with people like them.

They know they have something to offer us, but we also, they see, have something to offer them. They know we’re seeking what they’re seeking; what brought them to the monastery. And they recognize that it is harder, in a way, to walk this path, in our form of life than it is in their life form, whatever they might have thought about that when they entered the monastery.

Let me offer a little metaphor here that may be useful. What we’re doing in spiritual practice is a lot like surfing, as I understand it. Things are impermanent, always changing. Life, our experience, has a visible form, like the form of a wave, but don’t think that wave is stable or substantial. It’s ephemeral and it’s moving. What the expert surfer does is amazing, when you think about it. They learn to ride, to find their balance on top of, the crest of that wave. What they’re doing on the crest of that wave is falling a thousand times the second. Always adjusting, recovering to maintain their balance on the crest of impermanence. Getting to the point where you can do that is going to look really choppy. The first time the expert tried to do it, it didn’t look anything like they make it look now.

I think many monastics look at our lives, and they think, “Man, you’re out there in the big waves. Yeah, we’re maintaining our balance here in the monastery, but this is like skimboarding; what we’re doing. We’re in the shallow water. You’re in the deep end, where the big waves are.”

Their practice opportunities, are, in many ways, more manageable than many of ours, at least much of the time. In our householder lives, we are dealing with all sorts of challenges that are, well, genuinely challenging. Relationships are top of mind for me. Relationships with aging parents or aging partners or peers. Relationships with intimate partners whatever our ages. Monastics are intimate with one another, but not quite the same way many of us are intimate with somebody. Another person with whom we literally lie naked, and with whom we are naked spiritually and psychologically. That’s an extreme level of vulnerability. It’s as hard to manage as some of us might think maintaining silence all day long, every day of the year, is hard to manage.

 I mentioned work and having to deal with material reality and money and scarcity and abundance. Things are kept very level for them in a material sense. My family went through a period of economic vulnerability when I was in high school and early college. I didn’t know it at the time, because my parents insulated us from the details pretty well, but we had just $300 to our name as a family at one point. I am certain my parents, with three children, were worried in ways that monks seldom worry.

We also contend with difference more than monastics do. Different norms, expectations, perspectives, worldviews, moral codes. We just confront more difference than they do. People bring these things to monastic life, but, to some extent, they are normalized or suppressed. You hue to a common moral vision and code that is essentially imposed on you in a monastery. Christian monasteries have the Rule of St. Benedict. Many Buddhist monasteries have some version of the Vinaya. And you reconcile yourself to that somehow.

Also Distractions: I don’t think I need to say more about that.

And the last thing I’ll mention from our long list of greater challenges is risk. We all deal with risks that are more frequent and present and, well, risky. Many people who walk this path, and who might consider entering a monastery, are tuned towards introversion. But outside a monastery, we must meet new people all the time and compel ourselves to venture forth in ways that you just do not in a monastic environment. There are many other forms of risk in our lives: for one of us, who is commuting to this sesshin, driving here early in the morning with lots of people driving too fast on the road; driving away from here at night with poor eyesight. Monks drive, but less frequently.

This isn’t a comparison for purposes of declaring one life form good and another bad. It is a comparison for purposes of noting and being honest about what is different about the life we live and the life that, perhaps, the Buddha and some people in his era and since then have thought people need to live to express the best versions of themselves, leaving home supposedly to grow or meet life fully or seek truth.

I submit that, in this day and age, as we read in that lovely Judith Collin poem, or as Kevin Hunt and Bob Kennedy would say, the major turn of the Dharma wheel is about broadening our sense of sangha to include the kind of life we live. I submit that it is as hard as life here in a monastery; that looking at our lives from this monastic perspective, which we tend to think of as harder, there’s reason to think it is the other way around: that it’s harder to walk the Zen path “in the world,” so to speak.

It may be easier to cultivate attention in an environment like this, but this is not ultimately a practice about attention. It’s a practice about intention and action; about how we show up, how we meet the world. The quality of our attention and the capacity to maintain it is an important condition for consistently meeting the world as our best selves. But a lot of the world lies beyond the four walls of a place like this. And the rest of the world needs what has historically and traditionally been cultivated primarily in places like this to be brought beyond these four walls and out into the world.

That’s why we’re here for a time, ironically. To realize this more fully. That’s who we are. That’s why we’ll leave here on Saturday.

Layman P’ang 1

Jeff

This is the first 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.

During this sesshin, we are going to be exploring the theme of form and formation along the householder path of Zen. This is the reading we’ve chosen as our launchpad for exploring this theme. It’s the second story—one could call it a case, and I’ll say more about that in a minute—in The Sayings of Layman P’ang. It’s titled “Subtleties of Daily Life”:

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.

This little book I’m reading from, The Sayings of Layman P’ang, which I expect many of you are familiar with, is a classic in China, even to this day. It’s one of the most revered texts in Chinese culture. It is a collection of sayings of Layman P’ang—about whom I’ll say more in a moment—but probably not all of them. We think there were more. These were collected within, let’s say, 10 years after his death. 

P’ang lived in the late 8th century and the early 9th century. He died, I think, in 808. And he made quite an impression on people. This little book is really our first collection of koans—of stories about teachers. P’ang became a teacher. I’ll say more about that in a minute, too.

This collection of anecdotes, of koans, about P’ang and his encounters with monastics, was compiled before the first compilations of koans that we’re familiar with. Even today in China, most people aren’t going to be very familiar with the koan collections centered on monastic Zen teachers. But they are still familiar with The Sayings of Layman P’ang.

So who was P’ang? He grew up the son of the governor, of a provincial governor, or—we’re not sure—maybe the son of an official who worked for a governor. That’s a little murky. But it’s safe to say he grew up in privilege. Likely with some affluence and access and education.

When we meet him in this story I’ve just read, which is the second story in the book—I’ll say a little bit about the first story in just a second—he’s probably in his 30s. He’s married. I guess we can’t know whether he’s had both of his kids, but he does eventually have two kids, a daughter and a son. 

And, apparently, he had been something of a scholar of Confucius thought. By the time we meet him, he’s probably wandered around quite a bit. We know he had encounters with Taoist teachers. So he’s steeped in Confucian thought and Taoist thought, which were the two big schools of thought in China that predated the emergence of Zen.

And when we meet P’ang, he’s meeting some of the earliest Zen teachers. Towering figures in the history of Zen. It is the heyday of Zen in China during P’ang’s life. He lives during the Tang dynasty, which was a time of real prosperity and cultural flourishing and relative peace and stability in the rocky history of ancient China. 

Shih-t’ou, the teacher he encounters in this story, is one of two towering figures who live in the area where P’ang is living. (Shih-t’ou authored the Song of the Grass Roof Hermitage, which we just read.) He is the Dharma Heir of Huineng, the sixth ancestor of Zen, who was himself a layman when he entered the monastery, and for some time after he became a teacher. The sixth ancestor made a sort of scandalous progression from kitchen boy who cleaned rice to head of a major monastery. Shih-t’ou is the person to whom we trace the Soto Zen school in which we practice.

P’ang will go on throughout this book to meet many other local Zen figures, including the teacher to whom we trace the Rinzai school of Zen. So he’s really making the rounds at the foundation and formation of the Zen tradition. He’s exploring the emergence of Zen as Zen is exploring itself, so to speak. He develops a close relationship with not only these two major teachers I’ve mentioned, Shih-t’ou and Ma-tsu, but another 15 or 20 more monastics who live in the area. 

When we meet P’ang early in this collection of sayings, in the story I read, the second case, it’s not his first encounter with Shih-t’ou. They have had at least one other meeting we know about. It is the subject of the first story in this collection. It’s a famous story. In that story, P’ang is visiting Shih-t’ou, who, at that time, probably lives as a hermit in the area in which P’ang lives. P’ang brings Shih-t’ou his genjokoan, his life koan. This is what genjokoan, which Dogen later writes about, means, by the way. Many of us walk around with a burning question, like “What’s the meaning of life?” Mine was “When can I stop sitting?” When can I stop practicing? That question ate at me for years, years ago. 

The genjokoan P’ang brings Shih-t’ou, the burning question P’ang asks him, is, “What about someone who has no connection with the 10,000 dharmas?” This is P’ang coming to a teacher and actually declaring something. I am a person who no longer has any connection to the 10,000 dharmas, to the 10,000 things, to the world of form. 

What does Shih-t’ou do? He covers P’ang’s mouth; silences him. And P’ang has a great realization.

So, in our case, the second case, Shih-t’ou is coming to check in on P’ang. He says, “I’ve come to visit you. What have you been doing?”

Well, you know, this is a Zen teacher. So, as always, this could either be an innocent question or a not so innocent question. Maybe he’s asking. “Hey, P’ang, I’m wondering: Are you still stuck in emptiness?” Or, has that realization you had in our last encounter really begun to sink in. Do you know, as we chant in the Heart Sutra, that form is exactly emptiness, and emptiness is exactly form? Do you know that as more than an idea? Do you know it in your bones? Do you know it so completely that you’ve forgotten it?

The Layman said, “If you’re asking what I do every day, there’s nothing to say about it.” That’s a promising response. It seems P’ang may be returning Shih-t’ou’s double meaning with a double meaning of his own. It seems perhaps P’ang realizes his ordinary life is validating and expressing the inexpressible. That he’s realized the 10,000 dharmas speak for themselves.

Shih-t’ou says. “What did you think you were doing before I asked you about it?” A joust to P’ang’s parry! This is a checking question. Shih-t’ou is saying, “That’s a nice response, P’ang, but I’m still wondering: Is it just for show? Is it just for me, or do you truly get it for yourself?”

The Layman made up a verse, “Truly, what I do every day is nothing special.” 
The ordinary is extraordinary. I’m not trying to put a second head on top of my head anymore. 

“I simply stumble around. What I do is not thought out. Where I go is unplanned.” What is this “I” that P’ang repeats three times? That I is now in its place. P’ang now experiences small mind as situated, at ease, and at rest in Big Mind. Small mind has given up its pretense of control, its control project. Even while I’m goal directed, I stumble around. Even as I chatter to myself, direct myself, what I do is not thought out. Even when I’m executing on my best laid plans, where I go is unplanned, P’ang is saying.

“No matter who tries to leave their mark, the hills and dales are not impressed.” I (Jeff) have for a long time planned to write, and have been working on writing, a couple of books. It’s gone much slower than I would like. And that bothered me a lot for a long time. It still bothers me, but not quite the same way as it once did. It used to bother me because I was so sure the world needs these books.

Don’t get me wrong, I think I’ve got something to say. If I do complete them, I hope they’ll be good books that people find useful. And yet, I realize and have come to accept, that if I do complete these books, and even if they’re best sellers, they don’t have the ultimacy, the extra ultimate importance, that I once invested in or imagined of and for them.

Last weekend, I was on sesshin with another community that I’m sort of loosely connected to. At one point on a break, I was sitting in the library of the retreat center, where this sesshin was happening. I looked over to my left, and I saw a book by someone I knew; one of my early teachers, the Trappist monk, Thomas Keating. I got up and I wandered along the bookshelf, which was quite long. At the other end of it I saw a book by another one of my teachers, the adult developmental psychologist, Robert Kegan. Keating is now dead. Kegan is alive but retired. 

I saw lots of books between these two, by people I don’t know. I had never heard of many of them, many of whom presumably are dead. Keating and Kegan and their books matter a lot to me. Yet, no matter who tries to leave their mark, the hills and dales are not ultimately impressed.

“Collecting firewood and carrying water are prayers that reach the gods.” Maybe you didn’t know that one of the most famous phrases in all of Zen originates from this householder, P’ang. It’s usually expressed as “chop wood, carry water,” and it’s been popularized in many ways, by many people. It’s been in the title of books. It’s in the lyrics of a Van Morrison tune.

Every day: sacred. Life as prayer. Our actions as prayer. What we do is continuous practice. And this is what our Zen practice is about. It’s about discovering ourselves, washing the dishes, as the universe’s meditation.

Shih-t’ou approved, saying, “So are you going to wear black or white?” No more checking questions. 

“Are you going to wear black or white?” In those days in China monks wore black and householders wore white. Notice I’m not saying priest and layperson. I won’t go off on that riff here. You’ve heard it from me many times before. But, you know, in those days, there was a kind of normativity around monasticism. The Buddha had given the example of leaving home as what it meant to step on the path of spiritual development. That’s a simplification and too hard a binary, of course, because there were householders who were respected members of the Buddha’s broader network, like Vamilikirti. But becoming a monk was thought to be extra special.

Apparently, P’ang has confided in Shih-t’ou that he thought about leaving home; becoming a monastic. Maybe Shih-t’ou, having seen the depth of P’ang’s insight and commitment, had raised that possibility. From our present-day perspective, that seems almost unthinkable. P’ang is married. He has kids or kids on the way. What? Really? Would he leave? Apparently, it was a live question for P’ang at this point in which we meet him on his journey.

The Layman said, “I will do whatever is best.” In other words, I’m still thinking about it. I’m still in a process of discernment. I’m not sure. What is my karma? What is my life to live? I don’t know. I don’t know yet. 

What do people imagine? What do people imagine today about leaving home and going to live in a monastery, or to live as a hermit? Did you think that’s what we need to do to be “spiritual”? To be holy, live a holy life. What was P’ang imagining?

“It came to pass that he never shaved his head to join the sangha” Well, as you know, in the Buddha’s day, and really throughout history, even to the present in most Buddhist streams in Asia, “sangha” means the community of monastics. But we use that word more broadly and think of ourselves, we householders, as part of the sangha. But that is not how people have primarily thought about it within mainstream Buddhism in cultures beyond the West.

In fact, Zen teachers in Japan—because in modern times they tend to spend very little time in training monasteries, and they live in local temples with their families, where and they eat meat and drink alcohol—are not regarded by monastics in other parts of Asia as real members of the sangha. Even the founder of the White Plum lineage in which we practice, Taizan Maezumi Roshi: he was, much revered by Tibetan teachers and Burmese teachers and Sri Lankan teachers, but, at events at which they all gathered and spoke to Buddhist practitioners, I understand Maezumi Roshi was not always, maybe not even most of the time, invited to sit up on the Diaz with these other teachers. Because the way Japanese teachers practice is not considered pure, or right, from their perspective. So they’re not really part of the sangha.

Okay, spoiler alert: I’ll tell you a little bit more about what comes after today’s story. P’ang continues to wander to meet Zen teachers and other monastics. He soon meets Ma-tsu, who I mentioned earlier, to whom we trace the Rinzai Zen stream. P’ang goes away at one point and lives with Ma-tsu for a year or two. But he eventually leaves. His karma became clear, his path became clear. It came to pass that he never shaved his head and joined the sangha.

To this day, even in the West, when you meet somebody who uses the word “priest” to identify themselves, what that really means traditionally is that they went through the ritual of Shuke Tokudo, which is the ceremony for entering a monastery. It’s about becoming a monk, not becoming a “priest”—historically, traditionally, anyway. They shave their head, and they take some vows, as they move into a monastery. The vows are pretty much the same vows we take at Jukai. 

P’ang decided not to shave his head and enter a monastery. It’s lucky for us that he didn’t, because his decision, his example, reverberates and resounds throughout history. He was eventually acknowledged as a teacher. He received transmission from Ma-tsu. So early on in Zen history, we see all the supposed rules being broken.

P’ang didn’t leave any successors as far as we know. But along the way, his wife and kids, it seems, became inspired to practice. The family took all their luxury goods at one point out into the middle of a lake, on a boat, and sunk the boat. They supported themselves from that point forward by weaving and selling baskets.

I really commend this book to you. Basically, it’s a bunch of stories in which P’ang goes around one-upping all the local monastics. Or, as the British would say, taking the piss out of them. It’s all very amusing, in addition to being very wise.

P’ang is quite something, and he needs to be centered more on the path that we walk, because his life is our life. He clearly appreciated his life in the world. And he provides encouragement to us. Singing in an a cappella group. Caring for a loved one with dementia. Taking kids off to college. These are prayers that reach the gods.

Let me close with a reading from our Sutra Book. The lovely poem by Judith Collin, titled The Layman’s Lament: 

Shame on you Shakyamuni for setting

the precedent 

of leaving home. 

Did you think it was not there – 

in your wife’s lovely face 

or your baby’s laughter? 

Did you think you had to go elsewhere 

to find it? 

Tsk, tsk. 

I am here to show you 

dear sir 

that you needn’t step 

even one sixteenth of an inch away – stay 

here – elbows dripping with soapy water 

stay here – spit up all over your chest 

stay here – steam rising in lazy curls from 

cream of wheat 

Poor Shakyamuni – sitting under the Bo tree 

miles away from home 

Venus shone all the while

Layman P’ang’s Dialogue with an Oxherd

Jeff

I gave this talk on August 6, 2025, at Full Moon Zen’s Sunrise Sit. A recording follows the text.

This is Case 49, Where the Path Leads, in The Sayings of Layman P’ang:

One day the Layman saw a young boy herding oxen and asked him, “Where does this path we’re following lead to?”

The boy said, “I don’t know where it goes.”

The Layman said, “Aren’t you herding the oxen?”

The boy said, “They live in these fields.”

The Layman said, “What time of day is it anyway?”

The boy said, “It’s time to take the oxen to pasture.”

The Layman laughed heartily.

Let’s take this wonderful story line-by-line.

One day the Layman saw a young boy herding oxen and asked him, “Where does this path we’re following lead to?”

P’ang is an acknowledged Zen master and his question is the sort of coy one you’d expect from a teacher. One of those questions that seems ordinary and innocent enough but is probing the depth of your insight (and your sense of humor). But is that really what’s happening here? P’ang is the trickster who knows all the holier-than-though monks in the region and takes great pleasure in one-upping them. I’m inclined to think he’s in unfamiliar territory, is innocently asking this young stranger for directions, and is about to get beaten at his own game.

The boy said, “I don’t know where it goes.”

The boy’s opening line reminds me of something my eldest, who’s now 20, said when he was four or five. Esther and I were in our bedroom and one of was griping about something a parent or sibling had done. As I walked out of the room, I said, “Well, you know what they say: You can’t choose your family.” 

We didn’t realize our son had been just outside listening the whole time. Without missing a beat, he lit up and exclaimed, “Yeah, and you can’t even choose yourself!”

Wisdom from the mouth of babes. Does anyone really know what this is, who we are, and where we’re going?

The Layman said, “Aren’t you herding the oxen?”

Now we begin to sense P’ang knows he’s bumbled into a trap and may have met his match. “Okay, little sage, so seemingly self-possessed, surely you imagine you’re in charge and leading the way here?”

P’ang’s second question is anything but innocent. It’s a joust to the boy’s parry. The boy is herding ox, but will he recognize and has he tamed the ox I’m talking about? 

Has he discovered his wandering small mind situated in and as Big Mind , as we see in Zen’s famous Ox Herding pictures? Has his small mind been weened of the illusion that it’s the center of the universe and locus of ultimate control?

The boy’s response?

The boy said, “They live in these fields.”

Touché!

There’s a footnote in the text which says, “The sense of this statement is that the oxen know where they are going.”

Indeed. Let me read you a short passage about dealing with distractions in meditation that makes the boy’s point more explicitly. This is from a wonderful new book, Zen Pathways: An Introduction to the Philosophy and Practice of Zen Buddhism, by Bret Davis, an American Rinzai teacher and philosophy professor who has extensive practice experience in Japan. Drawing inspiration from Shunryu Suzuki, founder of Tassajara Zen Mountain Center and the San Francisco Zen Center, Davis writes:

Another teaching Suzuki Roshi gives in this regard goes even deeper and wider. He says: If you want to control your mischievous mind, don’t try to control it. Don’t try to pin it down or confine it to a mental jail cell. Do the opposite and give it a wide-open space in which to roam. Using another vivid metaphor, he says: “To give your sheep or cow a large, spacious meadow is the way to control him.” That wide-open pasture is an image for what he and other Zen masters call “Big Mind.” All the thoughts and distractions of our small minds take place within a wide-open and non-judgmental field of awareness.

The Layman said, “What time of day is it anyway?”

P’ang, still fancying himself the teacher, hasn’t yet admitted defeat. We get another checking question, but who’s checking whom?

The boy said, “It’s time to take the oxen to pasture.”

Enough of this stuff about emptiness, Old Man. Bye, now. The cows and I are hungry. It’s time to eat.

The Layman laughed heartily.

May we all learn not to take ourselves too seriously and come to laugh this cosmic laugh with Layman P’ang. 

Nothing Worth Begrudging II

Jeff

I gave this talk on July 9, 2025, at Full Moon Zen’s Sunrise Sit. A recording follows the text.

Today I planned to talk a bit about householder Zen—this old-new turn of the Dharma Wheel we are developing through our practice. I’m not going to do that. The readings Rick offered at our morning sit yesterday and our discussion following were so rich and deep. I want to stick with the themes we took up yesterday.

Immediately after our sit I recalled a line in Bodhidharma’s Outline of Practice that I want to use to clarify and amplify something I said in our discussion yesterday. Bodhidharma is the first of the six so-called Zen Ancestors. He’s the Indian sage who, legend has it, brought the Dharma to China, where the Zen tradition developed. This reading that’s attributed to him is very resonant with Thich Nhat Hanh’s poem “Call Me by my True Names,” which Rick read yesterday. I’ll read the whole thing, which is rather long, and then I’ll lift out just one phrase and say a few words about it.

This is Boddhidharma’s Outline of Practice, as translated by Red Pine:

Many roads lead to the Path, but basically there are only two: reason and practice. To enter by reason means to realize the essence through instruction and to believe that all living things share the same true nature, which isn’t apparent because it’s shrouded by sensation and delusion. Those who turn from delusion back to reality, who meditate on walls, the absence of self and other, the oneness of mortal and sage, and who remain unmoved even by scriptures are in complete and unspoken agreement with reason. Without moving, without effort, they enter, we say, by reason.

To enter by practice refers to four all-inclusive practices: suffering injustice, adapting to conditions, seeking nothing, and practicing the Dharma.

First, suffering injustice. When those who search for the Path encounter adversity, they should think to themselves, “In countless ages gone by, I’ve turned from the essential to the trivial and wandered through all manner of existence, often angry without cause and guilty of numberless transgressions. Now, though I do no wrong, I’m punished by my past. Neither gods nor men can foresee when an evil deed will bear its fruit. I accept it with an open heart and without complaint of injustice. The sutras say, ” When you meet with adversity don’t be upset, because it makes sense.” With such understanding you’re in harmony with reason. And by suffering injustice you enter the Path.

Second, adapting to conditions. As mortals, we’re ruled by conditions, not by ourselves. All the suffering and joy we experience depend on conditions. If we should be blessed by some great reward, such as fame or fortune, it’s the fruit of a seed planted by us in the past. When conditions change, it ends. Why delight in its existence? But while success and failure depend on conditions, the mind neither waxes nor wanes. Those who remain unmoved by the wind of joy silently follow the Path.

Third, seeking nothing. People of this world are deluded. They’re always longing for something — always, in a word, seeking. But the wise wake up. They choose reason over custom. They fix their minds on the sublime and let their bodies change with the seasons. All phenomena are empty. They contain nothing worth desiring. Calamity forever alternates with Prosperity. To dwell in the three realms is to dwell in a burning house. To have a body is to suffer. Does anyone with a body know peace? Those who understand this detach themselves from all that exists and stop imagining or seeking anything. The sutras say, “To seek is to suffer. To seek nothing is bliss.” When you seek nothing, you’re on the Path.

Fourth, practicing the Dharma. The Dharma is the truth that all natures are pure. By this truth, all appearances are empty. Defilement and attachment, subject and object don’t exist. The sutras say, “The Dharma includes no being because it’s free from the impurity of being, and the Dharma includes no self because it’s free from the impurity of self.” Those wise enough to believe and understand these truths are bound to practice according to the Dharma. And since that which is real includes nothing worth begrudging, they give their body, life, and property in charity, without regret, without the vanity of giver, gift, or recipient, and without bias or attachment. And to eliminate impurity they teach others, but without becoming attached to form. Thus, through their own practice they’re able to help others and glorify the Way of Enlightenment. And as with charity, they also practice the other virtues. But while practicing the six virtues to eliminate delusion, they practice nothing at all. This is what’s meant by practicing the Dharma.

In a moment I’ll invite you to highlight anything in this reading that particularly spoke to you, but phrase I want to elevate is this: “that which is real includes nothing worth begrudging.” For me, this phrase seems to convey an essential point of Thich Nhat Hanh’s poem.

Yesterday in our dialogue I observed how Thay’s poem seems to be calling us to see and embrace and resolve seeming polarities: generosity and greed; peace and violence; beauty and terror.

Today I just want to revise or qualify the word “resolve.” If it’s even fair to present these features of reality in a dualistic way, as polarities, I’m not sure we’re called to resolve them exactly, or that we even could. We’ve been endowed both with love and with anger; gentleness and strength; separateness and togetherness. We need both. We are both.

I think the goal isn’t so much to resolve seeming polarities, but to harmonize them. To reduce the amplitude of our swings between them. To see and integrate the whole reality. Nothing worth begrudging. To stop oscillating among extremes. To moderate. To find and to walk the middle way.

Action

Jeff

I gave this talk at our Full Moon Zen zazenkai on June 14, 2024. A recording follows the text.

Impermanence was the theme of my last talk, which I gave at Sunrise Sit on June 4th. I opened it with this case from the Blue Cliff Record:

A monk said to Dasui, “When the thousands of universes are altogether and utterly destroyed in the kalpa fire — I wonder whether this perishes or not.

“This perishes,” said Dasui.

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

“It follows the other,” said Dasui.

As you can see, we’re serious about the idea of impermanence in Zen. Even emptiness is empty. It dies with form. Don’t think of it as the ultimate ground of reality, at least if you’re imagining something that exists apart and persists forever.

I said at the end of that talk that I would connect the observable truth of impermanence, of change, to action. I’m making good on that promise now. 

Let me open this talk with another koan, a brief story, from the record of Dogen’s teaching, together with his brief commentary on it:

Mayu, Zen Master Baoche, was fanning himself. A monk approached and said, “Master, the nature of wind is permanent and there is no place it does not reach. Why, then, do you fan yourself?”

“Although you understand that the nature of wind is permanent,” Mayu replied, “you do not understand the meaning of its reaching everywhere.”

“What is the meaning of its reaching everywhere?” asked the monk.

Mayu just kept fanning himself.

The monk bowed deeply.

Dogen’s commentary:

The actualization of the buddha dharma, the vital path of its authentic transmission, is like this. If you say that you do not need to fan yourself because the nature of wind is permanent and you can have wind without fanning, you understand neither permanence nor the nature of wind. The nature of wind is permanent; because of that, the wind of the buddha house brings forth the gold of the earth and ripens the cream of the long river.

Here we meet yet another monk who has gained some insight—and who is stuck in emptiness. He thinks the nature of wind somehow exists apart from wind. He thinks he’s grabbed the lion by its tail and caged it. He’s not yet become the lion.

We know the wind as it beats against us. As we move the fan. We know the lion as it roars. As we roar.

The nature of emptiness can’t be expressed as an idea (even this one): Emptiness is only ever actualized, enacted. Emptiness is expressed as action. The action of the wind. The action of my hand moving the fan.

Action is motion. The best definition of life I’ve ever heard, from a biologist, is movement. Living things are moving things. And everything is alive, even supposedly dead things. Corpses and logs are expressing a form of life we call decomposition. They’ll eventually spawn forms of life that appear to be moving faster for a while, until those life forms “die” and decompose.

Motion is change. Impermanence.

What does it mean to say the nature of wind is permanent? What does permanent mean here?

Change. Wind moves as wind.

In my last talk I also said another core tenet of Zen Buddhism is that our default mode is to resist the reality of change. We cling to whatever evokes pleasurable feelings. We’re averse to whatever threatens to take away pleasurable feelings. We remain willfully ignorant to the reality of impermanence; to our inability to avoid change. We seek a safe haven in which nothing changes, and in which we needn’t change.

Mayu is demonstrating a more viable path. The path of activity beyond ideas. The path of becoming a Buddha. Dogen said, “Buddha-nature and becoming a Buddha always occur simultaneously.” The nature of wind and wind always occur simultaneously. 

Our ideas also are activity. We must permit them to change. I never get myself into more trouble than when I cling to a misguided viewpoint or idea about some situation and myself and others in relation to it. 

It’s 90 degrees out. Mayu is hot. He fans himself. An appropriate response. 

I’ve taken offense at what someone else has said or done. My blood is boiling. I fan the flames. An appropriate response? Likely not.

How are my preexisting, fixed views conditioning the experience and my reading of it? Can I let my views be susceptible to change? Can I remain open to newness and possibility, including newness and possibility within myself? Can I remain truly present and curious? If so, perhaps I’ll use my fan to cool the room, or even to extinguish the flames, rather than fanning them.

Zazen—our practice of sitting still—is activity. It’s the activity of becoming a Buddha; of learning to act as a Buddha acts. Finding the still point on the crest of the wave of impermanence. Maintaining our balance there. Knowing how precious this passing moment is and how precious those with whom we briefly share it are. Knowing this in our bones. Moving as the wind, roaring as the lion, to enact that knowing.

Even This Perishes

Jeff

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

This is Case 55 in The Blue Cliff Record:

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

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

“This perishes,” said Dasui.

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

“It follows the other,” said Dasui.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If emptiness is not destroyed, might I live on?

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

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

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

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

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

Shikantaza and Mindfulness (or Zen and the Other Mindfulness, Take 2)

Jeff

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

I gave a Thursday evening talk earlier this month about Zen and what I called “the other mindfulness”: the work of Harvard psychology professor Ellen Langer, whose research has revealed the surprising power, and many health and other benefits, of simple awareness—of paying attention. You can find that talk on my blog if you didn’t hear it.

Langer describes her work as the study of mindfulness, but she chose that term without knowing about Vipassana meditation, which is more commonly called mindfulness meditation. She sees no connection between the two. In fact, she thinks mindfulness meditation can be mindless. She says mindfulness is what might happen for meditators after they meditate, and that you don’t need to meditate to experience it.

Langer’s disclaimers haven’t stopped people from making connections between mindfulness meditation and Langer’s research about the power of noticing. They’re all wishful thinkers from Langer’s perspective. But all the comparisons are made between her work and Vipassana meditation, which is very different than shikantaza, Zen’s approach to meditation.

I think there are interesting connections between Langer’s take on mindfulness and shikantaza. Those of you who heard my earlier talk will recall that I asked an AI tool, Claude, to help me explore possible connections. Here’s what it said, which I think is quite good:

1. Non-goal orientation: Both Langer’s mindfulness and shikantaza emphasize process over outcome. Langer critiques mindless pursuit of goals, while shikantaza explicitly avoids meditation as a means to an end.

2. Present-centered awareness: Both approaches value immediate experience rather than abstract analysis. Langer emphasizes noticing novelty in the present moment, which aligns with shikantaza’s open, non-discriminating awareness.

3. Rejection of rigid techniques: Langer’s approach doesn’t involve formal meditation techniques, and shikantaza is considered the most technique-free form of meditation.

4. Creative engagement: Langer emphasizes creative engagement with one’s environment, which has some resonance.

So, this morning I want to say just a bit more about what’s going on in Zen’s approach to meditation in my experience, and why I do think it supports “the other mindfulness” (Langer’s version), whatever may or may not be happening in other forms of meditation. 

Here are some of the key functions of Zen meditation and how they help us cultivate the presence of mind and being—presence to experience, to life—that Langer studies:

  • Capacity to cope. When many of us begin to meditate, we fear we won’t be able to sit still for 25 minutes. That we won’t be able to tolerate the discomfort. That the sky really will fall if we don’t respond to that email now. Maybe we fear just being with our thoughts and feelings. One of the first things meditation does is simply increase our confidence that we can bear experiences we’d cast as unbearable. This reduces adventitious suffering: the extra suffering we tend to layer over suffering we can’t avoid, like an injury, or that we choose to endure, like a surgery to repair an injury. Meditation—all or most forms, I imagine—develops our capacity to cope, and this helps us become more at ease with life, with ourselves, and with others we find challenging.
  • Inclination toward noticing. This is Langer’s territory. It’s what she studies. Shikantaza truly is the most technique-free form of meditation. We just sit. There’s nothing more to it. So all that’s left is being. All that’s left is noticing, receptivity. What do we notice? We notice leaves rustling and sirens getting louder, then quieter, then gone; we notice our stomach growl; we notice our noticing come and go. We notice impermanence. Change. The river. 
  • Nonseparation; identification with it all. The river’s water works on the stone that we are, or at least that we’ve imagined ourselves to be. It smooths it, softens it, makes it porous, dissolves it in time. The distinction between stone and water becomes less clear. We feel less separate; more part of it all. More attuned to context, because we experience ourselves as woven into the fabric of our context. Sometimes we forget ourselves—in a good way.
  • Comfort with no-thing. The more we sit and notice, the more we know and don’t know. We know our experience more intimately, but confidence in our capacity to contain it conceptually declines. Our best concepts and constructs remain useful, but we see their limits. We no longer hold them so tightly. We develop comfort with not knowing and not being able to contain or control everything.

These are some of the fruits I feel Zen meditation practice, and Zen practice more broadly, offers over time. They seem very related to and supportive of the qualities in which Langer sees such value, including genuine curiosity and the capacity to get out of our own frame to consider others’ experience. Ultimately, she’s all about creativity: our capacity to respond freely and appropriately to life in the moment; to be creatures that co-create creation. I think Zen’s all about that, too.

Rohatsu 2024: Enlightenment Beyond Belief

Jeff

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This seeker is sensing this seeming binary is a trap.

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

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

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

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

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

Presence. Pure and simple.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Every Day is a Good Day

Jeff

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

This is Case 6 in the Blue Cliff Record:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But they’re dumbfounded. 

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

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

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

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

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

Every day is a good day.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Kill the Buddha

Jeff

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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