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.
I gave this talk on November 13, 2025, at our Full Moon Zen sesshin at Providence Zen Center. We had a Jukai ceremony the previous night, during which eight of our sangha members received Zen’s sixteen Bodhisattva Precepts. A recording follows the text.
It is wonderful to be here with you. I’m so happy. This feels like something of a reunion. I think we’ve all, if I’m not mistaken, come from out of state. Even Cheryl, who used to live a stone’s throw away. Some of us just traversed one state to get here, but others traversed several, and some even got on the plane. I’m just so happy that we’ve all made an effort to be here together in this beautiful place. I’m always awestruck sitting here and looking out of the windows, whatever the weather’s doing. It’s beautiful. I’m tempted to say we can’t make it any better with our words. But words are it, too.
Our theme for this sesshin is being a Buddha, and I want to explore the practice of living by vow as being Buddha. In our Jukai ceremony last night we said the precepts are not rigid commandments to be blindly followed but instead are a bridge—a bridge between the Buddha nature, the truth at the heart of our existence as we sense it wants to express itself, on the one hand, and the manifestation of its expression in our daily lives, on the other hand.
I know from conversations with each of you, including a couple conversations last night, that some of us grew up in a Christian tradition with the notion of sin. And, if you did, maybe your tradition’s notion of sin; and its ethical principles, like the Ten Commandments designed to discourage sin; and the way people talked about and related to those things, did feel like rigid commandments. Maybe.
But what does this word sin mean, really? It has linguistic roots and it also has a theological gloss or interpretation.
What are the linguistic roots? In both Old English and in precursor languages to German, it’s straightforward. Sin is moral wrongdoing, which was understood in terms of deviation from divine law. It meant deviation from God’s law in this early European context in which the notion of sin began to take shape. The word also conveyed a sense of “being” or “true existence,” suggesting that sin is deviation from truth or being itself. So, linguistically, etymologically, sin also suggests deviation from that which is true; deviating from being or existence itself—or, in Zen terms, we might say not being Buddha, not being oneself, not being one’s highest self.
When the Christian Bible was translated from Greek into Old English, the Greek word that was translated as sin is an archery term that means “missing the mark.” I kind of like that because I used to practice Kyudo, which is Zen archery. The archery reference is lovely, I think. Linguistically, and in theistic terms, sin is deviating from godliness or from ultimate truth. It’s missing the mark.
In our non-theistic Zen idiom, we could think of God as oneness or the Absolute, which all relative things like you and me manifest and express. Missing the mark is thinking speaking or acting in some way that denies or obscures this reality of oneness.
When we speak about the Three Treasures, Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha—which are the first three of our sixteen precepts—we sometimes translate Buddha as oneness. To be Buddha—which we can’t help but be, but which is a reality that we’re not always awake to, and which we can awaken to—means to know and to feel this oneness as ourselves, as others, and to live it. It’s to know that we’re distinct, but in no sense separate.
I said earlier that, in the Christian tradition, there’s a linguistic root to the notion of sin, but there’s also theologizing about it. Sin is sometimes theologized about in terms of separation; separation from what is ultimately true and real. And here we find a tight connection to Zen. If I had to pick just one word to sum up the Zen Way, it might well be non-separation. Or, to state it positively: oneness, wholeness, integration. Thich Nhat Hanh’s word for this was interbeing.
Bernie Glassman, our Dharma great grandfather, in his book about the precepts, really summed it all up by saying that the precepts and all the teachings are about realizing that all is Buddha. Oneness. It’s no surprise that Nancy Mujo Baker titles her book on the precepts, which is the main text for our precepts study group, “Opening to Oneness.”
I’m a big fan of a contemporary philosopher whose name is Terry Warner. He taught at BYU. His “secular” philosophical work is deeply informed by his Christian faith. In one of his big philosophical themes, which lies at the intersection of philosophy and psychology, is self-deception. He says we almost always know when we are about to miss the mark, to separate. He says we very often have a flash of clear insight before we transgress or miss the mark, and that we betray the reality of oneness when we act in a way that’s contrary to that higher standard, to hitting the mark. We separate from our Buddha nature. We separate from others. We separate from truth itself or reality in that moment.
Warner is very influenced by Martin Buber, the Jewish philosopher and mystic, who distinguished between what he called I-Thou and I-You modes of relating. I-Thou seeing the divinity, or we might call Buddha Nature, in others and in all things. When we’re in an I-You mode, we’re objectifying and instrumentalizing others; making ourselves separate from them. And you know what? We’re also objectifying ourselves when we do this, which is to say separating from our own true nature.
With all that as background, I thought we might just walk through each of the ten Grave Precepts, briefly, one by one, and look at how they encourage us to aim towards wholeness or interbeing; not to separate. Really, all 16 precepts are about non-separation. Each of the three treasure—Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha—is a different way of saying that all is Buddha. They are different angles on the reality of oneness, and we have a context, a community, in which we discover it and make it real. The Three Pure Precepts—ceasing from evil, doing good, and helping others—begin to make that reality of oneness more concrete. They help us think about it more concretely. And the ten Grave Precepts guide us on how to make the reality of Oneness concretely manifest in our daily lives.
Recognizing that I am not separate from all that is, I vow to take up the way of non-killing.
There you have it. In classic Zen fashion, we get right to the heart of the matter. Have you ever wished that someone or something would just go away? Even die. That is the pretense of separateness in the extreme. That is the most forceful desire to separate imaginable. Dogen’s version of this first precept on non-killing, which I just read, appropriately opens with the statement, “Recognizing that I am not separate from all that is . . .”.
Being satisfied with what I have, I vow to take up the way of not stealing.
Me, my, mine. My need, my thing. Being unsatisfied with what I have is separation. Appreciating what I have, working to satisfy my reasonable wants and my true needs such that others’ reasonable wants and true needs are respected and satisfied alongside mine: This is appreciating what I have; non-stealing. Getting what I want and need in a way that doesn’t separate myself from others, or me from the recognition of what’s sufficient, is to take up the way of non-stealing.
Honoring mutuality and respect and commitment, I vow to take up the way of not misusing sex.
Sex, needless to say, is a domain in which we see people instrumentalizing others, objectifying others, and so objectifying myself. What a shame; such a squandered opportunity to hold and conduct ourselves in a way that honors Oneness. Such wonderful potential to express beautifully the reality of Oneness. Such a shame when sex is not approached that way.
Listening and speaking from the heart, I vow to take up the way of not speaking falsely.
To speak falsely—saying things we know not to be true or even being reckless about the truth—is to separate from truth. Speaking carelessly is to separate from the truth and to separate ourselves from others. I love the way this Dogen’s version of this precept opens with “Listening and speaking from the heart.” When we’re doing that, we’re being present, present to others in this speech act, in this speech communion. It’s another way to express non-separation. Another word for this is presence. When we truly are present to ourselves and others, we’re not separate. We’re manifesting the reality of Oneness.
Cultivating a mind that sees clearly, I vow to take up the way of not intoxicating mind and body.
Intoxicants of all varieties—anything we might overvalue, including work, TV, and Instagram, not just drugs and alcohol—can be a way of separating from our own lives and from others. Not being present, truly present. I drink wine. I enjoy it. And, with a nod towards Terry Warner’s idea of self-deception, it’s my practice to pay attention to that first impulse to have a glass of wine. What’s it about? Sometimes when it arises, I recognize it as a desire to separate from something that’s been difficult; that I don’t like about the day or about my experience presently. That doesn’t mean I don’t have the glass of wine necessarily, but I’ll do my best to shift into another mode around it if I do. At other times that glass of wine is so much about enjoying the company of others; communing; non-separation. Lovely.
Unconditionally accepting what each moment has to offer, I vow to take up the way of not finding fault in or with others.
“Unconditionally accepting what each moment has to offer”: right there, presence, non-separation. I don’t think too much more needs to be said about this one. This is just so common, isn’t it? Speaking for myself alone, I can and often tend towards separating myself from others in this way. Blame. Being blind to my own contributions to some difficulty.
Meeting others on equal ground, I vow to take up the way of not elevating myself at the expense of others.
In some ways, this is my favorite precept. It’s the hardest one in so many ways. It’s as if we needed a precept just to say, “It’s all about non-separation.” Elevating myself at the expense of others is the very move of the separation we’re talking about.
Using all the ingredients of my life, I vow to take up the way of not sparing the Dharma assets.
We can steal, take things from others, and we can also hoard what we have: our time, our capabilities, our talents, our resources. We can refuse to participate fully in the circle of life; in making the circle of life a virtuous circle. The circular economy, so to speak. By withholding our love. Withholding our truth; what we know to be true; not speaking up about our reasonable needs. When we’re doing that, we’re often actually elevating ourselves above others. We’re denying others the opportunity to meet us and to meet our needs, which they might want to do. Even if they don’t want to do it, they might need to learn to do it for there to be a virtuous cycle.
Transforming suffering into wisdom, I vow to take up the way of not harboring ill will.
Anger. Anger is all about separation. In the version of the Four Vows we chant, we use the word hatred. In other translations, you’ll see that word as anger. I think hatred really makes a point. It’s about aversion. Aversion is about wanting to separate from something. It’s a helpful, adaptive impulse on some level. There are things we don’t perpetually want to abide; that we want to work skillfully, and perhaps collaboratively, to change. Yet that impulse can be taken too far when it manifests as outwardly expressed anger, even hatred. That can lead to missing the mark on other precepts we’ve looked at. Anger-driven killing is the most extreme example of that.
Honoring my life as an instrument of the Great Way, I vow to take up the way of not defaming the Three Treasures.
Well, this is just another way of saying everything we’ve said so far. We’re pointing back to Oneness. Non-separation. Separation is a fraud. Indulging in it is a pretense. It’s a story. It’s impossible. The precepts remind us of this truth and help guide us towards living in truth, living this truth.
So, we can see the precepts as a little instruction manual for how to be a Buddha. If we’re living our vows and living them from the right mindset and heartset, we are likely to be showing up as Buddha, not separating from our Buddha nature. We tend to think of other practices, like zazen and koans, as the centerpiece of our practice. Thy really are not the centerpiece of our practice. They’re all just ways to help us learn to show up as Buddha; to hit the mark. They are supportive of the heart of our practice, which truly is the precepts.
Realizing, manifesting, living by them. This is being Buddha.
This is the third of three talks I gave at our weeklong sesshin, held from August 24-30, 2025, at Providence Zen Center, a monastery. Our theme was “Chop Wood, Carry Water”: Everyday Form and Formation on the Householder Path.A recording follows the text, which is edited for clarity and conciseness.
This is Case 2 in The Sayings of Layman P’ang:
One day, Shih-t’ou said, “I’ve come to visit you. What have you been doing?”
The Layman said, “If you’re asking what I do every day, there’s nothing to say about it.”
Shih-t’ou said, “What did you think you were doing before I asked you about it?”
The Layman made up a verse:
“What I do every day is nothing special.
I simply stumble around.
What I do is not thought out.
Where I go is unplanned.
No matter who tries to leave their mark,
The hills and dales are not impressed.
Collecting firewood and carrying water
Are prayers that reach the gods.”
Shih-t’ou approved saying, “So, are you going to wear black or white?”
The Layman said, “I will do whatever is best.”
It came to pass that he never shaved his head to join the sangha.
In this talk, my third and last for this sesshin, I aspire to seize at least one of two opportunities, where I perhaps have room for improvement. My other two talks were longer than usual . . . although, honestly, I am known to give long talks. This one may be just a tad shorter. I hope I don’t break that promise. The other opportunity: the past two talks were packed with a lot of points to follow. Well, I’m going to fall down big time on that front again!
What I’ve been thinking about since the second of the talks I gave is the moment when it came to pass that P’ang didn’t shave his head to join the sangha. He chose a householder’s life. When we meet him here, what words of encouragement might we be able to offer someone who is choosing that life? What words of encouragement might I be able to offer P’ang?
Somehow my response to that question began to come out in a series of tips or encouragements. I think this is probably because, as those are you who join us on Thursday nights know, Nick Patterson, when he it’s his turn to do reading, has for the last several months been reading three or four of Wumen’s 14 Cautions that come at the end of his compilation of the Mumonkan, The Gateless Gate. Wumen is offering cautions presumably for people who live in a monastery. I thought I might offer some encouragements for people who don’t.
I’m not sure I was driving for 14, but I came up with 14. This is something like the alpha version, v0.1 of them. I’ll be continuing to think about them. And because there are 14 of these points, and because I’ve got just a little bit to say about some of them, well, that’s a lot. I encourage you just to listen and let them wash over you. If one thing I say jumps out and sticks with you—is meaningful to you somehow—we’ll be lucky. These eventually will be in writing on my blog, so there’s no need to try to remember it all.
These are not ready for prime time, so thanks for bearing with me as I test drive them with you. Maybe someday these will be in one of those to-be-written books I mentioned during my first talk. One book I want to write is about householder life on the Zen path; maybe I’ll put a more developed version of these points at the end as, I don’t know, Kōgen Roshi’s 14 encouragements or something. We’ll see.
There is no inside or outside
Don’t imagine you leave the world when you enter a monastery or that you enter the world when you leave one.
To be in the world is to be of the world.
As Linji says, “There’s no Dharma outside to run after. There’s no Dharma within to obtain.”
There is no home leaving, ever.
Hide it in plain sight
As Dongshan says, “With practice hidden, function secretly, like a fool, like an idiot,”
As Shih-t’ou, who our beloved P’ang knew well, said “If you wish to speak ten times, keep quiet nine.”
All is sangha
By which I mean: Buddha is Dharma is Sangha.
Be the guest house of which Rumi writes. Welcome all.
There’s truly nothing worth begrudging, as Bodhidharma said.
Relate: Lead with the relational perspective
Those of you who’ve been in our Precepts study group this round, or in the past, or who have read Bernie Glassman’s book on the Precepts, Infinite Circle, know that, in Zen, we look at our Bodhisattva Precepts—our ethical precepts—from three different perspectives: the literal, the relational, and the Absolute.
For our lives in the world, of the world, whether in a monastery or outside of one, the relational is in the lead. It’s where the rubber of the Absolute meets the road of the literal.
Non-killing is the first of the ten grave precepts. Let’s look at it:
The literal is don’t kill. Full stop.
The Absolute: nothing is born or dies. Non-killing.
The relational: If you’re a vegan and the cook doesn’t know it, don’t kill her joy, his joy, whether you choose to eat the beef stew or not.
Not too tight, not too loose
That’s the phrase a hidden Buddhist friend of mine—a certified, crusty, old, cheap Vermonter named Bob Bender, the elder brother of my close friend, Bill—repeats often. “Not too tight, not too loose.”
In other words, seek the middle way.
Make space
This universe is the altar. This planet is the wisdom seat.
Clear a place for yourself; a little place at home to sit. Make a simple altar at which to dedicate your practice and your life.
Make time, and mark time
Make time a time to sit each day; time for group practice; time for sesshin—all as your circumstances permit.
Mark time: holidays like Bohdi Day, the Buddha’s birthday, and Obon. Holidays from your birth tradition if you have one and they’re still meaningful to you.
In Zen monasteries in Japan, they have endless regular and special rites and rituals and religious holidays. In householder life, especially as our cultures mixed and secularized, we can feel adrift in time.
So find ways to mark time, including over the course of a day: waking time, mealtimes, bedtime. We can mark these with little gathas. Like our simple meal gatha, which I say to myself at every meal: We receive this food in gratitude to all beings who helped to bring it to our table, and vow to respond in turn to those in need with wisdom and compassion.
Be time, by which I mean be present and give your presence. Give your genuine attention to other people. There is no greater gift you can give them, and yourself.
Everybody here is keeping time during sesshin: Matt and Libby and Paul and Cheryl—each of us in different ways. You have given me a real gift. Over the last couple of days, I’ve mostly not been wearing my watch, which I realized was making me mildly anxious. I don’t need it. Dropping the watch has helped me be time.
Make a mark
We can’t help but make a mark, whether we intend to or not.
Some of you know I practiced Zen archery years ago with Kanjuro Shibata Sensei XX, one of my first teachers. He was the imperial bowmaker of Japan. He stood in a long line, as the 20th of Japan’s Imperial bow makers.
Most of the shooting one does is inside a kyudojo room where there are hay bales, each covered with a white sheet. You stand a few yards from a hay bale and shoot into it. Far more arrows are shot into hay bales than circular targets far away.
As you can imagine, those sheets get poked full of holes. Everything you do in kyudo is ritualized, like what we do here. There is a ritual way to pull the arrow out of the hay bale. You pull it out slowly, twisting it. And the last thing you do, before you return to where you stand and prepare to take another shot, is to put your finger at the tip of the arrow and touch the arrow tip to the hole you have made. This gesture acknowledges you’ve made a mark. We can’t help but make a mark.
How do we make a mark through our householder existence? By not sparing the dharma assets. Develop and share your talents. Master some craft to life craft, to self-craft: teaching, cooking, poetry, medicine, hospitality, physical therapy. In other words, like Pierre, Maurice Sendak’s character, who I loved—and if you don’t know this reference, check it out: Care.
But as you make your mark, be gentle, and leave no trace. Don’t forget: The hills and dales are not impressed.
All is precious, but don’t be too precious
All these forms to which we attend in minute detail are only to help us have a good shared experience. They’re not for the sake of the forms themselves. We embrace them to give life a pleasing shape and texture and feeling when we’re practicing them, and to learn to give life a pleasing shape and texture and felling when we’re not.
So hold them with the light touch. Don’t force them if we are forcing others by forcing them. If we’re pooping the party.
It’s nothing personal
By which I mean two things:
First, enlightenment isn’t something we can get. Something we can have.
Second, don’t take that, or anything else, too personally.
Optimize for wholeness and integration
This also has two dimensions:
First, about our life choices. You probably will make less money if you walk the Zen path. We could all be working right now. It probably will influence choices you make about your livelihood and how you live; opportunities we don’t take up.
Still on this first dimension, don’t privilege the formal forms of our practice over the rest of your life. Find the right balance, like the surfer. For example, if you’re married, your marriage probably will suffer if you don’t leave sesshin to celebrate your spouse’s birthday, if it falls during the week of sesshin. I know this from personal experience with teachers who expected me to be at sesshin over my wife’s birthday year after year. Don’t ever practice with a teacher who wouldn’t let you leave sesshin for an evening to celebrate your partner’s or child’s birthday.
Second, optimize for wholeness and integration by exploring your shadows and welcoming what you meet there.
Okay, on to the last three encouragements. I have less to say about them.
Life is the teacher
Trust your experience.
A footnote on that is, if you invite somebody into a Zen teacher role in your life, make sure that is what they are teaching. Make sure that’s what they want for you. That they know life is your ultimate teacher.
Time passes swiftly, and opportunity is lost. Do not squander your life.
This is from our Evening Gatha, of course. Some of these aren’t very original.
Choose the long road, take it easy, and enjoy the ride
Sometimes swiftly, always slowly.
There is no short road. There are no shortcuts, either.
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:
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.
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.
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.
I gave this talk on October 31, 2024. A recording follows the text (which is lightly edited).
A big theme for me this year has been vulnerability. That theme has been very present to me personally, and there a lot of people in my life, including many of you, for whom I sense it’s been a theme, as well.
As many of you know, I had a big surgery earlier in the year to correct a problem that caused a big medical emergency last fall; a close call. After that surgery, I learned that three good friends about my age all had terminal cancer. As of last Friday, they’ve all died. Vicky, I know, recently has lost people close to her. People here have family members and other loved ones who are struggling in one way or another.
We’ve seen wars. We’ve seen hurricanes and flooding. Somehow vulnerability just seems like a big theme this year.
So recently my mind was wandering, and I found myself thinking about koans in which vulnerability is a theme. The one I’m going to read and say a few words about tonight is the first one that came to mind. At sunrise sit last week I spoke about another one, but this one is the very first one I thought of.
It helps before one hears this koan to know a little bit about the characters in it, so let me tell you a little bit about them. I’m going to say more about each of them after I read the koan.
The first character is Te-shan. He is a famous Zen teacher; famous in China at the time, famous throughout history to this day. He’s, say, about 80 years old in this koan. He was the head of a major monastery in China. This is the early ninth century, which historians generally think of as the peak of ancient Chinese civilization. It’s the heyday of Zen in China.
The other two characters are two of his senior students. Hsüeh-feng, is maybe about half Te-shan’s age. He’s 40, let’s say. And his Dharma brother Yen-t’ou, the head monk, is maybe a little bit older. They’re both senior students in this monastery. They’re not yet transmitted teachers, but they’ve been in the monastery a long time and they have a lot of responsibilities, no doubt. So, you’ll hear their names, and I’ll say a little bit more about each of them after I read the koan.
This is Case 13 in The Gateless Gate. It’s called Te-shan: Bowls in Hand:
Te-shan one day descended to the dining hall bowls in hand. Hsüeh-feng asked him, “Where are you going with your bowls in hand, Old Teacher? The bell has not rung and the drum has not sounded. Te-shan turned and went back to his room.”
Actually, that’s just the first part of the koan, and it was all I was thinking about when I was thinking about this koan in relation to vulnerability. I’d forgotten about what comes next. When I read the whole thing, I realized I got even more than I bargained for on this theme. So here’s where the koan goes from there:
Hsüeh-feng brought up the matter with Yen-t’ou, his Dharma brother. Yen-t’ou said, “Te-shan, great as he is, does not yet know the last word.”
Hearing about this, Te-shan sent for Yen-t’ou and asked, “Do you not approve of this old monk?” Yen-t’ou whispered his meaning. Te-shan said nothing further.
Next day, when Te-shan took the high seat before his assembly, his presentation was very different from usual. Yen-t’ou came to the front of the hall, rubbing his hands and laughing loudly, saying, “How delightful! How delightful! Our old boss has got hold of the last word. From now on no one under heaven can outdo him.”
So let me say a bit more about each of these characters. Te-shan, as a young man, had been an expert on and renowned for his insight into the Diamond Sutra. He went around preaching about the Diamond Sutra as a young man. Impressing people; going to see teacher after teacher, trying to impress them with his knowledge of the sutras generally and this sutra in particular.
One day he came across a wise old woman who wasn’t so impressed and essentially told him, “So what? I don’t think the real Dharma—the real thing—is in these words on this page. I can’t even read.” Te-shan was shaken by this and, to his credit, he took her words and her insight to heart. He went deeper.
Te-shan matured and eventually became a teacher. He looked for some new way to teach the Dharma. We know Te-shan ultimately became famous for not teaching with words and not teaching with silence either, but instead, holding up his teacher stick as his teaching. He sometimes whacked his students with his stick, in good Punch-and-Judy form. Let’s hope it was more of a gentle tap!
I think it’s fair to say that Te-shan’s holding up his stick is an expression of the middle way. To borrow some words Jay introduced to us a couple weeks ago, his teaching was both apophatic and cataphatic. It’s at once the via positiva and the via negative. It’s neither extreme. Te-shan wants people to realize that this is it. It’s all right here; simply right here.
And it’s probably also fair to say that stick is a bit of a prop for Te-shan. When, we ought to ask, does his stick become a prop? Maybe in that phase of his life, the stick is being weaponized a bit as a symbol of strength. Is it still masking a bit of vulnerability? Is it more a shield than a weapon? Hold that thought for just a minute.
So what about Hsüeh-feng? Well, I don’t know about you, but I can’t help but think, Hsüeh-feng’s reaction to his old teacher coming down to dinner at the wrong time, bowls in hand, is a little bit scolding or a little bit prideful. In fact, I can’t help but see his raising the matter with his Dhrama brother Yen-t’ou as maybe a little bit of tattling.
What is Hsüeh-feng clinging to? Maybe his role in the monastery. Maybe his status. Maybe his perfection of the forms. And, if so, might these things be masking vulnerability—the kind of things we sometimes cling to as a false projection of strength, that mask the deeper reality of our vulnerability.
What to say about his Dharma brother Yen-t’ou? I think Yen-t’ou comes across pretty well in this koan. Yen-t’ou is very important to Xuefang, actually. I think it’s fair to say Yen-t’ou becomes Hsüeh-feng’s main teacher.
There’s a story about Yen-t’ou from another koan that I’ll just mention briefly. The culmination of that koan relates back to Fran’s talk yesterday morning. Those of you who heard it will recognize a metaphor she used. In this other koan Hsüeh-feng is lamentiong to Yen-t’ou that, “My heart is not yet at peace. My mind is not yet at peace.” Yen-t’ou says, “Well, tell me about your experience. Tell me what you’ve experienced on this path.”
Hsüeh-feng tells Yen-t’ou about a realization of emptiness he had; a kensho moment. He tells him about another moment of insight he had. He’s reporting these profoundly moving experiences we associate with enlightenment, realization, insight, but he’s still saying they didn’t set his heart to rest. In fact, he says he went to their teacher at some point and asked whether he would ever experience what the ancestors experienced.
What did Te-shan do? He hit Hsüeh-feng with his stick and said, “It’s as if you’re a bucket whose bottom suddenly dropped out!” (That’s the metaphor Fran used in her talk yesterday.)
At this point in their exchange, Yen-t’ou says, “Don’t you know that what enters from the gate cannot be the treasure of the house? If you want to propagate the great teaching, it must flow point by point from within your own breast to cover heaven and earth. Only then will it be the action of someone with spiritual power, only when it comes from inside you.”
Pow! With this, Hsüeh-feng had a great realization, true realization, deep and lasting realization.
Here we see Hsüeh-feng had been clinging to kensho experiences. Flashes of insight as a source of strength or representation of his strength; of the spiritual power he’s seeking. I think Xeufeng is also looking for eternal knowledge and clinging to supposed certainties as he imagines he is finding them.
Now, here’s where our original koan really gets playful: What’s this bit about the last word, and what did Yen-t’ou whisper to Te-shan? After Hsüeh-feng tattles on Te-shan, you can imagine him flying into a tizzy when Yen-t’ou says, “Te-shan, great as he is, doesn’t yet know the last word.”
“What! There’s a last word! There’s a secret I don’t yet know?” Te-shan thought he knew it all already, a bit like the young Te-shan with his command of the Diamond Sutra.
So, when Te-shan came down and asked Yen-t’ou whether he still approved of his old teacher, what did Yen-t’ou whisper to Te-shan? I imagine he whispered, “Oh, my old friend, you are more than okay.” I imagine Yen-t’ou thinking to himself as he said this, “You are more than okay, even as your mind slips away; even as dementia takes over.”
Then I imagine Yen-t’ou whispering to Te-shan, “Hey, let’s have some fun with Hsüeh-feng. Tomorrow when you show up in the Dharma hall, stride right in like a peacock! Speak loudly, boldly! Let them know you really do know the last word after all!”
Whatever false strength Te-shan might have been projecting earlier in life with his impressive knowledge of the Diamond Sutra or by whacking students with his stick, it’s all been stripped away as we meet him here. He’s vulnerable. Fully exposed.
How does all this end? Well, Yen-t’ou, precocious spiritual powerhouse that he was, dies a couple of decades later without any Dharma heirs. There’s no line from Yen-t’ou. Hsüeh-feng, plodding as he seems to be in this koan, keeps at it. He takes it all to heart. He lets his heart break open. He becomes vulnerable. The vulnerable anchor of two of the five main houses of Zen that continue to this very day.
I gave this talk on August 27, 2024, during our Full Moon Zen sesshin. A recording follows the text.
This is Case 1 in The Blue Cliff Record:
Emperor Wu of Liang asked the great master Bodhidharma, “What is the highest meaning of the holy truths?” Bodhidharma said, “Empty, without holiness.” The Emperor said, “Who is facing me?” Bodhidharma replied, “I don’t know.” The Emperor did not understand. After this Bodhidharma crossed the Yangtse River and came to the kingdom of Wei.
Later the Emperor brought this up to Master Chih and asked him about it. Master Chih asked, “Does your majesty know who this man is?” The Emperor said, “I don’t know.” Master Chih said, “He is the Mahasattva Avalokitesvara, transmitting the Buddha Mind Seal.” The Emperor felt regretful, so he wanted to send an emissary to go invite (Bodhidharma to re turn). Master Chih told him, “Your majesty, don’t say that you will send someone to fetch him back. Even if everyone in the whole country were to go after him, he still wouldn’t re turn.”
This koan focuses us on two perspectives we see time and again in Zen teachings. We have several names for them, like the relative and the Absolute or the lower truth and the higher truth. In this koan, Emperor Wu represents one perspective and Bodhidharma represents the other. It’s obvious which is which.
When the emperor asks Bodhidharma for the essence of the holy teaching, the adjective “holy” implies that teachings and all else can be divided into the categories sacred and profane, or mundane. This is the relative perspective.
When Bodhidharma replies, “nothing holy,” he is contesting this division. This is the Absolute perspective.
They’re also channeling these different perspectives when each speaks the seemingly identical phrase, “I don’t know.” There’s relative not knowing and Absolute not knowing.
This koan seems to portray the emperor and Bodhidharma as reversing roles. The penniless, unkempt and unshaven, wandering hermit is the sage. The emperor is the fool; the court jester. The koan almost seems to demand that we read it this way.
But is this the only or best reading of it?
The pioneering French sociologist Émile Durkheim, who died over a century ago, said, “[t]he sacred and profane [i.e., mundane] are always and everywhere conceived by the human intellect as separate . . . as two worlds with nothing in common. . .. They are different in kind.” Most of us would have little difficulty sorting what we value, and our values, into “mundane” and “sacred” categories. Most of us sense intuitively that things in these categories don’t mix naturally.
Your wedding ring is a mundane item from my perspective, worth only its weight in precious metal and stone, and vice versa. I certainly could put more money to use, as could you. Shall we exchange our rings and then cash them in? That’s a trade neither of us is likely to make.
Contemporary researchers have confirmed Durkheim’s insight. We all make distinctions between mundane items and commitments, on the one hand, and sacred items and commitments about which we feel strong moral conviction, on the other hand. Our sacred values are less subject to change, threats to them evoke strong emotions, and the conviction they inspire can inspire us to take great risks and make costly sacrifices.
Each of us has our deep convictions and commitments. First principles we consider holy truths. I have mine, and I bet you do, too. If you don’t yet know what they are, you haven’t yet had an encounter that would reveal them.
When we come to Zen and are exposed to the two truths teaching, we not only may have our eyes opened to the Absolute perspective; our ears may hear it as a call to abide there, as Bodhidharma seems to do. It’s the higher truth after all, isn’t it?
I certainly was stranded there for a time. And I thought the higher truth demanded a consistently yielding orientation. I acquired a new “should do,” which was letting go of my convictions and commitments whenever they conflicted with others’ needs, convictions, and commitments. I could give you numerous examples.
But I ultimately discovered this approach didn’t produce much of genuine value to anyone. Truth was, I still had my own deeply felt needs, convictions, and commitments. Like the buffalo who tries to pass through a window frame in another famous koan (Case 38 in The Gateless Gate), it seems I had a tail that kept getting stuck and wouldn’t let me pass completely to where I thought I was supposed to go; to the supposed other side.
Understood this way, the Absolute became a hiding place. I wasn’t truly showing up.
Genuine moral dilemmas arise when two goods collide. Two truths. Two rights. A choice between something we know to be right and something we know to be wrong isn’t a genuine moral dilemma.
Likewise, genuine conflict arises when two or more people meet as they truly are, and when they discover genuine differences. Sometimes yielding can be a sensible and appropriate thing to do. We must choose our battles, as they say.
But inhabiting the Absolute perspective doesn’t imply retreat to a realm of idealized abstraction, in which all distinctions are leveled. The real higher truth loves and embraces and enlivens the relative, including our own deeply felt needs, convictions, and commitments. Both yours and mine.
From the authentic Absolute perspective, we loosen our grip on them somewhat. We gain some perspective on the relative perspective, and this can help us be more open to and accommodating of others’ needs, convictions, and commitments. But we’re not asked to deny our own completely. We neither let our truths completely rule us—have us and have their way with us—nor imagine we can or should cast them away.
Here’s the first principle of the holy teaching, as best I can discern and express it: Nonduality must include duality to be nondual.
To put that more straightforwardly as some contemplatives from other traditions would:
“Though we don’t know it yet, we are all sons and daughters of God.” That’s the medieval German mystic Meister Eckhart.
“The god wants to know itself in you.” That’s the Romantic poet Rilke.
Or, in Zen lingo, “The `all’ is none other than sentient beings and living beings. Thus, all are Buddha nature.” That’s Dogen.
Turning Words 