Bring Me the Rhinoceros: And Other Zen Koans That Will Save Your Life

When the Buddha made his discoveries, he said, “I have found the builder, and I will not build the house of pain again.” Without your fictions, life has a simplicity that is full of beauty. There is nothing I dislike.

Koans required a humility that is really a kind of plainness in approaching life without drama and ulterior motives.

We don’t expect the answers to our questions to come out of nothing. However that might be the only place a solution can come from. You start by not knowing—not knowing how or what or why or who—until that seems to be quite an acceptable place to spend time in. Then the strange thing is that if you reach out your hand, what you need might be there.

In order to embrace a handmade life, you do have to be willing to deal with the Minmin lights along with awe and fear. But you have to deal with awe and fear anyway, and when you pay attention, a continual turning toward the genuine just happens.

It can also be true that if a koan makes you suffer in such a way, then it might be especially useful to you. And if you are interested in freedom, it might lie in this direction. You could go toward rather than away from the sign in your mind that says NO TRESPASSING.

This koan has always encouraged me to trust the difficulties I run up against and the slowness with which I work with them. It is as if an impasse has its own journey built into it, a journey that belongs only to that impasse and which is a unique path to freedom. Each step in the dark turns out in the end to have been on course after all.

When you forget your carefully assembled fiction of who you are, you can find a natural delight in people, in the planet, the stones, and the trees. There is no observable limit to this beauty, and no one is excluded from it. Then, if you are fighting an enemy, you may be fighting them as well as you can, but you won’t be a true believer. You will

They sit on a bench and watch. He can see that the children like finding Easter eggs. The children don’t have opinions about affairs, and they don’t think about what should be happening. They do want their father not to abandon them for the sake of his fiction that his wife should be someone other than who she is. His opinions about his wife are no

He reflected for a moment. “There isn’t a reason. She’s just worn out.”