Sublime

Han-shan.

the Kalama Sutta.

If you think Zen is something lofty and esoteric, the master will give you a shout or slap for an answer. If you think it is abstract, you’ll be told it’s three pounds of flax or the oak tree in the garden. If you think it is beyond words and abstractions, the master may quote the sutras or a poem by Han Shan. If you think Zen is nothing but our ev

The satori which so frequently follows these interchanges is by no means a mere comprehension of the answer to a riddle. For whatever the Zen master says or does is a direct and spontaneous utterance of “suchness,” of his Buddha nature, and what he gives is no symbol but the very thing. Zen communication is always “direct pointing,”

Chi-fo says, “The reason Subhuti asked these questions was because he realized that in the Buddha’s everyday actions of wearing his robe, eating, washing his feet, and sitting down, he never stopped manifesting the marvelous workings of his true mind and that all such instruction contained the essence of perfect prajna. Hence, Subhuti’s words of pr

In other schools of Buddhism, awakening or bodhi seems remote and almost superhuman, something to be reached only after many lives of patient effort. But in Zen there is always the feeling that awakening is something quite natural, something startlingly obvious, which may occur at any moment. If it involves

This attitude of “acting as a Buddha” is particularly stressed in the Soto School, where both za-zen and the round of daily activities are not at all seen as means to an end but as the actual realization of Buddhahood.

“A roshi is a person who has actualized that perfect freedom which is the potentiality for all human beings. He exists freely in the fullness of his whole being. The flow of his consciousness is not the fixed repetitive patterns of our usual self-centered consciousness, but rather arises spontaneously and naturally from the actual circumstances of