Sublime

Each one of us must make his own true way, and when we do, that way will express the universal way. This is the mystery.

There is a legend in which the Buddha comes upon the mind of not picking and choosing.3 On the edge of his own profound change of heart, the Buddha meditates all night under a fig tree, and an image comes to mind. He remembers that, as a child, while his father plowed a field in an annual ceremony, he was left in the shade of a rose apple tree. At

how completely Suzuki Roshi worked at things, how much care he took with the details. He took care of details I didn’t even notice. He put vastly more energy into things than I ever would have. He did not cut corners. He did not decide he didn’t have time.

Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

Teitaro Suzuki, unofficial lay master of Zen Buddhism, humorous offbeat scholar, and about the most gentle and enlightened person I have ever known; for he combined the most complex learning with utter simplicity. He was versed in Japanese, English, Chinese, Sanskrit, Tibetan, French, Pali, and German, but while attending a meeting of the Buddhist

the koan that is the subject of this sutra: “Can you see the Tathagata?” And “no” was as far as he got or needed to go.

Our usual understanding of life is dualistic: you and I, this and that, good and bad. But actually these discriminations are themselves the awareness of the universal existence. “You” means to be aware of the universe in the form of you, and “I” means to be aware of it in the form of I. You and I are just swinging doors. This kind of understanding

We are all by now familiar with Rinzai’s old saying “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” That saying, once startling, is in danger of becoming a cliché, preventing us from experiencing the full force of the words. We need to “kill” any idea we have of the buddhahood being “out there,” or down the road or in any way outside ourselves.