Sublime

Rinzai Roku (a celebrated Zen text of the T’ang dynasty) and the teachings of Bankei, the seventeenth-century Japanese master who, for me, represents Zen at its best.

I believe that the next buddha will no longer be an individual; it will be a sangha,

Buddhism could be described as “the culture of awakening.”

The Buddha teaches us to practice charity, to rid ourselves of all attachments within, and to benefit all beings without. By not dwelling on anything, bodhisattvas do not see the self that gives, nor do they see the other that receives, nor do they see anything given. For all three are essentially empty. By concentrating without concentrating on an

If the Buddha has no self, being, life, or soul, what exactly is the Buddha? The Buddha is, by definition, the embodiment of enlightenment, the buddha nature personified. But what is the nature of such a nature?

Adopting a healthy scepticism towards inherited ideas means “emptying the container of the Self”, or perhaps exercising a kind of trained “forgetting” of that which is extraneous to the essential self. In this state, we become less prone to partaking in the superfluous occupations we impose upon ourselves to cope with the weight of social expectat