Sublime

But the genuine Zen flavor is when a man is almost miraculously natural without intending to be so. His Zen life is not to make himself but to grow that way.

was Angulimala, but he felt no fear. He continued to take slow steps, aware of everything taking place within and outside of himself.

The characteristic notes of the spontaneous life are mo chih ch’um or “going ahead without hesitation,” wu-wei, which may here be understood as purposelessness, and wu-shih, lack of affectation or simplicity. While the Zen experience does not imply any specific course of action, since it has no purpose, no motivation, it turns unhesitatingly to any

But just as there is no need to try to be in accord with the Tao, to try to see, or to try to hear, so it must be remembered that the breath will always take care of itself. This is not a breathing “exercise” so much as a “watching and letting” of the breath, and it is always a serious mistake to undertake it in the spirit of a compulsive disciplin

delightful ashoka groves28

Cultivating the heartless center between Heaven and Earth, sages delight in the endless creation of something out of nothing without becoming attached to anything.

All in all, it would seem that hsin means the totality of our psychic functioning, and, more specifically, the center of that functioning, which is associated with the central point of the upper body. The Japanese form of the word, kokoro, is used with even more subtleties of meaning, but for the present it is enough to realize that in translating

Zen arrived in Japan shortly after the beginning of the Kamakura Era, when the military dictator Yoritomo and his samurai followers had seized power from the hands of the then somewhat decadent nobility. This historical coincidence provided the military class, the samurai, with a type of Buddhism which appealed to them strongly because of its pract