Events

As I go along the path, I not infrequently run into dead snakes. I couldn’t figure out how to get past them. Now, they are still here, but they’re not alive. All I have to do step over them. Admittedly, sometimes I step on them and they’re slippery and sometimes I fall.

—David Weinstein

Meditation doesn’t add anything to life; it does have a magical property of subtraction so that you feel welcome in the world and can welcome others.

—John Tarrant

“Dokusan” is the Japanese word for these conversations about meditation practice. It means “to go alone” or “to practice alone.”

It is to have a conversation so intimate, that for both participants it is as if you were talking with and listening to yourself.

There will be personal interviews and deep meditation, teaching talks and some conversations, old friends and new, brilliant teachers, music, great enlightenment, mistakes, and delight.

—John Tarrant

Meditation doesn’t add anything to life; it does have a magical property of subtraction so that you feel welcome in the world and can welcome others.

—John Tarrant & All of us at PZI

Wuzi said, “It is like a buffalo jumping through a window. Its head, horns, and four legs all pass through. Why can’t its tail pass through?” 

—Gateless Barrier Case 38

Spending time with this koan recently, a few things occurred to me. First, I took it as an invitation to relax.What’s wrong with being a non-attained Buddha? What’s wrong with being who I am, now, in this moment? Nothing, really. And yet…

Recently I called a friend and confessed having difficulty with an unsolvable problem. This is a habit—to see my problem as unsolvable, and to see it as “a problem.” (And here I am, at it again.) In response, my friend read me Shitou’s Song of the Grass-Roof Hermitage (a Chan ancestor.) Hearing it was an immediate balm!

Not thinking our way to becoming awake, but becoming awake to our thinking. Waking up and smelling the roses.

In the case of koans, inviting someone to fill a sieve with water is something that is suggested knowing that the person can accomplish the task and may even have already accomplished it, though they don’t know it themselves. The task is our life and we are always living it, whether we notice it or not.