Zazen Notes

The twenty-first case of “The Blue Cliff Record” is as follows:

A monk asked Chih Men, “How is it when the lotus flower has not yet emerged from the water?” Chih Men said, “A lotus flower.”

The monk said, “What about after it has emerged from the water?” Men said, “Lotus leaves.”

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There’s a koan in the “Blue Cliff Record” (case 17) that goes like this:

A monk asked Hsiang Lin, “What is the meaning of the Patriarch’s coming from the West?”
Hsiang Lin said, “Sitting for a long time becomes toilsome.”

(Yuanwu, ‘Blue Cliff Record’, Shambala publications pg 110)

In a ...  read more

I’d like to try to describe what I see in the lines of the illustration from “The Secret of the Golden Flower” (a Chinese meditation manual now dated somewhere between 1668 and 1692):

The lines up the leg parallel the ilio-tibial tract, a fascial band which stretches from the lower leg to the pelvis, and to which the tensor ...  read more