A friend of mine took me to hear Kobun Chino Otogawa speak at the Santa Cruz Zen Center in about 1971. Kobun had a way of saying things where I thought he was speaking to me, and he was describing what I had to do (or not do) in order to be on-time or in time with my life. There was this sense of the future coming on, and although he could have no ...
‘Zazen’, from “The Mudra of Zen”
Dogen said: “To study the way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self.”
Simply by being where we are, we can come to forget the self. The sense of place engenders an ability to feel, and each thing we feel enters into the sense of place- even before we know it.
This being where we are with each thing, even before ...
On the effectiveness of mudras (response on Tao Bums)
When I finally sat down to write something about zazen, I wrote an essay about “the mudra of zen”. I didn’t know what I was going to say about that, but I wrote anyway. As it happens, I still use the practice I wrote about even today, six years later. And yet, it’s an oddball thing!
So here it is. As consciousness occurs, we ...