I’ve been thinking about a question someone asked: Is there ever any mention of compassion in this Zen practice? Is there any emphasis on compassion? I was thinking about how best to address that question, all the while asking myself that question. I have many answers for it, and I offered some of those answers [...]
This Zen teaching unfolds like a fan. (I use these two words, Zen and teaching, as tools to limit something that has no limits.) The more we become aware, present, openly, selflessly, the more it unfolds, and the more it unfolds, the more the many dimensions of life unfold. And in each of those dimensions [...]
Someone who knows little about "Zen" asked today whether I "practiced" everyday. Well... I thought of saying, "I'm practicing right now." But I didn't. I asked him, "Do you mean formally?" Which was not really what I was thinking, but it was what he was thinking. Launching into something about nonduality and not creating artificial [...]
What if everyone at rush hour in the Paris Métro really listened to that recorded voice that says sometimes, "Attention à la marche en descendant du train," (Watch your step when leaving the train)? That is, what if each person paid attention just for a second to one step? What if everyone just for a [...]
Morning seems touched by the sun today, brightly, freely, serenely. Or is it morning that touches sun? And the moon last night in a clear purple sky, fully nearly full, then crossed by a drift of clouds, casting a strange halo of yellow-orange-white-blue: What touched what? And me? Here I am in any case. Meanwhile. [...]
Back from retreat in Portugal, in Coimbra, where we sat in a kind of haven planted between ribbons of highway and a shopping mall. As the days passed, we didn't so much go deeper as we grew wider together. It rained and didn't, the lights went out and we sat, the lights came on and [...]