What is Zen?​

 

Good question.

 

With patience, curiosity, and lots of zazen, you might begin to notice how the need for tidy answers falls away. You might notice how stillness has a fondness for drawing near and how each moment has its own completeness. Is there something called Zen that can be found apart from bushes, birds, cities, war zones, sunsets, and galaxies? Is there something called Zen apart from the act of chopping carrots? 

The Zen tradition uses questions and scraps of ancient dialogue called koans that can help us, especially when paired with zazen, reveal a boundlessness of heart and mind. Handed down from teacher to student over the centuries, they're well-worn, pliable, and scrappy. And they have an uncanny ability to speak directly to your life, here and now in the 21st century.

Here's one: What is your original face, the one before your parents were born?

In sitting with a koan, a kinship develops. You find that each koan, like a friend, has its own perfection and raw beauty. And at some point its seemingly paradoxical quality begins to dissolve.

Koans offer a radical proposition: there is a way of being in this world that is generous, expansive, intuitive, and creative—and it's available right now. The rich not-knowing at the heart of koan investigation is the same not-knowing of the artist or the first-time parent. And this openness and freshness can bloom in all the precincts of your life.

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As you gain freedom from narrow certainties and old habits of mind, you find allies and guides wherever you turn—not in easy answers but right here in grit of the so-called ordinary: this most mysterious thing called being human.

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​Bamboo shadows sweep the stairs

but no dust is stirred;

moonlight reaches the bottom of the pond

but no trace is left in the water.  

—Zenrin-kushū, 1688​