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 also notice how stillness has a fondness for drawing near. Are those bickering crows outside or inside? Is there something called Zen that can be found among bushes, birds, cities, war zones, sunsets, and galaxies?

Where certainty shuts down curiosity, questions open a window.

In addition to meditation, the Zen tradition uses questions and scraps of ancient dialogue called koans that 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 completeness 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 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 heart and mind, you find allies and guides wherever you turn—not in easy answers but right here in the so-called ordinary moments of 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​