Opening survey of contemplative practices
There are many contemplative practices: Moonlight sitting, sunlight sitting, snow sitting, rain sitting. Whatever nature's condition is, you sit in it and find out both what it is and what is yourself.
Using the actual creek sound to illustrate shamatha
Listen to the creek. You stop hearing it when I am talking but the creek becomes loud when your mind is in the state of shamatha, a deep degree of shamatha.
Vipassana as the natural quality of engaged activity
Every activity we are engaging in, devoting ourselves to, deeply interested in, has this nature of vipassana: Insight, knowing, awakening, and unfolding. Phenomena unfold the teaching in front of you, within you.
Defining shamatha as mirror-like stillness
Shamatha is bodily stillness, mind stillness. Your body and mind are a round mirror on your cushion. If it moves around, the world moves with it.
Core question distinguishing Soto from Rinzai
Is zazen the method or the purpose? This is an important subject. The method and the actual achievement are different. This is why different practice lineages occurred.
Kobun's koan training with his elder brother
One koan he gave me was this: "Imagine you have completed digging a deep hole in the ground." And I said, "Yes, I dug it, deep. No one can climb up from the bottom. I did it, now what do you want?" "Now you go get a national treasure from the shrine, Shakyamuni Buddha's statue."
Resolving the koi koan through Bodhidharma's teaching
I recalled if you want to know the mind of the fish, you've got to know the mind of the water. This is a famous word of Bodhidharma. That word clicked in my head and the next day I told him, "I got it!" And I touched my hand on the ground like this, "Right now I caught it."
Zazen as utter gift without intention
Sitting should be utterly open. It's an utter gift, so it shouldn't have a price tag, or any intention involved in it.
Demystifying shikantaza as pure action
By saying, "shikantaza" we imagine there is some special stage, psychological, physical, or spiritual, that we experience. That's how we tend to think. But "shikantaza," the word itself, points to action. The purest form of sitting action is called "shikanta."
Sitting as prior to all religion
Before religion began, before Buddhism came about as a historical order and cultural phenomenon, sitting was already there. Unstained.
The intensity of shikantaza practice
You sit and sit and sit with hot blood full in your head. All kinds of memories, impressions, perceptions, knowledge, theories, ideas, doctrines, without thinking, you see through. It is very strict guidance, given in order to reveal your own truth, your own life-dynamic, undefeatable, and so fragile, so uncertain.