395. ZEN REMARKS

 395. Do you stand at a window in your room and survey the world vast and wide spread out before you? Is that world simply the object of an act of spontaneous extroversion? Is your relation to the vast wide world one of subject to object? Is the world -- your world -- vast and wide as it is, limited to what you can see, hear, taste, touch and smell?

394. ZEN REMARKS

 394. From what vantage point do you look out and see that the world is vast and wide? 

393. ZEN REMARKS

 393. Master Unmon said, 'See how vast and wide the world is! Why do you put on your seven-piece robe at the sound of the bell?' Is the master referring to the world of your ordinary everyday experience or does he have something else in mind?

392. ZEN REMARKS

392. Master  Gettan said to a monk: 'Keichu made a cart with a hundred wheels. If he removed the wheels and the axles, what would he make clear about the cart?' 

     A good koan to become intimate with in this time of pandemic. 

391. ZEN REMARKS

391. An old Chinese master put the question, 'Why has the foreigner from the West no beard?' Surely an odd question given that 'the foreigner from the West', that is, Bodhidharma, is always depicted with a big bushy beard. What is going on here? 

390. ZEN REMARKS

390. Thirty of us in a twenty-one day lockdown in a mountain zendo: time and opportunity to become ever more intimate with that mystery in which we live and move and have our being. 

389. ZEN REMARKS

389. Some questions to ponder in the silence and solitude of a zendo deep in the mountains: What is your calling in life? Are you aware of being called? Alternatively, are you pursuing a project of your own devising? What is life asking of you? What are you asking  (demanding?) of life?