Don't Be a Jerk

My 8 highlights

• Because of the merit of practice you may be given a whole nation as a gift. But don’t see that as a great achievement. Pay close attention when things like that happen. Wise people reject such gifts the way secular people would reject the gift of a bag of poop. In general, beginners can’t imagine the Buddha’s

• This is not a once-and-for-all realization. It appears dynamically, moment after moment.

• When you do zazen, you’re not trying to achieve a totally empty mind. That would be impossible. But you are trying to avoid the deliberate habitual manipulation of thoughts and images we usually engage in. To me, that’s all this whole “thinking beyond thinking” stuff actually means. You point your brain toward something beyond thought, and hope for the best.

• Buddhism being an oral tradition, face-to-face conversation always beats anything that can be written down. Remember that.

• When Zen people say the “body” they generally mean the entire physical world by extension.

• We shouldn’t await some state of awareness. And we shouldn’t assume our current state is without awareness. Every possible state is awareness. There’s not even a gap big enough for a speck of dust.

• your present form as you are is the real state of experience. Alarm, doubt, and even fear are nothing but reality as it is.

• Actual cause and effect is not concerned with whether we characterize it as being about some kind of divine principle or whether we think it’s a natural process.