What is the enlightenment experience? It is the experience where one transcends the duality of self and other.

So, what happens when the backward step is taken on the mat or through the looking glass of the mind and we turn the instrument of our being back onto being itself?

We complicate things. We complicate things unnecessarily through our thinking, or more correctly, our clinging to our thoughts.

We have, perhaps, a little veto power over what feelings impel us to do, but the idea of some rational decision maker who’s in charge seems to be a fiction of the mind.

A vintage koan commentary by the Center’s founder, the late Roshi Philip Kapleau. Mumonkan number 14: Nansen kills the cat The Case Once the monks of the Western and Eastern Halls were arguing about a cat. Nansen, holding up the cat, said, “You monks! If you can say a word of Zen, I will spare…

Searching for solidarity: when technology helps more than it hurts.
A gender-questioning member finds warm support in a private online group.

“Both painting and sitting require a willingness to stay in one place for hours.” An interview with Dave Dorsey.

A few rounds with a new sitting group trigger a maddening case of Zen snob stink.

The First Buddhist Precept — to resolve not to kill — sounds deceptively simple, and yet it can be a lifelong koan.

Commentary by Roshi Bodhin Kjolhed on the Blue Cliff Record Koan No. 48: “Turning Over the Teakettle.”