It is like returning home and sitting down in comfort

To enter this ocean of quiet awareness, we must first simplify our lives, abandoning the pursuit of fame, complex intellectual studies, and the traps of greed, which include eating past two-thirds full or clinging to this and that.

We find a quiet, clean refuge away from extreme weather and worldly distractions, arranging our cushion to support an upright, mountain-like posture with our eyes gently open. zazen is the comfortable way.

If our bodies become uneasy or our minds start to drift and hallucinate, we gently tune our breathing through the nose and anchor our attention to the physical focal points of the body.

We cast aside all conceptual plans of becoming a Buddha, learning to sit with a mind like cold ashes and a body like a withered tree. Pure water has neither front nor back.

In this sacred space of no-action, we pierce through the fog of drowsiness and scattered thoughts by constantly vowing to awaken for the sake of all beings.

We practice thinking the unthinkable, which means entirely transcending the dualistic division between thinking and unthinking.

Sit is not a matter of practicing a doctrine or achieving a future enlightenment; it is the immediate, wordless realization of our original face here and now.

When we finally step up from the cushion and move into the world, every single action naturally becomes the living, breathing manifestation of the truth.

These are precautions regarding the place abandon the functioning of the mind; stop dualistic thinking, and do not plan to become a Buddha. Don't think about right and wrong. Do not waste time make efforts as though saving your burning head.

We must put a stop to our delusive mind, cool our passions, transcend moment and eternity, make our mind like cold ashes and withered trees, unify meditation and wisdom like a censer in an old shrine, and purify body and mind like a single white strand.

I sincerely hope that you will do all this.

gassho,