Best zen koans11/25/2023 Everyone wants to develop meditation as a skill, but building a skill is just making your life smaller than it is. Have the life you have, and let the koan into it. You are joining a timeless conversation and you are forming a relationship with the koan, so you can let all that happen without worrying about it. The coin that’s lost in the river is found in the river. Just repeat the words of the koan to yourself a bit. The coin lost in the river is found in the river. If no koan has already grabbed hold of you, here’s one to try: It is for you the way your life is for you. It can be like an ear worm-it seizes you and won’t go away. If you have heard of a koan and it stayed with you, you can try that one out. You just keep company with the koan, and it draws your attention to something you already have but might not have valued. But the ambition to improve your state of mind is part of the consciousness that finds fault with itself and lives in pain. You might think meditation is difficult-that your job as a meditator is to change your mind about reality and see through your illusions. What’s required is more strange and also less effort it’s outside of easy or hard, yesterday or tomorrow. It’s not training your mind because that is something you already know about. It’s familiar to reach for things you already know about, and meditation means stepping beyond that. In the land of koans, you see that everything that happens in your life is for you. Before anything is explained, there is the sky, the earth, redwood forests, pelicans, rivers, rats, the city of San Francisco. Instead, they show you something by opening a gate. Then it’s easy to love others, which is the other thing a practice is about. The path is about learning to love this life, the one you have. There’s a tradition of koan study to transform your heart and the way you move in the world. It’s something to keep you company, whatever you are doing. Mysteriously, like koans.The koan: The coin lost in the river is found in the river.Ī koan is a little healing story, a conversation, an image, a fragment of a song. "John Tarrant’s talent for telling these classic Zen tales transforms them magically into a song in which, as you read, the words disappear as the music continues to echo in your mind and make you happy. This book could take you to a different and important level of experience." -Thomas Moore, author of Care of the Soul With intelligence, humor, and steady deep reflection, John Tarrant does this as no one has done it before. You need someone to put you in the right frame of mind to see the puzzles and paradoxes of your experience. "Every life is full of koans, and yet you can’t learn from a book how to understand them. Your life is a koan, a deep question whose answer you are already living-this is the true inspiration, and Tarrant delivers." -Roger Housden, author of the Ten Poems series Tarrant’s is the fix that fixes nothing because there is nothing to fix. Forget about self-improvement, five-point plans, and inspirational seminars that you can’t remember a word of a week later. "Here’s a book to crack the happiness code if ever there was one. " Bring Me the Rhinoceros is one of the best books ever written about Zen." -Stephen Mitchell, translator of Gilgamesh: A New English Version Rather than the usual Zen mystique that treats koans as arcane meditation objects, Tarrant discusses them as open secrets that actually matter for our lives here and now." -Zoketsu Norman Fischer, poet and Zen priest author of Sailing Home: Using the Wisdom of Homer’s Odyssey to Navigate Life’s Perils and Pitfalls His koan re-tellings read like postmodern short fiction, complete with anti-heroic characters, visible scenery, and attitude. Having digested the traditional koan literature, which he has taught for many years, Zen teacher John Tarrant cheerfully goes beyond it. "You’ve never read a Zen book like this before. He weaves his deep immersion in Buddhist practice, Western psychology, and the arts into a unique yet completely authentic story of the Zen life and its mysteries." -Melvin McLeod, editor-in-chief, the Shambhala Sun "John Tarrant is one of the most interesting minds in American Buddhism.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |