If you say that making a fist, giving a shout, holding a staff or showing a needle are but ordinary actions … … you are absolutely right, yet completely wrong. If you say that they are magical actions that swallow the universe … … you are absolutely wrong, while completely right. In her lectures on…

. Zazen is a ‘reset’ button on the human brain and our thinking, allowing a balance and clarity free of assembled opinions, memories, dreams, categorizations, judgments, likes and dislikes. The world is thereby perceived as free and simple. Dropping our sense of a separate ‘self’, we drop the many ways in which that ‘self’ resists…

. Nothing to think. No opinions. No names. No comparisons. We see in the past that those who transcended the ordinary and transcended the sacred and those who died while sitting or died while standing, relied totally on this power. Moreover, changing of the moment through the action of a finger, a [flag]pole, a needle,…

. Traditionally, Zen Teachers would give a shout of ‘KATSU’ … arising from somewhere, spreading everywhere … beyond thinking or discrimination … power to swallow the universe whole …. . … Such as in these stories of Master Rinzai (who was a little physical): A monk asked: “What is the essence of Buddhism?“ Master Rinzai…

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