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Back to Zen: Stop Trying to Quiet Your Mind | Henry Shukman, with Henry Shukman.

Why Does the Great Way Dislike Choosing?

Henry Shukman says the great way is the great reality, one single whole that excludes nothing. It has no size. It is free of time, yet it allows time to happen and lets everything unfold. The poem opens with the line that the great way is not difficult and just dislikes choosing, the same ground as preferences and reactivity.

The line comes from the third ancestor in Chinese Chan, or Zen Buddhism, in a poem called the Shin Shin Ming, or the Shin Jin Mei in Japanese, about three pages long. People have pored over it for millennia. The great way is not something a person sees out there. It is what a person actually is, and what all of us are. It goes beyond self and other and beyond self and world, and it includes self and world. A person can be themself totally and, in the great way, still be part of everything, with everything part of everything.

True non-dual reality includes the dual. If the great way left the dual out, it would not be truly non-dual.

Grokipedia·Henry Shukman

Transcript

Zen: Stop Trying to Quiet Your Mind | Henry Shukman ·

The Kevin Rose Show

More from this episode

  1. What Did Suzuki Roshi Teach About Monkey Mind?Henry Shukman says Suzuki Roshi, who wrote Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, taught a different way to meet monkey mind.
  2. What Is the Backward Step in Zen?Henry Shukman says the backward step in Zen is disengaging from outward activity.
  3. What Does Rumi Mean by Come Back?Henry Shukman says Rumi's call to come back, in the translation by Coleman Barks, means returning to now after the mind has wandered off.
  4. What Was Henry Shukman's Awakening Like?Henry Shukman had an awakening as a youth, far from home, so complete that he felt he could die that night because his life had already been fulfilled.
  5. How Does Practice Become a Flow State?Henry Shukman says flow states might be some kind of preparatory training.
  6. How Can Someone Walk and Still Go Nowhere?Henry Shukman says a student who declared that Bodhidharma never took a step seems to have found a reality where there is nowhere to go.
  7. Would Kevin Rose Rather Fly the Plane?Kevin Rose would rather fly the plane than ride as a passenger, silly as that sounds. Needing to know shows up as a preference for control.

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