Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘Spiritual life is not done for a particular purpose – it’s huge. Zen practice is just to open the heart and be intimate with the truth. It’s very vague. You don’t understand it.’

I was leafing through some of my notebooks the other day and came across a quote by Katagiri, and wondered if I had posted it. Turns out I had. I had been thinking that it would do no harm to post it again – as with all things, there is a tendency to forget, and it is nice to be reminded afresh – then when I was checking, I found this one. The last sentence caught my attention. I reckon that most people might read that as a dismissal, ‘you just don’t understand,’ but right now, and perhaps this was also a year ago when I posted it, I took it to mean, ‘don’t try to get your head around it, it is not a question of understanding.’ This is a lesson that I think is always good to be reminded afresh, because our minds are so conditioned to search for understanding; letting go of that seems to me to be a key part of practice.