Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘When I give beginners instruction, I try to start people off with the idea that zazen is something they can’t do right or wrong. It’s not a technique to master. Like looking in a mirror, your face immediately appears. There’s no right or wrong about that. You just sit and look. Yet it’s very hard for people to maintain that stance in practice. That’s the true difficulty of this practice. We do a disservice when we make the primary difficulty of sitting in pain as something we can master, because then it turns Zen into something we get good at, and it inevitably misses its deepest point. That’s the no gain side. No gain is actually a very deep and difficult concept because it speaks to the idea of absolute or intrinsic value of each moment of our lives and our lives as a whole. It goes against the grain of pretty much everything we do in our life, when pretty much everything is treated as a means to an end, something we do in order to be happy, rich, secure, calm, enlightened.’ (from the Ordinary Mind website)

A student sent me this article which serves as a useful counterpoint to the idea that all sesshin should be endurance tests.