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A student said to Zhaozhou, “You always say that the Great Way is not difficult if you just don’t pick and choose.” “Isn’t this a bit cliche?”

Zhaozhou said, “You’re not the first person to ask me that. The truth is, I haven’t found a better way to say it.”

—Blue Cliff Record, Case 58

Fritz is the German shepherd dog that lives with me off Panola Road in Waco, Kentucky.

When I first came to live here, Fritz lived down the hill in a neighbor’s kennel. At first, every once in a while when Fritz escaped the kennel, he would come to my house and would not leave. He’d hang out with the dogs up here on Panola Ridge, and even without food he would stay for days until I would walk him home. This happened more frequently as time went on. He’d come up, we’d not feed him, and he would stay.

Finally, his person from down the hill came up and asked, “Do you want him?” “Yes,” I said. But the truth is that I did not choose Fritz, he chose to live with me. Now he doesn’t wander, and he is best friends with Martine, the corgi, and Panda, the Great Pyrenees mix.

I have found also that sometimes a koan just chooses me. It lives with me and works in me, opening gates and doors, bringing me to the moment and opening the heart until—no separation. As I engaged in the task of selecting a koan, or even a theme, for our Thursday gathering, Zhaozhou, like Fritz, just kept coming back.

The Great Way is not difficult if you just don’t pick and choose.

Even in engaging this koan, I could see the Great Way at work. It was not a matter of picking and choosing—it is just here in my life. Maybe that is how it came to Zhaozhou.

Originally taken from third ancestor Sengcan’s song-poem, Faith in Mind, variations on this notion of “not picking and choosing” take up four percent of the hundred koans of the Blue Cliff Record. All of these show Zhaozhou responding to students with this teaching. Maybe it just kept coming up for the old master and he would be moved to repeat it.

In our koan, Case 58 of the Blue Cliff Record, the student hears Zhaozhou preaching platitudes, throwing out the equivalent of Instagram memes to his 9th century Chan community. So the student asks, “Isn’t that a bit cliche?” By any measure that is grabbing the tiger by the whiskers. But, not one to hit or shout, the golden-tongued tiger Zhaozhou, as he does in other instances of “picking and choosing,” echoes Bodhidharma’s “I don’t know,” with his response, “Others have asked me that, but frankly, I haven’t found a better way to say it.”

This Thursday, let’s look out for picking and choosing, better and best, a life lived with preferences against the reality of, “Well, you just never know.” It is not only Fritz. In each moment, life also chooses me.

Things seem to work out better when I give up the illusion of control.