Description
We’re always looking for a recipe or data points to get a handle on happiness. The most profoundly simple but difficult challenge is to let ourselves transform into ourselves. We imagine a different, better self “after awakening.” Every stroke, even the most difficult or painful, is part of the piece. Our journey through suffering transforms everything, including the destination.
Stop Suffering!
Links to Audio, Video, & Text on the topic
We’re always looking for a recipe or data points to get a handle on happiness. The most profoundly simple but difficult challenge is to let ourselves transform into ourselves. We imagine a different, better self “after awakening.” Every stroke, even the most difficult or painful, is part of the piece. Our journey through suffering transforms everything, including the destination.
This Trouble Is for YOU
There is a tremendous empathy for the notion of predicament in the Zen tradition. Maybe we have to walk through a predicament, not run the other way. It’s all right to weep about it, or be frustrated and angry. The gateway is yours, not someone else’s.
(John Tarrant)
SOME PREDICAMENT KOANS
1. Yunmen’s Midnight
2. You Find Yourself in a Stone Crypt
3. Hanging from a Branch by Your Teeth
4. The Goose in the Bottle
5. Only for Your Benefit, Honored One
6. The Fire at the End of the Universe
7. Alone and Poor
8. The Moon Sets at Midnight
The Project of Suffering
It helps to understand the suffering we fabricate, which separates us, versus a fitting suffering which opens our hearts in connection.
(Allison Atwill)
AUDIO: The Project of Suffering vs the Reaching – Allison Atwill, Sunday Zen, Winter 2023
VIDEO: Mind of Awakening, Mind of Suffering – John Tarrant, Summer Sesshin 2014
AUDIO: My Heart Is Not At Rest – Jesse Cardin, Winter Sesshin 2022
The Paradox of Happiness
Everyone wants to use happiness as a fix for problems, yet happiness is its own, very big thing, and it is selling happiness short to make it a fix for problems. To be happy is to experience life not as a series of struggles but as a gift, one that has no known limit. This doesn’t mean ignoring your difficulties: it means not assuming that they are what you think they are.
(John Tarrant)
ARTICLE: The Paradox of Happiness – John Tarrant, Lion’s Roar, January 2004
AUDIO: Setting the Mind to Rest – John Tarrant, Sunday Zen,
Bodhidharma is meditating when a student says to him,
“My mind is not at peace. Please put it to rest.”
Bodhidharma says, “Bring me your mind and I will set it to rest.”
“But I’ve searched for my mind and can’t find it.”
“There, I have put it to rest.”
What Is the Way?
This is the stone, drenched with rain, that points the way. —Santoka
Santoka trusted his two feet when he couldn’t trust anything else. Always, there was a sense of beauty and of deeply inhabiting his life. Life comes through us. It’s our poetry, it’s our way.
(Tess Beasley)
AUDIO: Recipes for Happiness: Santoka’s Life – Tess Beasley, Fall Sesshin 2021
AUDIO: Going Straight on the Road with 99 Curves – John Tarrant, Winter Sesshin 2014
AUDIO: Not Knowing Is Most Intimate: Delight in the Chaos of Life – John Tarrant, Fall Sesshin 2019
To taste the thing itself, an unskillful person penetrates that unskillfulness to the bone.
—Santoka
Carried in the Dark
VIDEO: Carried in the Dark: Lostness Is a Spiral Path – John Tarrant, Winter Sesshin 2023
AUDIO: Carried by Kindness and Joy – Tess Beasley, Winter Sesshin 2023
AUDIO: Deshan’s Journey out of Suffering – John Tarrant, Sunday Zen, Spring 2020
VIDEO: Are You Afraid of This Happiness? – John Tarrant & David Weinstein, Winter Sesshin 2011
We can’t leave our shadow behind, we can’t leave all the things we don’t like about ourselves—we have to take them through the gate, too. And maybe the Dao will heal some of those things, maybe not. It doesn’t matter—they’re part of your Buddha nature.
So, we can trust this path we’re on.
—John Tarrant
Related materials:
DHARMA THEME: Past Midnight – Discoveries in the Dark
DHARMA THEME: Sickness and Medicine