Bultasa Zen Group

12/27/2025

12/11/2025

11/25/2025

This truth pierces a conceptual past, conceptual present, and conceptual future. Equanimity and wisdom cannot appear if we are continually commenting both internally and externally on people, events, situations, and conditions. Commenting causes all sorts of emotional responses. This is the crux of

11/22/2025

When you practice Zen earnestly, you’re burning up the karma that binds you to ignorance. In Japanese the word for “earnest” means “to heat up the heart”. If you heat up your heart, this karma, which is like a block of ice in your mind, melts and becomes liquid. And if you keep heating it, it becomes steam, and evaporates into space. Those people who practice come to melt their hindrances. Why do they practice? Because it’s their karma to do so, just as it’s others’ not to. Our discriminating thoughts build up a great thought-mass in our minds, and this is what we mistakenly regard as our real self. In fact, it’s merely a mental construction based on ignorance. The purpose of Zen meditation is to dissolve this thought-mass. What is finally left is the real self. You enter into the world of the selfless. And if you don’t stop there, if you don’t think about this realm or cling to it, you will continue in your practice until you become one with the Absolute. —Zen Master Seung Sahn

10/18/2025

Here is a cup of orange juice. If you have "cup," then you can keep this orange juice here. But if this cup breaks, how can the orange juice remain? You cannot keep the juice there, yah? Suffering is the same as that. Where does suffering abide? If you are attached to the five skandhas of form, feelings, perceptions, impulses, or consciousness, then suffering has a place to stay. But the Heart Sutra shows the view that these five skandhas are empty. Mind is completely empty: where can suffering possibly stay? So this teaching about emptiness is very, very important to attain. When you practice the way of the perfection of wisdom, you attain that all five skandhas are actually empty. Attaining this view saves us from all suffering and distress. Merely understanding these views cannot help you—you must attain something. —Zen Master Seung Sahn

08/28/2025

08/26/2025

Succinct.