Two Arrows Zen

04/19/2026

There’s a well-known story, often shared in both Taoist and Zen circles, about a farmer and his horse. An old man lived in a small village with his son. One day, his horse ran away, and the neighbors came by to offer their sympathies.

“What bad luck,” they said.

The old man simply replied, “Maybe.”

A few days later, the horse returned, bringing with it several wild horses from the hills. The neighbors returned, praising the good fortune.

“What good luck," they said.

Again, the old man responded, "Maybe."

Soon after, the man’s son tried to ride one of the wild horses. He was thrown and broke his leg.

“What bad luck,” the neighbors lamented.

Once more, the old man said, "Maybe.”

Not long after, soldiers came through the village, drafting young men into the army. Seeing his son’s injured leg, they passed him by.

“What good luck," said the neighbors.

And again, the old man only replied, "Maybe.”

The story keeps turning like this, over and over.

What seems fortunate can turn out to be unfortunate. What looks like a loss might reveal something different over time.

Nothing remains fixed or certain.

What stands out isn’t the events themselves but our tendency to rush to judge their meaning too quickly.

Most of the time, our minds jump to conclusions—this is good, this is bad—and then everything else follows from there.

But the story suggests something else: that we don’t see the full picture. Time often shows what the moment cannot. What we label as “good” or “bad” might just be a small piece of something still unfolding.

The old man doesn’t deny what happens. He simply leaves it open.

In Zen, this is sometimes called not knowing—not confusion, but a kind of clarity that isn’t in a rush to judge.

It’s about being willing to meet life as it comes before it hardens into certainty.

The story is straightforward. A horse runs away, then returns. A son falls, then heals. A war comes, then goes.

Nothing extraordinary. And yet—the moment we decide what something means might be the very moment we stop seeing it clearly.

04/15/2026

Before he became one of Tibet’s most revered yogis, Milarepa was known for something far darker. He was born in western Tibet into a family that, for a time, lived with stability and relative comfort. That stability ended with his father’s death. In its wake, his aunt and uncle seized the family’s property, forcing Milarepa, his mother, and his sister into a life of humiliation and labor. What began as loss gradually hardened into resentment, and resentment into something more dangerous. At his mother’s urging, he left home to learn sorcery—not as a curiosity, but as a means of revenge.

He did not hesitate to use it. Traditional accounts describe him collapsing a house during a wedding, killing many people inside, and later summoning violent hailstorms that destroyed crops across the region. The harm was not symbolic. It was irreversible. Whatever sense of justice or satisfaction he had imagined did not arrive. When it was over, there was no restoration—only absence. The people were still gone. The damage remained. And with it came something that could no longer be directed outward: a sustained and unyielding recognition of what he had done.

That recognition did not free him. It deepened into remorse—not the kind that passes, but the kind that stays and asks a different question. What now? And is there any way to live differently after this? It was this question, more than anything else, that turned him toward the path.

Milarepa eventually sought out the teacher Marpa Lotsawa, who had brought Buddhist teachings from India back to Tibet. Marpa did not greet him with instruction or consolation. Instead, he gave him work. Milarepa was ordered to build a stone tower by hand. When it was finished, Marpa instructed him to dismantle it completely and return each stone to its original place. Then he was told to begin again. Different towers, different locations, the same labor—repeated over years.

To an outside observer, the treatment might appear severe. Within the tradition, it is understood differently. Milarepa had used discipline, focus, and determination to cause harm; now those same qualities were being redirected. The labor offered no refuge in abstraction. Each stone lifted required effort. Each wall raised and undone revealed the limits of will, frustration, and attachment. In time, something shifted—not suddenly, but through endurance. The urgency that had once driven him gave way to the capacity to remain.

Only then did Marpa begin to teach him. And when he did, he sent Milarepa away—not into a monastery, but into solitary retreat in the mountains.

It is in this setting that one of the most enduring stories from his life takes place. Returning to his cave one night, Milarepa found it filled with demons. At first, he responded with the strength he knew. He ran the lesser ones out, and they scattered. Others proved more persistent, and with these he shifted his approach. Instead of resisting, he met them with a kind of openness—offering rather than opposing—and they were gradually banished.

But in the back of the cave, one remained.

This final presence did not react. It did not yield to force, nor to patience, nor even to openness. Everything Milarepa had relied on—his strength, his discipline, even his ability to meet things skillfully—had reached its limit. There was nothing left to apply, no method that made sense.

So he did something else.

He stepped forward, bowed, and—according to the story—placed his head into the demon’s mouth.

There was no resistance, no attempt to control the outcome, no distance left between himself and what he faced.

And the demon dissolved.

The story has been told for generations not as a record of supernatural combat, but as a description of the mind itself—of fear, guilt, memory, and the consequences that remain long after action has passed. Some of these can be pushed aside. Others can be worked with. But some persist, unaffected by either.

For these, there may be no solution in the usual sense.

Only the willingness to face them completely, and to see them clearly for what they are.

By the time Milarepa entered that cave, he had already encountered the weight of his own actions. The final moment was not a sudden breakthrough, but the continuation of a process that had begun much earlier—with loss, with anger, and ultimately with the recognition of what could not be undone.

What followed was not escape, but a different way of meeting what remained. And in that meeting, something changed—not because the problem was defeated, but because it was no longer being resisted.

04/14/2026

Tonight at 9pm MTN, Shambhala will debut a new episode of This Very Moment featuring Diane Musho Hamilton.

In this conversation, Diane reflects on the arc of her practice—from early encounters with loss and existential questioning, to her training at Naropa, her work with Genpo Merzel, and her ongoing integration of Zen and Integral perspectives influenced by Ken Wilber.

At the center of the discussion is a simple but profound insight:

That there is something in us—already present—that knows how to be with what is.

Through years of meditation, facilitation, and working with individuals and groups in conflict, Diane points to a shift that many practitioners recognize: not necessarily a change in life’s conditions, but a transformation in how we meet them.

Rather than becoming less reactive by force, we begin to see reactivity as it arises. Rather than escaping difficulty, we develop the capacity to remain present within it.

This is where practice becomes lived.

The conversation also explores the integration of contemplative depth with relational and developmental capacity—what Diane often describes as the convergence of waking up and growing up. In a time of increasing complexity, this integration becomes essential for how we engage one another, navigate difference, and remain grounded in the midst of challenge.

We’re grateful to see this work shared more widely.

The episode premieres tonight at 9pm MTN on YouTube.

Episode 7 of This Very Moment features Zen teacher, meditator, and author Diane Musho Hamilton in a rich conversation about learning to be with life as it is.

04/12/2026

There’s no reason to study Buddhism once you realize you have inherent Buddha nature.

Nothing to gain.
Nothing missing.

So why all the sitting?
Why the teachings?
Why the effort?

Because knowing something isn’t the same as living it.

The gap is obvious the moment you pay attention.

Irritation still comes.
Judgment still comes.
Fear still comes.

And in those moments, Buddha nature feels very far away.

The teaching isn’t there to give you something new.

It’s there to show you—again and again—how quickly you forget what’s already true.

The path taught by Gautama Buddha doesn’t make you into something else.

It asks:

If nothing is missing,
why is it so hard to live that way?

That’s the practice.

Kanji pictured below : (pronounced busshō), combining the kanji for "Buddha" (仏/佛) and "nature/essence" (性). represents the inherent, perfect, and unchangeable potential for enlightenment in all beings.

04/09/2026

No one comes out of a Zen center a golden Buddha.

There is a subtle trap in spiritual practice that doesn’t always appear as greed or anger. Sometimes, it shows up as being right—as feeling more aware, more ethical, or more awake than others. It can sound like, “I would never do that,” or “I can’t believe they did that.” Over time, almost without noticing, practice becomes identity—a position, a way of separating oneself from others.

The path taught by Gautama Buddha was never about becoming superior. It was about seeing clearly.

And seeing clearly includes something difficult:

Harm is real.
People are hurt.
Actions have consequences.

But it also includes something deeper.

Thích Nhất Hạnh wrote:

“I am the twelve-year-old girl,
refugee on a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean
after being r***d by a sea pirate.

And I am the pirate,
my heart not yet capable
of seeing and loving.”

This is not a justification of harm.

It is a recognition of how suffering arises—through causes and conditions that are not separate from any of us.

Practice does not place anyone above confusion, above conditioning, or above the complexity of the human heart. It asks something more demanding:

To acknowledge harm clearly.
To take responsibility where it is needed.
And to resist the impulse to turn human beings into something fixed and final.

Because the line between “us” and “them” is not as solid as we imagine.

No one becomes a golden Buddha.

Practice does not make us better than others.

If anything, it makes it harder to look away from ourselves—more honest, less certain, and less interested in standing above anyone.

And perhaps that is the real shift:

Not becoming superior—
but becoming less separate.

04/08/2026

By now, many in Utah’s broader spiritual community have heard of the passing of Christopher Caru Warden, known to many as Caru Das—a central figure in the development of Krishna devotion in the American West.

Caru Das did not inherit this path by accident. He came to it, committed to it, and over time gave his life to it.

For decades, he served as a steady presence at the Sri Sri Radha Krishna Temple in Spanish Fork, Utah, helping build and sustain a community rooted in devotion, service, and shared experience. Through festivals, music, food, and celebration—including the now well-known Festival of Colors—he created conditions where spiritual life was not explained, but encountered directly, often for the first time.

What stood out was not only what he built, but how he lived.

Caru Das was a practitioner in the fullest sense of the word. His life reflected a sustained commitment to a path—expressed through devotion, discipline, and service to others. The outward forms were those of bhakti: chanting, offering, celebration. But beneath those forms was something universal to spiritual life—sincerity, continuity of practice, and a willingness to give oneself over to something greater.

There is a difference between speaking about a path and living one.

By all accounts, Caru Das lived it.

Even across different traditions, there is a quiet recognition when a life is given over in this way. As Ram Dass once said, “We’re all just walking each other home.”

His passing marks the loss of a guiding figure whose influence extended far beyond his immediate community. The spaces he helped create—welcoming, alive, and open—offered countless people an entry point into spiritual life without precondition or expectation.

That kind of work leaves a trace.

Not only in memory, but in the lives it touches, the communities it shapes, and the generosity it sets in motion.

And so, with respect:

May his soul be at peace.
May he be free from suffering.
May we continue to see the good in the world through his eyes.
May we give away love in his honor.

A life devoted to practice does not end with death.

It continues in what was given,
in what was shared,
and in what others carry forward.

04/07/2026

April 6 marks the birth of Ram Dass (born Richard Alpert, 1931–2019), one of the most influential spiritual teachers of the twentieth century and a key figure in the transmission of Eastern contemplative traditions to the West.

He was born in Boston, into a well-established American family, and educated at institutions including Tufts, Wesleyan, and ultimately Harvard University, where he later taught psychology. In the early 1960s, alongside colleague Timothy Leary, Alpert became involved in pioneering research into psychedelics, particularly L*D, as a means of exploring consciousness.

While these experiences revealed profound alterations in perception and identity, Alpert came to recognize their limitations. The insights they offered were temporary; they did not provide a stable or enduring transformation of being. This realization led him to seek a more sustained path.

In 1967, he traveled to India, where he met Neem Karoli Baba, a meeting that would decisively shape his life. Under his teacher’s guidance, Alpert was given the name Ram Dass, meaning “servant of God,” and began a disciplined path of spiritual practice rooted in devotion, meditation, and self-inquiry.

His 1971 book, Be Here Now, became a seminal work in American spiritual literature. It articulated, in accessible language, the possibility that awakening is not separate from ordinary life, but available within it—through attention, presence, and the gradual softening of self-centered identity.

Ram Dass’s contribution extended beyond writing and teaching. He was a co-founder of the Seva Foundation, an organization dedicated to alleviating suffering through service, particularly by supporting sight-restoring medical care in underserved regions. He also helped establish the Love Serve Remember Foundation, which continues to preserve and share his teachings. The foundation’s name reflects a concise expression of his path: to love others, to serve selflessly, and to remember one’s deeper nature.

Throughout his life, Ram Dass emphasized the integration of insight into relationship. His often-quoted remark—“If you think you’re enlightened, go spend time with your family”—points to a central theme in his teaching: realization is not measured in isolation, but in how one meets the ordinary conditions of life.

He also offered a corrective to idealized notions of spiritual experience, observing that what one seeks as “God” or truth often appears in unexpected and challenging forms—what he described, at times, as “God in drag.” In this way, he redirected attention away from abstraction and toward the immediacy of lived experience.

In 1997, a stroke left him partially paralyzed, an event he later described as a continuation of his practice. Rather than diminishing his teaching, this period deepened its emphasis on acceptance, humility, and presence.

Ram Dass’s enduring legacy lies not in the establishment of a system or doctrine, but in the articulation of a path that integrates contemplative insight with everyday life. His teaching remains grounded in a simple but demanding invitation:

to be here now.

04/05/2026

April 5 marks the anniversary of the death of Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997), a poet whose work helped reshape how consciousness itself was understood in the modern West.

Ginsberg is often introduced through Howl, the long, breath-driven poem that gave voice to a generation disillusioned with conformity, war, and repression. But what Howl revealed was not only cultural critique—it was attention. A mind exposed in real time. A refusal to filter experience into something more acceptable.

That quality—raw, immediate, unedited—became the bridge between Ginsberg’s poetry and Buddhist practice.

His early contact with Zen came through Jack Kerouac and the Beat circle, where Eastern philosophy circulated as both inspiration and provocation. For Ginsberg, this was not literary curiosity. It was a response to a more intimate question: how to live inside the mind without being overtaken by it.

That question found direction when he met Chögyam Trungpa in the 1970s. Their meeting was unplanned. In New York, Ginsberg stepped into a taxi that Trungpa was already riding in. An ordinary moment became decisive. From that encounter, a relationship formed that would shape the direction of his life and practice. Under Trungpa’s guidance, Ginsberg entered into formal practice. Meditation became discipline. Attention became method. What followed was not a departure from poetry, but a deepening of it.

In 1974, he co-founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa Institute. The project was not built around technique alone, but around the possibility that writing could arise directly from awareness—that poetry could function as a record of mind rather than a performance for approval.

This may be one of Ginsberg’s most enduring contributions. He helped dissolve the boundary between artistic expression and contemplative practice.

His work did not attempt to explain Zen, nor did it adopt its language directly. Instead, it moved in parallel. The long lines of his poetry followed the rhythm of breath. His attention to passing thought mirrored the observational quality of meditation. His subject matter—impermanence, identity, desire, suffering—aligned with the central concerns of Buddhist inquiry.

At the same time, Ginsberg resisted idealization. He did not present awakening as purity or escape. His life and work remained entangled with the full range of human experience—sexuality, politics, grief, joy, contradiction. In this, he reflects a deeper current found in Zen: that realization does not remove complexity, but allows it to be seen more clearly.

What Ginsberg helped introduce into American culture was not simply Buddhism, but the legitimacy of looking directly at the mind. Today, meditation and mindfulness are widely accessible, but in his time these practices lived at the margins. Through poetry, teaching, and public presence, he helped bring the exploration of consciousness into the cultural foreground—not as theory, but as lived experience.

He did not leave behind a system or a doctrine. What he left was a method of attention.

A willingness to see without turning away.
A recognition that experience does not need to be edited before it is worthy of awareness.
A demonstration that consciousness itself can be both the subject and the path.

In a time marked by distraction, anxiety, and fragmentation, that orientation remains relevant. The question he lived into persists: how do we meet the mind as it is—not after it improves, but in the midst of its movement?

His work does not resolve that question. It keeps it open.

And in doing so, it continues to function in the way Zen teachings often do—not as answers, but as invitations.

To look.
To listen.
To become aware of what is already happening.

That remains his legacy.

⸻

The world is holy! The soul is holy!
The skin is holy! The nose is holy!
The tongue and c**k and hand and as***le holy!
Everything is holy! everybody’s holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is in eternity!
Every man’s an angel!

excerpt from
“Footnote to Howl”
by Allen Ginsberg.

04/05/2026

From time to time, Zen offers a statement that sounds less like philosophy and more like a disruption: you were never born, and you will never die. At first hearing, it can feel abstract, even dismissive of ordinary human experience. We mark beginnings. We mourn endings. A life appears to start and stop. Zen does not deny this. It asks a more precise question: what, exactly, is it that begins and ends?

What we call a person does not arrive as a fixed entity. It is assembled through conditions—body, history, language, memory, and relationship. From this convergence, a center forms. We begin by saying “I,” and from there a narrative takes shape. Yet nothing within that process remains stable. The body is in constant change. The mind does not repeat itself. Even identity shifts depending on circumstance. What appears to be a solid life is, on closer inspection, movement. Not a thing, but an event.

From this perspective, birth is not the absolute arrival of something separate, and death is not its final disappearance. They are transitions within a process that never steps outside itself. Forms appear and disappear, but nothing stands apart long enough to be born in the way we imagine—or to die in the way we fear.

This way of seeing offers an unexpected point of contact with the Easter story. Resurrection is often understood as a return—life restored, something lost brought back again. But it can also be heard as a revelation. Not a reversal of death, but a challenge to the assumption that life was ever contained in a single form to begin with. What if what appears to vanish was never fully confined to what we saw?

Zen approaches this from the opposite direction. It does not begin with belief or doctrine, but with observation. Breath comes and goes. Thoughts arise and pass. The sense of self appears, shifts, and dissolves. Everything is coming and going. And yet, nothing falls outside of life. What we call continuity does not depend on something fixed remaining the same. It is expressed through change itself.

Much of human effort is organized around stabilizing what cannot be stabilized. We try to become someone, to fix an identity, to carry a version of ourselves forward. But the more closely we look, the harder it is to find anything that holds. This can be unsettling. If nothing is fixed, what are we? Zen does not replace one identity with another. It removes the need to anchor experience in a permanent self. What remains is not a solid center, but participation—life expressing itself as this moment, without requiring ownership.

Birth and death, then, are not illusions. They are real and consequential events within human experience. But they do not describe something separate, entering and leaving existence. They describe changes in form. What we are is not limited to the form we currently experience, and when that form changes—moment to moment, or finally—it is not life that disappears, but a particular arrangement.

When Zen says nothing is born and nothing dies, it is not offering a belief to adopt. It is pointing to something already taking place. Everything is coming and going. And here, in the midst of that movement, nothing is missing—not because anything endures unchanged, but because nothing ever stood apart long enough to be lost.

04/04/2026

On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. His death marked a profound loss in American history, but his life continues to shape how we understand justice, courage, and the possibility of meeting violence without becoming it.

Dr. King’s work was grounded in the Black Baptist tradition, where faith is not only professed, but lived—through community, through struggle, and through a commitment to love in the face of hatred. Nonviolence, for King, was not passive. It was an active, disciplined force—a way of confronting injustice without abandoning humanity.

In the later years of his life, King formed a meaningful friendship with Thich Nhat Hanh. He was deeply moved by Thich Nhat Hanh’s teachings on peace and compassion, and in 1967, nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize. What King recognized was not something foreign, but something familiar—a shared understanding that the roots of violence are not only social or political, but human.

Though they came from different traditions—Baptist Christianity and Zen Buddhism—both pointed toward a similar truth: that transformation begins within, and that how we meet the world matters.

In one tradition, this may be expressed as love of neighbor, even love of enemy. In another, it appears as compassion, non-attachment, and the careful examination of how the mind creates separation. The language differs. The forms differ. But the orientation is strikingly close.

Both traditions ask something difficult of us.

To refrain from hardening in the face of conflict.
To remain present when it would be easier to turn away.
To respond with clarity rather than reactivity.

This is not abstract. It is lived, moment by moment.

Dr. King’s life stands as a powerful example of this kind of practice in action. Not perfect, not without struggle—but rooted in a deep commitment to meeting the conditions of his time without losing sight of something larger.

Buddhism and the Baptist tradition are not the same. Their histories, teachings, and forms are distinct. And yet, at times, they can feel like different expressions of a shared human effort—to understand suffering, and to respond to it in a way that does not perpetuate harm.

Different fingers, as the saying goes, pointing at the same moon.

Remembering Dr. King today is not only about looking back. It is also about recognizing the depth of the path he walked—and the ways that path continues to echo across traditions, cultures, and time.

04/04/2026

April 4 marks the anniversary of the death of Chögyam Trungpa (1939–1987), a central and controversial figure in the emergence of Buddhism in the West.

Trungpa Rinpoche arrived in the West at a time when Buddhism was still largely an intellectual curiosity. Trained in Tibet as a tulku in the Kagyu lineage, he carried with him a complete system of practice—ritual, meditation, philosophy—and something more difficult to translate: presence.

After fleeing Tibet and studying at Oxford, he began teaching in Europe and eventually in the United States, where his influence took root. In 1974, he founded Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado—one of the first attempts to integrate contemplative practice with higher education in the West. Around it grew a network of students, practitioners, and communities that would shape generations of Western Buddhists.

He spoke directly to Western minds.

His teaching on “spiritual materialism”—the subtle habit of using spiritual practice to strengthen the very self it is meant to loosen—cut through idealism and aspiration alike. It remains one of the clearest warnings in modern Dharma: that the path can be co-opted by the ego at every step.

And yet, his life refuses to settle into a clean narrative.

Trungpa drank heavily. He had sexual relationships with students. He rejected the image of the restrained, ascetic teacher and instead embodied something far less comfortable. Some of his students understood this as a form of “crazy wisdom,” a deliberate refusal to let the teachings become fixed or idealized. Others experienced harm, confusion, and disillusionment.

That tension has not faded with time. If anything, it has become more visible.

So what are we to do with a figure like this?

To dismiss him outright is to overlook the depth of his contribution. To ignore the controversy is to overlook the real consequences of power within spiritual communities.

Trungpa’s life leaves a question rather than an answer:

What does it mean for awakening to appear in a human life?

Not in theory. Not in scripture. But in a body, in relationships, in choices.

Zen has long held that realization does not make a person immune to conditioning. At the same time, it insists that realization must express itself in conduct. The tension between those two truths is not a problem to solve—it is the field of practice itself.

Trungpa did not resolve that tension. He exposed it.

And in doing so, he helped shape the form that Buddhism would take in the West: direct, accessible, psychologically aware—and inevitably entangled with the culture it entered.

Remembering him today is not about agreement or rejection.

It is about seeing clearly what has been handed down—and taking responsibility for how it continues.

04/04/2026

By now, many people are aware of the fire that destroyed the main meditation hall at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center. Fewer may understand the historical and cultural significance of the site itself.

Located deep within the Los Padres National Forest, Tassajara is widely recognized as the first Zen Buddhist monastery established outside of Asia. Founded in 1967 by Shunryu Suzuki and the San Francisco Zen Center, the center marked a turning point in the development of Buddhism in the United States, transitioning Zen from a largely academic or urban practice into a fully embodied monastic tradition on Western soil.

Accessible only by a long, unpaved mountain road, Tassajara was intentionally designed as a place of intensive training. For much of the year, it functions as a residential monastery, where practitioners follow a rigorous schedule of meditation, work, and study. During winter practice periods, the center often becomes physically isolated, reinforcing its role as a site of sustained and uninterrupted practice.

The monastery’s establishment created a model that would influence the growth of Zen centers across North America. It provided a setting in which Western practitioners could engage directly with traditional forms of Zen training, rather than encountering them solely through books or short-term instruction.

In addition to its role in religious practice, Tassajara also became known for its contributions to American food culture through the Tassajara Bread Book and its emphasis on natural foods, which influenced early movements in vegetarian cooking and whole-grain baking.

The fire on March 26 destroyed the zendo, or main meditation hall, a central structure used for daily practice and ceremonial activity. According to fire officials, residents of the center initiated early firefighting efforts, helping contain the blaze before emergency crews arrived. No injuries were reported, and only one structure was lost.

While the physical damage is significant, Tassajara’s importance has historically extended beyond its buildings. As one of the foundational institutions of Zen practice in the West, its influence has been carried through generations of practitioners, teachers, and affiliated centers.

The loss of the meditation hall marks a notable moment in the center’s history. At the same time, Tassajara’s role in shaping the development of Zen Buddhism outside of Asia remains intact, grounded not only in its structures, but in the continuity of practice it has supported for nearly six decades.

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