Two Arrows Zen

03/27/2026

Keeping our friends at the San Francisco Zen Center close in our thoughts and hearts as we hear this news.

At around 11:30 pm last night, the Tassajara zendo caught fire. No one was hurt, but the zendo burned down completely. Some of the library was also destroyed. Our gratitude to everyone who worked tirelessly to contain the flames, including local firefighters who were on the scene.

We will share more information as it comes in.

03/26/2026

March 27 marks the birth of Charlotte Joko Beck (1917–2011), a Zen teacher whose work helped reshape the way practice came to be understood in the West, not by expanding its philosophy, but by narrowing its focus to the immediacy of everyday life.

Beck did not enter Zen through traditional monastic training or early religious vocation. She came to practice later, after years of living within the ordinary structures of American life—marriage, family, and the accumulated tensions that often accompany them. Her search was not abstract. It emerged from the direct experience of dissatisfaction and the need to understand it. This orientation remained central to her teaching.

Her formal training took place under Taizan Maezumi, one of the most influential figures in the transmission of Zen to the United States. Within that context, she engaged in rigorous practice, including the study of kōans. Over time, however, her own teaching began to move away from a structured kōan curriculum and toward a more immediate and psychologically grounded approach.

This shift was not a rejection of tradition, but a reorientation of emphasis. Beck observed that many students were not primarily struggling with philosophical questions or formal practice structures, but with the ongoing patterns of thought and emotion that shaped their daily lives. Her teaching addressed this directly.

Rather than directing attention toward insight experiences or advancement through stages, she consistently pointed students back to what was already present: irritation, anxiety, expectation, and the internal narratives that give rise to them. These were not seen as obstacles to practice, but as its primary field.

Her approach helped articulate a form of Zen that resonated with Western practitioners, particularly those navigating the psychological complexity of modern life. In her widely read book Everyday Zen, she framed practice not as a means of transcendence, but as a disciplined attention to the ways in which suffering is created and maintained through habitual patterns of mind.

Beck’s influence can be seen in the broader development of American Zen, where there has been an increasing integration of contemplative practice with psychological insight. Her work contributed to a shift away from an emphasis on attainment or special states, and toward a sustained engagement with ordinary experience.

Her legacy does not rest on innovation in doctrine, but on clarity of application. She did not attempt to make Zen more appealing or more accessible in a superficial sense. Instead, she made it more difficult to avoid. By removing the distance between practice and daily life, she left little room for abstraction.

On her birthday, her teaching continues to point in a direction that remains both simple and demanding: that practice is not something separate from the conditions of one’s life, but is found precisely in the willingness to observe those conditions without turning away.

— Two Arrows Zen

03/24/2026

Carl Soloman and Lawrence Ferlinghetti at One University Place Bar, New York, 1981- photograph by Raymond Foye Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti – Photograph courtesy the City Lights Archives Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919-2021) – photograph by Chris Felver It’s Lawrence Ferlighetti‘s bi...

03/24/2026

There’s a strange idea at the center of Zen: there is nothing to attain. Nothing to become. Nothing to arrive at. Nothing waiting for you at the end of the path. And yet—people sit, people practice, people dedicate their lives to this.

Bodhidharma was asked what he realized after years of practice. He said, “Nothing holy.”

Huineng said, “Originally there is not a single thing.”

The Heart Sutra says, “no attainment… and nothing to attain.”

So what are we doing?

Maybe the problem isn’t that there’s nothing to find. Maybe the problem is the assumption that something is missing.

We spend most of our lives moving toward a version of ourselves that doesn’t yet exist. I’ll be better when… I’ll arrive when… I’ll understand when… But every time you get there, there’s another step. Another version. Another halfway.

Zen cuts through that—not by giving you something better to chase, but by removing the need to chase at all.

What if this is it? Not as a conclusion. Not as a belief. But as a direct experience.

No final step. No finish line. No arrival.

And nothing missing.

— Two Arrows Zen

tada ( just/simply )

03/24/2026

Zeno of Elea, a Greek philosopher of the 5th century BCE, occupies a curious place in the history of thought. He did not establish a school, nor did he leave behind a comprehensive system. Instead, he is remembered for a series of paradoxes—arguments that seem simple on the surface but, when examined closely, destabilize some of our most basic assumptions about reality. His work was intended to defend the teachings of his teacher, Parmenides, who argued that reality is unified and unchanging. Zeno’s method was indirect: rather than asserting this claim outright, he exposed the contradictions embedded in ordinary ways of thinking about motion, space, and time.

Among his most well-known arguments is the so-called “dichotomy paradox.” To traverse any distance, one must first cover half of it. From there, half of the remaining distance, and so on. Because this process of division can continue indefinitely, the number of steps required becomes infinite. If movement requires the completion of infinitely many steps, it would seem that motion cannot, in fact, be completed.

Zeno did not deny that people walk across rooms or travel from one place to another. The force of the paradox lies elsewhere. It reveals a tension between conceptual reasoning and lived experience. When movement is analyzed through the lens of infinite divisibility, it becomes unintelligible. Yet in experience, movement is immediate and unproblematic. The paradox does not negate motion; it calls into question the adequacy of the concepts we use to describe it.

This tension finds an unexpected resonance in the development of Zen. Although there is no historical connection—Zen emerging in China nearly a millennium later—the functional similarity is striking. Zen, particularly in its use of kōans, employs a method that also disrupts conceptual certainty. A kōan does not offer a solution in the usual sense; it undermines the framework within which solutions are sought. In this respect, Zeno’s paradoxes and Zen practice share a common gesture: both bring thought to a point where it can no longer sustain itself.

It is useful, then, to consider which figures within the Zen tradition perform a role analogous to Zeno’s. The Indian philosopher Nagarjuna is perhaps the closest parallel. Writing in the early centuries of the Common Era, Nāgārjuna developed a rigorous critique of all fixed philosophical positions, demonstrating that any attempt to assert inherent existence leads to contradiction. His concept of emptiness (śūnyatā) does not deny the world but reveals the lack of independent, stable essence in all phenomena. Like Zeno, he employs reasoning not to establish certainty, but to dissolve it.

Within the Zen tradition itself, figures such as Zhaozhou and Dogen extend this destabilizing function into lived practice. Zhaozhou’s responses often cut off inquiry at its root, refusing to satisfy the demand for explanation. Dōgen, writing in 13th-century Japan, approaches similar questions through language that bends and reconfigures ordinary categories. His treatment of time, for example, resists linear progression, suggesting that each moment is complete in itself rather than part of a sequence moving toward an endpoint.

The relevance of these ideas becomes clearer when considered in relation to human experience. Zeno’s paradox is not only about spatial distance; it also implicates time. If every interval can be divided endlessly, then the notion of completion—whether of a journey or a life—becomes difficult to locate. This has a direct parallel in how individuals often conceive of their own lives: as movement toward a future state of resolution, fulfillment, or understanding. Yet such states, like the successive halves in Zeno’s argument, remain perpetually deferred.

Zen practice addresses this not by resolving the paradox, but by reframing the question. If there is no final point at which everything is complete, then the meaning of activity cannot depend on arrival. The act itself—walking, breathing, attending—ceases to be a means to an end and becomes, instead, the full expression of the moment.

In this light, a teaching such as the one attributed to Mugaku Roshi—that practice is like walking halfway across the room and never arriving—can be understood not as a statement of incompletion, but as a critique of the assumption that completion lies elsewhere. The paradox remains, but its implications shift. Rather than obstructing movement, it reveals the unnecessary burden placed upon it by the expectation of a final destination.

Zeno’s contribution, then, may be seen as an early articulation of a problem that Zen later addresses in a different register. Both point to the limits of conceptual thought when it attempts to grasp the nature of reality. Zeno does so by pushing reasoning to its breaking point; Zen does so by inviting direct engagement with experience beyond that point.

In both cases, what emerges is not a solution in the conventional sense, but a reorientation. The question is no longer how to arrive, but what it means to move at all.

03/23/2026

March 22 marks the anniversary of the passing of Joanne Kyger (1934–2017), a poet whose work stands at a quiet but important intersection between American poetry and Zen practice.

Kyger did not come to Zen through formal training or institutional commitment. Her introduction was more organic, shaped by proximity, friendship, and lived experience. In the late 1950s, she became closely connected with Gary Snyder, whose own practice and study of Zen Buddhism were already well underway. Through that relationship, she traveled to Japan, spending time in Kyoto while Snyder trained in Zen monasteries.

Kyger was not a monk, nor did she present herself as a Zen teacher. But she lived near the conditions of practice—temples, rituals, daily discipline—and absorbed something of their rhythm. What stayed with her was not doctrine, but attention. Her poetry does not attempt to explain Zen; it reflects a way of seeing shaped by it.

Her work is often diaristic, grounded in the immediate details of daily life. Weather, conversation, bodily states, stray thoughts—nothing is elevated above anything else. This quality, sometimes described as “flat” or “plain,” is precisely where its depth begins to emerge. The poems do not point away from experience. They remain with it.

A short excerpt gives a sense of her voice:

“The quality of attention determines the nature of the experience.”

There is no overt reference to Zen in that line, but the orientation is clear. Experience is not something to be improved or escaped. It is something to be met, and the way it is met changes everything.

Kyger’s legacy is subtle but enduring. She helped carry forward a strand of American writing that did not separate spiritual life from ordinary life. Where some of the Beat writers dramatized awakening, Kyger normalized it. She made room for a practice that looks like paying attention, day after day, without spectacle.

She also represents a different kind of authority in Zen-adjacent culture—one not based on position, title, or transmission, but on consistency of attention and honesty of expression.

Her life suggests that the influence of Zen does not always appear as teaching or institution. It can appear as a way of writing, a way of noticing, a way of being present to the unfolding of a single day.

In that sense, her work continues to offer something simple and difficult at the same time:

to remain with what is happening,
without needing to turn it into something else.

— Two Arrows Zen

03/20/2026

At the zendo the other night, Mugaku Roshi said something that stopped the room:

“Zen is practicing walking halfway across the room for the rest of your life and never getting there.”

Sit with that for a moment.

Most of us came to practice because we wanted to get somewhere. Less suffering. More clarity. Maybe even — if we’re honest — enlightenment. We want to cross the room.

But what if the room is not the problem? What if the crossing is the whole thing?

This is not a consolation prize for never arriving. It’s a completely different relationship with your life. The walking itself — attentive, present, step by step — that is the other shore.

Today is the Spring Equinox. In Zen tradition it’s called Higan — “the other shore.” And maybe that’s exactly what Mugaku Roshi was pointing at the other night in the zendo.

You’re already halfway across. Keep walking.

Two Arrows Zen | twoarrowszen.org

03/19/2026

March 20 marks the birth of Eugen Herrigel (1884–1955), a German philosopher whose work became one of the earliest bridges between Zen and the Western world.

Herrigel was trained in Western philosophy and traveled to Japan in the 1920s to teach in Sendai. He did not arrive as a Zen practitioner, but as a scholar. While living there, he became curious about Zen and sought a way to understand it directly. Because of language barriers and limited access to formal training, he was advised to approach Zen indirectly — through practice rather than study.

He took up kyūdō, traditional Japanese archery, under the teacher Awa Kenzō.

What he encountered was not Zen in a formal or institutional sense, but a demanding discipline that challenged his reliance on effort, control, and intellectual understanding. Again and again, he was instructed not to force the shot, not to aim in the usual way, but to allow the release to happen without interference.

At one point, his teacher expressed it simply:

“It shoots.”

Under the guidance of his teacher, Herrigel struggled with a simple instruction: do not force the shot. Do not aim in the conventional sense. Allow the arrow to release itself.

For years, this made no sense to him.

He approached archery as a problem to be solved, a skill to be mastered through discipline and precision. But Zen, as it appeared through the practice, was not asking for better control. It was asking for the disappearance of the one trying to control.

For Herrigel, this became a turning point — not because he mastered a technique, but because his usual way of relating to action began to break down. Through repetition and frustration, something shifted. The separation between the one acting and the action itself became less defined.

He later interpreted this experience through the lens of Zen.

After returning to Europe, he wrote Zen in the Art of Archery, published in 1948. The book became one of the first widely read introductions to Zen for Western audiences. For many, it opened the possibility that insight was not something to be believed, but something to be encountered directly through practice.

At the same time, his work has been carefully reexamined. Scholars have noted that Herrigel’s understanding of Zen was shaped by cultural distance, translation challenges, and the fact that his teacher was not a Zen master in a formal sense. His account is not a complete or orthodox presentation of Zen.

And yet, its importance remains.

Because it points to something real:

that there are moments when effort falls away,
when control loosens,
and when action happens without the weight of a fixed self behind it.

— Two Arrows Zen

03/19/2026

“The entire teaching of Buddhism can be summed up in this way: nothing is worth holding on to.”
Letting go isn’t loss—it’s freedom. When we loosen our grip, life can meet us as it is.

03/18/2026

The Self...

Not this time.

That story you keep telling about yourself?
Not this time.

“I’m this kind of person.”
Nope.

“This is just who I am.”
Made up.

“I’ll always be this way.”
Fictitious.

Not real.

We build identities out of memory and repetition —
then pretend they’re permanent.

Zen cuts through that.

No fixed self.
No solid version of you.

Just conditions.
Just patterns.
Just movement.

Even now —
as you’re reading this —
something is shifting.

And the story can’t keep up.

To explain anything completely,
you’d have to include every cause and condition
all the way back to the beginning of the universe.

No story can hold that.

So the version of you
that you defend, repeat, and protect…

Not this time.

It was never one thing to begin with.

03/18/2026

A special guest appears at the St Patrick's Day parade, Downpatrick, County Down.

Lá Fhéile Pádraig sona daoibh! 💚

03/16/2026

A question that has followed Zen students for more than a thousand years is surprisingly simple:

Does an enlightened person fall under the law of cause and effect?

The question appears in one of the most famous kōans preserved in the classic Zen collection The Gateless Gate.

The story takes place in the monastery of the Zen master Baizhang Huaihai, known in Japanese as Hakujo. Each day Hakujo would give a talk to the monks. One day, after the assembly had ended and the monks had begun leaving the hall, an old man remained behind.

Hakujo asked him why he stayed.

The old man explained that he was not truly a man at all, but the spirit of a monk who had once practiced at that monastery many lifetimes earlier.

“In my time,” the spirit said, “a student asked me:
Does an enlightened person fall under cause and effect?”

“I answered, ‘No. An enlightened person does not fall under cause and effect.’”

Because of that answer, he said, he had been reborn as a fox for five hundred lifetimes.

Now he had finally encountered Hakujo and asked the question again:

“Does an enlightened person fall under cause and effect?”

Hakujo answered:

“No one is beyond cause and effect.”

At that moment the old monk was released from the body of the fox.

At first the story sounds strange, even mythical. But the question at its center touches something deeply human.

Many people imagine enlightenment as a kind of escape from the ordinary conditions of life — as if awakening means floating above the world, untouched by consequences, emotions, or responsibility.

Zen rejects that idea completely.

Awakening does not remove us from the laws of life. It reveals them more clearly.

Cause and effect still function.
Actions still have consequences.
Choices still matter.

Hakujo’s answer corrected the old monk’s misunderstanding with a single sentence:

“No one is beyond cause and effect.”

In Zen, awakening does not place a person outside reality. It means seeing reality exactly as it is.

And the old fox was finally released.

But the kōan leaves us with the same question that started the story:

Are you living as if you stand outside cause and effect — or inside it?

— Two Arrows Zen