Two Arrows Zen

06/02/2026

June 3 marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997), a figure often remembered as one of the leading voices of the Beat Generation. Best known as the author of Howl, the groundbreaking poem that challenged literary conventions and became a defining work of postwar American literature, Ginsberg transformed the possibilities of American poetry through his candid, expansive, and spiritually searching voice. Yet his contribution to Buddhism in America may prove just as significant as his contribution to American poetry.

Through his friendship with Jack Kerouac, Ginsberg helped introduce generations of readers to Buddhist ideas at a time when they were still largely unfamiliar in the United States. But unlike many who encountered Buddhism through literature alone, Ginsberg became a dedicated practitioner. His interest matured into decades of meditation, study, and engagement with Buddhist teachers.

His most important relationship was with Chögyam Trungpa, whose arrival in America helped shape the transmission of Tibetan Buddhism to the West. Together with poet Anne Waldman, Ginsberg helped establish the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado—one of the first institutions in North America to intentionally bring contemplative practice, poetry, and higher education into dialogue.

In this sense, Ginsberg was more than a poet interested in Buddhism. He became part of the infrastructure through which Buddhism entered American culture. Through teaching, public speaking, writing, community building, and his support of Naropa, he helped create conditions for the Dharma to take root far beyond monasteries and meditation halls.

A century after his birth, it is difficult to tell the story of Buddhism in America without Allen Ginsberg. Alongside figures such as Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Ram Dass, and Trungpa Rinpoche, he helped build a bridge between Eastern contemplative traditions and modern Western life.

His legacy reminds us that the transmission of the Dharma does not occur through teachers alone. It also depends upon artists, translators, poets, and cultural figures willing to carry those teachings into new places and new generations.

05/31/2026

Mountains and rivers appear throughout Buddhist literature with surprising frequency.

They are found in Zen poetry, Chan dialogues, Taoist writings, pilgrimage traditions, and countless sutras. At first glance, they seem to function simply as features of the natural world. But over time, they became something more: enduring symbols of practice, impermanence, and awakening itself.

One of the most famous Zen expressions comes from the Chinese master Qingyuan:

“Before I studied Zen, mountains were mountains and rivers were rivers.

After I gained some insight, mountains were no longer mountains and rivers were no longer rivers.

But after awakening, mountains were once again mountains and rivers once again rivers.”

The saying describes a movement familiar to many practitioners. We begin by taking the world at face value. Then, through study and contemplation, we discover complexity, interdependence, emptiness, and the constructed nature of our assumptions. Everything becomes a question.

Yet Zen does not end there.

The final return is not a return to ignorance, but to intimacy. Mountains are once again mountains. Rivers are once again rivers. The world is neither reduced to concepts nor lost in abstraction. It is encountered directly.

This helps explain why mountains and rivers appear so often in Buddhist literature. They are ancient teachers of impermanence and continuity. Rivers are never the same from one moment to the next, yet they remain rivers. Mountains appear solid and enduring, yet they too are shaped by time, weather, and change.

In the Zen tradition, awakening is often described not as escape from the world, but as a deeper participation in it.

Mountains and rivers are not obstacles to practice.

They are the practice.

To sit quietly beside a river.

To walk a mountain trail.

To watch clouds move across a ridgeline.

These are not departures from the Dharma.

For countless practitioners across centuries, they have been among its most eloquent expressions.

( photo of Capitol Reef, home to Torrey Zendo / Two Arrows Zen )

05/29/2026

As spring gives way to summer, many of us feel the urge to head for the mountains, rivers, deserts, and open spaces.

More than twelve hundred years ago, the Tang Dynasty poet Li Po (Li Bai) understood that impulse well.

A wanderer, poet, and lover of the natural world, Li Po spent much of his life traveling among mountains, rivers, and remote landscapes. Though often associated with Taoism, his work has long been embraced by Zen practitioners for its directness and intimacy with experience.

Unlike philosophers who sought to explain reality, Li Po often allowed reality to speak for itself.

One of his most celebrated poems concludes:

“The birds have flown away.
The lonely cloud drifts on.
We sit together, the mountain and me,
until only the mountain remains.”

The poem contains no doctrine and offers no formal teaching. Yet it points toward something familiar to both Zen and Taoist traditions: the softening of the boundary between self and world.

The mountain does not change.

What changes is our relationship to it.

As summer approaches, Li Po’s poetry offers a gentle reminder that nature is more than scenery. Mountains, rivers, clouds, and moonlight are not separate from practice. They can become places where the mind settles, striving falls away, and our sense of separation begins to loosen.

More than twelve centuries after his death, Li Po’s poems continue to endure because they return us to something simple:

Sometimes wisdom begins by going outside and paying attention.

05/27/2026

A student once asked Joshu, “What is Zen?”

Joshu replied:

“Have you eaten your meal?”

The student said, “Yes.”

Joshu said:

“Then wash your bowl.”

Among the many stories preserved in Zen literature, few are as deceptively simple as this exchange. There is no dramatic revelation, no mystical vision, no philosophical discourse on enlightenment or emptiness. A question is asked. A meal is finished. A bowl is washed.

And yet the story has endured for centuries precisely because it points toward something many people spend their lives overlooking: the extraordinary difficulty of being fully present in ordinary life.

The student asks about Zen as though it were something separate from daily activity—something hidden behind concepts, rituals, or special states of consciousness. Joshu redirects him immediately back into the immediacy of the moment.

Eat the meal.

Wash the bowl.

Nothing extra.

This simplicity is often misunderstood. Zen does not reduce practice to mere routine or anti-intellectual minimalism. Rather, it asks whether we are actually present for the life we are already living.

Most of the time, the mind is elsewhere:
replaying the past,
anticipating the future,
judging,
comparing,
narrating experience while barely inhabiting it.

The bowl remains unwashed not because the task is difficult, but because attention itself has become divided.

In this sense, Joshu’s response is not dismissive. It is precise.

Before searching for transcendence, enlightenment, or ultimate truth somewhere outside ordinary existence, Zen repeatedly returns practitioners to the concrete reality directly in front of them:
the sound of water,
the weight of a bowl,
the act of cleaning,
this breath,
this moment.

The teaching is not that ordinary life is separate from awakening.

The teaching is that awakening is not found anywhere else.

Perhaps this is why the story continues to resonate across centuries and cultures. Modern life increasingly fragments attention, pulls awareness outward, and encourages endless dissatisfaction with the present moment. The simplicity of Joshu’s instruction cuts directly against that momentum.

Wash the bowl.

Finish the moment you are in.

Do not live somewhere else while life is happening here.

05/25/2026

On Memorial Day, many Zen practitioners turn not toward victory or nationalism, but toward remembrance, impermanence, and compassion.

The day invites reflection on the human cost of conflict—not only for those who never returned home, but also for those who carried war back with them in visible and invisible ways, and for the families who continue to live with both love and absence.

May those lost to war be held in peace.

May those who grieve be met with compassion.

May those carrying wounds of body, mind, or memory find rest.

May we honor the dead not only with remembrance, but through deeper compassion for the living.

May all beings, everywhere, be free from suffering and fear.

05/24/2026

The Buddha once told a parable about a man standing beside a dangerous river.

Behind him lay chaos, fear, and suffering. Across the water he saw peace and freedom, but there was no bridge or ferry to carry him there.

So he built a raft himself.

Using branches, reeds, and scraps of wood, he fashioned something rough but workable. Through patience and effort, he crossed safely to the far shore.

Once there, he thought:

“This raft saved my life. Maybe I should carry it with me everywhere.”

Then the Buddha asked:

Would that make sense?

Of course not.

The raft mattered because it helped him cross. But once the journey was complete, carrying it further would only become another burden.

The parable of the raft remains one of Buddhism’s clearest teachings on wisdom and attachment.

The Buddha does not dismiss the raft. Without it, the man may never have crossed at all. In the same way, teachings, practices, meditation, discipline, and community all serve a purpose. They help us navigate suffering and give shape to the path.

But the Buddha asks something subtler:

What happens when we cling to the things that once helped us?

People often turn methods into identities and insights into possessions. What once created freedom slowly becomes another attachment. A belief that opened the mind hardens into ideology. A practice meant to loosen the ego becomes part of the ego itself.

The point of the raft is crossing.

Not carrying.

This is one reason the story remains central to Zen.

Zen warns against mistaking the finger for the moon, the symbol for reality, or concepts for direct experience. Teachings matter, but they are not the destination. Eventually, even useful frameworks must be light enough to release.

This does not mean abandoning wisdom. It means recognizing that no single form can fully contain what is alive and changing.

The raft is honored because it served its purpose.

And then it is set down.

The story resonates beyond Buddhism because most people know what it means to carry something long after it is needed:

Old fears.
Old identities.
Old grievances.
Old versions of ourselves.

Entire lives can revolve around carrying what once protected us but now keeps us stuck.

The parable asks:

Can we recognize when something has fulfilled its purpose?

And if so—

can we let it go?

Perhaps that is why the story has endured.

Not because it rejects teachings,

but because it reminds us that freedom was never meant to become another burden.

05/22/2026

05/22/2026

A Zen student once proudly told his teacher that he had finally understood emptiness.

“There is no mind,” he said.
“No body.
No self.
No Buddha.”

The teacher listened quietly.

Then, without warning, he struck the student with his stick.

The student jumped back in pain.

“Ouch!” he cried.

The teacher looked at him and asked:

“If nothing exists—

What hurt?”

⸻

Among the many stories preserved in the Zen tradition, few illustrate the subtlety of Buddhist teaching as clearly as this brief exchange between teacher and student. At first glance, the student appears to have arrived at a profound realization. He speaks confidently of emptiness, denying mind, body, self, and even Buddha. Yet the teacher immediately exposes the misunderstanding hidden beneath the student’s certainty.

The student had confused emptiness with negation.

This is a common mistake, not only among beginning practitioners but also among those drawn to Zen through philosophy alone. Emptiness can sound, to the conceptual mind, like a declaration that nothing is real, nothing matters, and suffering itself is merely an illusion to be dismissed. But Zen has never pointed toward indifference or denial.

In Buddhism, emptiness does not mean nonexistence.

Rather, it points to the absence of an independent and permanent essence. Things exist, but they do not exist separately from causes, conditions, and relationships. Everything arises together, changes together, and passes away together.

A wave exists, certainly. Yet it cannot be separated from the ocean that gives rise to it.

Likewise, the self exists in a practical sense, but not as a fixed and isolated entity standing apart from the rest of life. What we call “self” is fluid, relational, and constantly changing.

This understanding does not erase human experience. Pain still hurts. Grief still arrives. Joy still opens the heart. Compassion remains essential.

If anything, the realization of emptiness allows us to meet life more intimately, not less. When we stop clinging to rigid identities and fixed ideas, we become less trapped by the endless divisions of “me” and “mine,” “success” and “failure,” “gain” and “loss.”

The Zen teacher’s stick was not punishment. It was an instruction.

In a single instant, the student was pulled out of abstraction and returned to direct experience. The body recoiled. Pain appeared. Reality announced itself before thought could intervene.

Zen continually returns us to this immediacy.

Not to a world that is solid and permanent, nor to one that is empty in the nihilistic sense, but to a reality that is alive, interdependent, and impossible to fully capture with concepts.

Between the extremes of clinging and denial, Zen practice quietly begins.

05/20/2026

Hanshan—the legendary “Cold Mountain” poet of Tang Dynasty China—left behind poems written on rocks, trees, cave walls, and scraps of discarded paper. More than a thousand years later, they still endure because they speak directly to conditions that have never disappeared: ambition, distraction, loneliness, impermanence, and the restless search for meaning.

One of his best-known poems begins:

“Men ask the way to Cold Mountain
Cold Mountain: there's no through trail.
In summer, ice doesn't melt
The rising sun blurs in swirling fog.
How did I make it?
My heart's not the same as yours.
If your heart was like mine
You'd get it and be right here..”

Cold Mountain is not finally a destination. It is a way of seeing—a life less trapped by striving, status, and the need to be somewhere else.

The trail was never hidden.

It was simply never separate from where you already are.

05/17/2026

There is an old Zen story about a man being chased by a tiger. He runs through the forest until he reaches a cliff, grabs a vine, and lowers himself down. Above him, the tiger waits; below, another tiger circles patiently at the bottom.

The man hangs there suspended between the two.

Then he notices something else.

Two mice—one white and one black—have begun slowly chewing through the vine.

Little by little, the only thing holding him above the rocks below is being worn away.

And then, in the middle of all of it, he sees a wild strawberry growing.

Looking up at the tiger above and down at the tiger below, and then watching the mice chew the vine, he reaches out, picks the strawberry, and puts it in his mouth.

To be human is, in some sense, to hang between those two tigers. Caught between what has already happened and what eventually will. Trying to hold on. Aware, at least faintly, that the vine does not last forever.

What makes the story distinctly Zen is that it does not ask the man to transcend the situation.

The cliff remains a cliff.

The tigers remain tigers.

And yet the strawberry is still sweet.

That detail changes everything.

Because the story suggests that presence is possible even in the midst of uncertainty—not after fear disappears, not once life becomes stable, but directly within the fleeting and unstable nature of existence itself.

The strawberry does not solve his condition.

It simply returns him to the immediacy of being alive.

To this breath.

This taste.

This moment.